How much plastic is that

Every print profile on MakerWorld, the ready-made settings file people print a model from, shows how many times it's been printed and what the slicer, the program that prepares a print, expects each one to take. Multiply those out for the 327,759 MakerWorld models in our sample and you get 31,467,702 logged prints, 3,216 tonnes of plastic and 129.5 million hours of printer time.

Two things to keep in mind before the numbers get silly. These are sums over our sample, not totals for all of MakerWorld. And every figure is the slicer's estimate. We can't tell which prints finished, failed halfway or got scaled up. Each logged print counts at its profile's full estimate.

We studied 1,004,137 public models from MakerWorld and Printables, two of the biggest sites for sharing 3D printing files: 327,759 from MakerWorld and 676,378 from Printables. Every number here describes those models, not every model ever posted.

Filament types

2,883 of those 3,216 tonnes are PLA, 89.6% of the total. PETG is a distant second at 268 tonnes. ABS and TPU, the next two, come to 17.9 and 16.4 tonnes. Next to PLA they barely register.

If you design for MakerWorld, odds are your model gets printed in PLA. Plan the overhangs, the tolerances and the snap fits for it, and treat anything else as the exception.

Filament by length

Filament comes on a spool as one long strand, so you can measure it in length too. Laid end to end, the filament in those prints runs 1,046,853 kilometers. That's 26.1 trips around the equator, or 2.72 times the distance to the Moon.

Split across the prints, it's a modest 33.3 meters each. The big number comes from the count, not from any single job.

Machine time

129.5 million machine hours is 14,784 years of one printer running without a break. To finish today, it would have had to start around 12,800 BC.

The average logged print comes out at 4.1 hours, but long jobs pull that up. 50.3% of logged prints take under two hours.

For the length and time totals we left out the 3 profiles that claim more than 1,000 hours per print. They hold 2 logged prints between them, so nothing above changes in a way you'd notice.