University turns used McDonald’s cooking oil into 3D printing material

At the University of Toronto, a group of scientists has developed a method to convert cooking oil into a material that can be used by 3D printers. The team used oil from a McDonald’s restaurant.

Professor Andre Simpson’s team is conducting research on small living organisms at the University of Toronto using an NMR spectrometer. For that research, the team uses a 3D printer to print custom-made containers in which it can secure the organisms as they enter the spectrometer. This is a printer that works on the basis of light projection printing, a technique in which a barrel of liquid synthetic resin is used. The object being printed solidifies under the influence of the light produced by the printer. Until now, the team used an expensive synthetic resin for this, a liquid plastic that costs about five hundred euros per litre.

When Simpson examined the resin, the properties of the material were found to be very similar to those of the oil used for frying, frying and deep-frying. This gave rise to the idea that such oil might be suitable for printing. To investigate that, the team needed a significant amount of oil. Students from Simpson’s team went to Toronto restaurants to ask if they could pick up used oil. Of the approached restaurants, only a local McDonald’s responded positively, after which the team was able to get to work with ten liters of used cooking oil.

The team eventually managed to convert the oil into a synthetic resin suitable for printing. According to the researchers, this requires a simple conversion. Based on the new synthetic resin, the team was able to deliver transparent prints with an accuracy of 100 micrometers, which are also sturdy enough. Simpson sees great advantage in the technique. Not only is used oil reused, where in many cases it now disappears into the sewer, it also produces biodegradable prints. He buried a print and after two weeks it turned out that twenty percent of the print had broken off.

The team hopes that the research result will be picked up by a company that wants to use it. Incidentally, the food industry is also working on solutions to reuse used oil in a responsible manner. McDonald’s in Portugal, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, for example, has a program that converts the oil into biofuel that its own trucks run on.