Page 16 - Ratel 2023 Summer

Ratel volume 50, issue number 2

Embracing 3D Printing as a way of

Supporting Conservation, Education,

Husbandry and Sustainability.

By Markus Wilder.

The concept of 3D printing is something which has been embraced If we are able to put our minds at ease knowing that we can choose
by several industries to produce everything from precision tools and to print products that are not usually single use, are made from
parts from plastic all the way through to using huge printers to print recycled materials and could be recycled once we are finished with
whole houses with concrete. A place where I haven’t often seen it them, would this mean that there are opportunities in zoos for us
being used is in the zoo industry, even though it’s nothing new for to use this technology?
animal welfare professionals as 3D printed parts have long been
used by veterinarians. I have often wondered whether a lot of this We firmly believe that it can be utilised in a number of different
reluctance comes from a worry about the sustainability of printing ways and would like to introduce you to a few ways in which we are
using plastics. using 3D printing in our workplace.

3D printing technology has come a long way and there are now It’s a fairly simple process once you get used to it with items being
many printer filaments available on the market which are produced available two different ways. Firstly, you can download pre-made
using recycled materials - and therefore end products which are also items from sites like Thingiverse (e.g the puzzle feeders as seen in
100% recyclable. Often this is a way to recycle waste from the 3D use in Figs.5 and 6) action in where we have even printed a sand
printing industry itself (such as failed prints or support structures), cleaning sieve for our reptile team while we were getting our heads
but there are also companies who have produced 3D printing around our new printer (which is a Flashforge Adventurer 3 - Fig.1).
filament from recycled bottles and even fishing line and nets But other items from that site include everything from carabiners
recovered during beach cleans. and clips to wild bird feeders and even complex puzzle feeders for
our animals. All these items are totally free but do limit you to things
which people have designed before. If you have time to play around
with a simple CAD system like Tinkercad, which again is totally free
to use, you can print pretty much anything you can think of.

Our journey with 3D printing started with a simple problem.
Following our last zoo licence inspection, we were given a condition
which was that not only are the temperatures in our new reptile
house easy to read and permanently recording, but that they are also
on display in a public-facing way. We already had all of our
thermometers in place and they were designed to sit on top of the
enclosures. We now needed them to be mounted inside the exhibits
against the window, but a mount for these thermometers was simply
not available anywhere.

So, we designed one using Tinkercad which allowed the
thermometer to snuggly sit inside, leave access to the battery cover
and allow us to attach it to the window of the exhibit, facing the
Figure 1. Flashforge Adventurer 3 printer
visitors.

Figure 2. Example of a freely-available puzzle-feeder pattern.
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