3-D Printing Sweeping Toy Industry Off the Shelves

Michigan Tech 'Latest News'

Cheap, plastic toys—no manufacturer necessary. The 2020 toy and game market is projected to be $135 billion, and 3-D printing brings those profits home. 



People have scoffed that 3-D printers are simply toys themselves. But they probably didn't realize how much money is made off playthings. Do-it-yourself (DIY) manufacturing—making goods at home with a 3-D printer using open source designs from a free online repository—has a multimillion-dollar impact on the overall toy industry.
A team of engineers from Michigan Technological University and the London-based company MyMiniFactory published their results on the topic in Technologies (DOI: 10.3390/technologies5030045) this week.
More than Monopoly Money
The research team, led by Joshua Pearce, a professor of materials science and electrical engineering at Michigan Tech, focused on how much a desktop 3-D printer could save consumers.
"The 3-D printing industry is now dominated by small, low-cost printers and as the industry grows we're going to see a lot more DIY manufacturing," Pearce says. "The evidence is just overwhelming that this makes sense from a consumers' perspective."
To dig deeper into the potential savings, the study investigates the 100 most popular downloaded designs from MyMiniFactory, which is one of dozens of repositories where people freely share 3-D printable designs online. They used three different printing materials to analyze the potential costs of printing on an open source Lulzbot 3-D printer—commercial filament (spaghetti-like strands easily purchased online), pellet-extruded filament (cheaper option to make filament at home), and post-consumer waste plastic (converted to filament using a recyclebot).
When a commercially available toy was available for comparison, all filament types saved consumers more than 75 percent of the cost and the recyclebot filament saved more than 90 percent. In total—and just using the data from 100 toys (less than one percent of MyMiniFactory's repository)—people offset $60 million dollars per year in toy purchases.
To Pearce, an important added value emerged ...

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