Old PET bottles are being used for countless applications, on top of being recycled back into bottles. Some spectacular examples for reusing bottles are on Instagram, ranging from windmills to furniture and even sculptures.

“Why do it the easy way when the hard way is so much more fun?” an architecture student must have thought when setting out to build a 3D printer with a six-axis robot arm that is to print 350 shredded PET bottles into a chair. For the moment, the printer cannot live up to its builder’s ambitions, as it can only use PLA and, more importantly, the robot’s arm is simply too short to construct an entire chair. Once again, expectation and reality are at odds...