FORMNEXT LIVE: Sustainable materials and processes for Additive Manufacturing

– Hi, we’re here at Formnext. This is Adam Penna and I’m here with Bjorn Hannappel from EOS and we’re gonna talk a little bit about sustainability. It’s obviously a big topic for everyone, but in additive manufacturing, EOS has been taking certain steps that are affecting the whole industry. So Bjorn, very nice to talk to you.

– Yeah, thanks for the invite.

– Yeah, so again, EOS is doing a lot with sustainability and you being the head of sustainability, can you tell us a little bit more about what actions have you been taking over the last year or so?

– So, the purpose, our company purpose, was the first thing that we did, yeah?

– Yeah

– And we believe that innovation and technology can actually create a better world for everyone and that’s why we want to accelerate the transition towards responsible manufacturing. So that’s our company purpose. Responsible manufacturing is what we want to achieve. And what we’re doing here is firstly developing a holistic strategy, sustainability strategy with targets, with KPIs. For example, carbon reduction is one of them, zero emission or zero waste, AM production, and also we want to develop green products and services to support our customers on their sustainability journey.

– That’s amazing. So I know that you work with a lot of sustainable material also. So talk a little bit about what the material side of it is.

– So we have, for example bio-based material, PA11, that has already a better footprint than other materials have. But what we’re doing here is we’re trying for the first time to also calculate the whole carbon footprint of a powder, but also of applications

– Because customers are more and more asking this information and they wanna know what it is

– Yeah

– And what we did here, and also we wanna have more bio-sourced materials. There’s only one at the moment. And we’re working towards also biodegradable materials. It’s still a way to go. We’re not there yet, yeah.

– Yeah

– It’s not true circle economy yet, but this is the target. But to bridge that, what we’ve done, we’ve developed at first carbon neutral polymer powder for 3D printing, and we just released it here at Formnext.

– Okay, so this is brand new news here at Formnext.

– That’s brand new news yeah.

– Okay. Wonderful. Yes. So I know that you’re talking about the whole process of additive manufacturing. And it’s not only the printer, right? It’s everything that happens before and after. And now you know you’re looking at that whole process at EOS. So you could tell me a little more about what happens on the sustainability side, pre and post machine.

– Yeah. So one thing is that you need to get information. You need to get data, you need to generate data

– Yeah

– Because, it’s not enough to just look at one piece of it, but you have to look at the whole lifecycle of the whole value chain. And for example, we did another study together with a customer. It’s an eyewear manufacturer named Youmawo.

– Yeah.

– And we did look at the production of the powder until the disposal let’s say of the glasses at the end or the recycling. And we did look at every single step. And there were two reasons why we did that. On one hand, we wanted to prove that additive manufacturing is more sustainable than traditional manufacturing but we didn’t know before we started the study if we will get there. And the second topic was that we wanted to know, okay what are the key impact factors that drive the carbon footprint of that application? And luckily, the results were quite good, so

– Good to hear that, yeah,

– 3D printed glasses are three times more sustainable than conventionally manufactured ones.

– Very important.

– And we saw that the biggest impact factor is actually the powder. So that’s why working on our powder strategy with bio based, biodegradable and recyclability is the right way to go.

– It is. And I know EOS is the leader in both polymer and metal technology. So I know there’s both of the side of sustainability when you look at the polymer and metal is different. On the metal side of it, what are the key ingredients in sustainability of metal additive manufacturing?

– So on the metal side of it, it’s a bit more difficult. I have to say. I mean, you can use, you can reuse the metal powder better than on the polymer side yet We’re working towards that. But actually we want to understand that also a bit better. So we did this two polymers studies now, and then for this year or for the next year, we’re planning to look more into the metal powder side and it would not be serious to now tell you something, what we think,

– Sure

– But we really wanna look at the data and learn from that and then take assumptions out of that.

– It’s very important and I know that’s why I asked because EOS is ahead of the game at looking into these things. So, thank you for being here with us talking today Bjorn. It’s wonderful to hear about what EOS is doing, and I’m looking forward to seeing much more about sustainability in the future with EOS.

– Thank you very much

– Thank you very much. And that is us today at the Formnext floor here at the EOS booth. Thanks for joining us.