2 high school students 'print' toys for charities using recycled materials

A selection of the 3D printed toys made by the non-profit organization Prints4Play on Oct. 15, 2024. (Nahreman Issa/CTV News Edmonton)

Two high school students are putting their skills to a good use using 3D printers and recycled materials.

Saras Agrawal and Rateb Ajamieh – from Old Scona Academic and Harry Ainlay High School, respectively – are Grade 12 students with a charitable itch to scratch: they've found a way to reuse leftover 3D printing waste to make new toys for local charities.

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Agrawal told CTV News Edmonton on Tuesday that he and Ajamieh created the 'Prints4Play' non-profit organization to combine their passion for sustainability and community service.

"What we do is we collect 3D printed waste from all across the University of Alberta … and we have our own recycling process that we use to re-extrude (the waste) into filament, which is used to print these wonderful toys," Agrawal said.

The duo designed a few different models for their toys including dinosaurs, boats, cars and spinning tops.

Ajamieh said there's a lot that goes into repurposing the byproduct: first they collect the scrap, organize it by colour, shred it into five-millimetre pellets, dehydrate those for a few hours to get all the water and waste out, melt the pellets and re-extrude the material into new filament.

Using the 3D printers at the university and at home, Prints4Play is able to fulfill orders for local and oversea clients while redirecting waste that would otherwise head to the landfills.

"It's getting close to 1,000 toys," said Ajamieh, referring to the number of toys they've made since July. "We have another fulfillment to India soon, which is about 400 toys. I think before the end of the year, we could definitely get somewhere around 2,000 toys delivered, which is just insane."

"I would say about 60 kilograms of waste (is what) we've processed so far," said Agrawal.

Pam Gudmundson, the program director for Jasper Place Family Resource Centre and a client of Prints4Play, said on Thursday the toys are extremely useful in her line of work.

"Many of these little toys speak to the work we do with children and inspire their creativity and autonomy in their play," said Gudmundson.

"It also helps them focus and may help them co-regulate with the adults around them so they're actually pretty multifaceted as far as materials, and they're really cool looking so the children are drawn to them, as they are vibrant colours," she added.

Agrawal and Ajamieh hope their project inspires other young people to start thinking about a greener future.

"I think generally, in Canada, we have this really kind of wasteful attitude towards a lot of things … if we're not going to reduce, I would say that we need to reuse and recycle and try to make the planet better for everyone," said Agrawal.

"This is something that I'd like to see other kids and other young people try to do."

The plan for the two students going forward is simple: expand and grow.

"We're working on India, we have some partnerships in place with Uganda that we're trying to pursue right now (as well as) Afghanistan," said Ajamieh. "Getting more people on our team and making more orders, that's basically what we're doing."

For more information on Prints4Play, or to request some toys for an organization, visit their website.  

With files from CTV News Edmonton's Nahreman Issa.