We’ve all heard stories of the dangers of 3D printing, with fires from runaway hot ends or dodgy heated build plates being the main hazards. But what about the particulates? Can they actually cause health problems in the long run? Maybe, if new research into the carcinogenicity of common 3D printing plastics pans out.
According to authors [CheolHong Lim] and [DongSeok Seo], the research covered in this paper was undertaken because of reports of rare cancers among Korean STEM teachers, particularly those who used 3D printers in their curricula. It was thought that only long-term, continued exposure to the particulates generated by 3D printers could potentially be hazardous and that PLA was less likely to be hazardous than ABS. The study was designed to assess the potential carcinogenicity of both ABS and PLA particulates under conditions similar to what could be expected in an educational setting.
To do this, they generated particulates by heating ABS and PLA to extruder temperatures, collected and characterized them electrostatically, and dissolved them in the solvent DMSO. They used a cell line known as Balb/c, derived from fibroblasts of an albino laboratory mouse, to assess the cytotoxic concentration of each plastic, then conducted a comet assay, which uses cell shape as a proxy for DNA damage; damaged cells often take on a characteristically tailed shape that resembles a comet. This showed no significant DNA damage for either plastic.
But just because a substance doesn’t cause DNA damage doesn’t mean it can’t mess with the cell’s working in other ways. To assess this, they performed a series of cell transformation assays, which look for morphological changes as a result of treatment with a potential carcinogen. Neither ABS nor PLA were found to be carcinogenic in this assay. They also looked at the RNA of the treated cells, to assess the expression of genes related to carcinogenic pathways. They found that of 147 cancer-related genes, 113 were either turned up or turned down relative to controls. Finally, they looked at glucose metabolism as a proxy for the metabolic changes a malignant cell generally experiences, finding that both plastics increased metabolism in vitro.
Does this mean that 3D printing causes cancer? No, not by a long shot. But, it’s clear that under lab conditions, exposure to either PLA or ABS particulates seems to be related to some of the cell changes associated with carcinogenesis. What exactly this means in the real world remains to be seen, but the work described here at least sets the stage for further examination.
What does this all mean to the home gamer? For now, maybe you should at least crack a window while you’re printing.
A famous person (cannot recall who, sorry) once said no pleasure was worth foregoing for the sake of a few extra years in a retirement home in Weston-Super-Mare. Well, even if printing does give me cancer one day, it’s worth it to be able to have the plastic parts I want translated from CAD and in to the real world in a matter of hours for less than <£20/kg.
Sounds like Dennis Leary talking about smoking:
“Smoking takes ten years off your life. Well it’s the ten worst years, isn’t it folks? It’s the ones at the end!”
And the report makes the risk look very mininal, if it’s even there.
Print on!
No one who has actually watched someone die of cancer thinks this.
But I bet the problem (if there even is one) can be solved with enclosing, filtering and/or venting. I doubt it requires giving up.
I have, and I think this. Remember: if the movie sucks, you can always leave the theater early.
I’ve seen people die in a good few ways and unfortunately it seems as if most of them suck pretty bad. But you aren’t wrong
Maybe a fume hood would be a good investment for your 3D printery?
Or just a Big Clive toilet paper HEPA filter using an old PC fan.
They’ve got containment tents you can hook vent tubes to. I use one just to keep my cat from bapping the filament as it feeds
Define “bapping” 🤣 I know exactly what it means, seeing as we have a cat who “baps” as well.
Haven’t bought a 3D printer yet (too many other hobbies), but what is state of the art in terms of printers being enclosed and being vented to the outside? Thx for any and all reco’s.
pretty much anything you build yourself. 3D printers have hardly changed in a decade and fume hoods haven’t in over 150 years.
The hardware has seen a moderate change in precision and price in the last decade due to them becoming commodity parts.
On the other hand, comparing the software/features to those of a decade ago, we may as well be looking at Star Trek.
I constantly poo-poo HaD articles for printing what is essentially a slightly modified project box.
But that doesn’t mean I can’t recognize how much better printers have gotten in a decade. Especially at doing what they ARE good for. (Rapid prototyping and art)
A decade ago we didn’t have cheap desktop printers surface mapping the build plate and auto-compensating, then slamming the print head around at 15 Gees, while using active harmonic balancing to keep precision in the 0.1mm range AND cutting print time to 1/5 of what it used to be.
It’s astounding what you can get for $250-300 in 2024.
90% of what I use my printer for is stuff that I could potentially source something adequate from the usual online retailers, but it’s hard to overstate the convenience of not only being able to get the exact dimensions and features I want, but usually same day.
Generally speaking, the amount of time it takes me to bash something out in CAD, whether it’s an enclosure, a mount, a clip, whatever, is comparable to how long it would take me to find what Im looking for using the increasingly poor search features, usually at a significantly higher price than materials cost.
But I’m only making projects for myself, I don’t have the expertise or desire to build things for others.
There are some things, like radiation, that cause cancer immediately and others that cause it over time as the substance eventually overwhelms the body to trigger cancer.
So does PLA fumes exposure cause cancer? Maybe it does over time. However how much time?
It’s like the chain smoker vs the pack a week smoker – we don’t know which one will get cancer because their DNA is different and ability to handle the poisons is different. It’s assumed that the chain smoker would get cancer and yet some chain smokers don’t get it.
Minimizing exposure to filament fumes through filtering and/or ventilation or even putting the 3d printer in the garage sounds like the implied recommendation. Just in case…
Disagree. Jumped into 3D printing just under 4 years ago. And just replaced my old printer with a new one. Holy PLA Batman! What a difference! Moore’s law now applies to 3D printers instead of computer chips.
Glucose metabolism changes are hardly confined to carcinogenesis; and the fact that no DNA damage was found in either test designed to identify it would indicate a considerably less declarative conclusion than “But, it’s clear that under lab conditions, exposure to either PLA or ABS particulates seems to be related to some of the cell changes associated with carcinogenesis”
Also ‘in vitro’ https://xkcd.com/1217/
ABS has been used industrially since the 50’s, and any potential carcinogenicity identified in those settings has bee exposure to the monomer precursors butadiene (known), acrylonitrile (suspected) and styrene . It does not get hot enough in 3D printing to come remotely close to the thermal decomosition temperature, so I feel pretty confident in saying you’re more likey to get cancer from a vast array of other things you’re exposed to that parsing out the risk from 3d printing is miniscule.
I agree with you on the carcinogenicity but I still recommend everyone who likes to 3d print get a cheap grow tent and fan setup because if nothing else printing abs smells awful. Also it’s pretty much a requirement for resin printers because the fumes from the resins are known to be bad for you. Also recommend wearing a respirator when opening them and doing post processing on the parts.
And, DMSO has been shown to transport nano-particles through cell membranes, so perhaps the testing method itself is flawed.
That is the whole point of the test.
Expose raw cells frome a specific line to particles, to see the damage.
The DMSO is there because we want to know what happens when the stuff gets inside the cell, and we don’t want to wait a decade.
tbh My take away from this article is ‘stay away from research labs, they might be doing carcinogenic stuff in them’
But when a high percentage of every school at every grade level( my kid in elementary, my feeder middle schools, and me in my high school) all have 3D printers, that means that every school has just become a “research labs doing carcinogenic stuff” that we maybe should be staying away from according to your line of thinking. The Korean data point showed an increase of rate in cancer in STEM teachers. That is what started this study. Sure they are exposed on a daily basis and multiple times a day. However kindergartners and first graders will be getting exposed to this stuff multiple times a year for their entire k-12 career, when such an exposure at a young age could, maybe, might, we didn’t know, have major effects at late age. The Anti-Vax movement has almost gone away thanks to a lack of a real smoking gun conclusive data. The ” school gave my child a third arm( not 3d printed)” group is going to be 9e3 times worse then the anti vaxers if any of these studies do conclusively show a link between 3D printers and cancer.
just going to refer you to Elliot’s post below, they didn’t actually find any link to carcinogenic stuff…
I think the more interesting line of exploration would be looking at the plethora of additives typically used by exploring many of the common filaments purchased.
Maybe ABS or PLA themselves don’t cause seem to cause cancer but perhaps a popular brand of cheap filament from China has additives that are bad or maybe one of the highly tuned specialty filaments you might find could use something exotic and toxic
Bruce: “the fact that no DNA damage was found in either test designed to identify it” is right!
The paper’s conclusion is that they “can’t entirely rule out that it’s carcinogenic”, which is a far cry from saying that they found anything carcenogenic. Indeed, the opposite is true — they looked for the obvious smoking guns and didn’t find any. (So they kept looking and found something that’s maybe suggestive, but maybe not.)
So yeah. Don’t worry about the 3D printing. Worry about the teflon pans.
https://hackaday.com/2016/02/01/3d-printing-fumes-new-science/
https://hackaday.com/2023/06/04/3d-printing-safety-according-to-the-ul/
ABS does seem to be worse in terms of VOCs when just measured in the air around the printer. PLA and PETG seem pretty clean. Whether these VOCs are harmful is a second issue.
I can think of a LOT of things we all normally do that are likely far more hazardous to our health than 3D printing. It’s dry and dusty where I live and I’d bet that simply breathing the outside air filled with who knows what is worse. Hell, breathing solder flux is probably worse.
I wonder how many smokers (of all kinds) are rushing out to buy a fume hood for their 3D printing ….
It’s all relative.
It might be “safe” for you to stand at the pump while getting gasoline, but if you are standing at the pump all day pumping other people’s gas, you have an entirely different level of exposure.
That is the point of testing.
And these tests made a point of targeting exposure levels of a STEM teacher. Standing in a room with multiple printers, for multiple hours a day.
Exactly. Even if I have no plans to ditch my printer, I would still like to know what the potential ill effects are, I may adjust my usage accordingly.
I only print pla but that’s beside the point. My general rule of thumb is of its not safe to consume though mouth or airways and I can smell it … it’s going in a ventilated space.
But hey you want to have a printer going in your bedroom for 30 hours to make a Ironman helmet out of stuff that has more syllables than a polish name then good for you sure the fumes make your gridfinity look that much better
Which city? It sounds Roman.
Latin, not Roman. Weston comes from the Anglo-Saxon for the west tun or settlement; super mare is Latin for “above the sea” and was added to distinguish it from the many other settlements named Weston in the Diocese of Bath and Wells. Prior to 1348 it was known as Weston-juxta-Mare (“beside the sea”).
I meant “Carcinogeni”.
3D printing pertains to Makers who may be but are not required to also be members of the set of Gamers. Ref closing statement of article.
I’m not a professional, but I made myself a enclosed furniture with those rubber car doors seals around the door and silicone glue in the joints, and so a thermal insulator in the inside walls of it to keep heat in the best I can.
As it have internal air recirculation, I installed a car’s air filter to just help keeping things a little cleaner, and I tell you that really avoid that ABS powder building up inside the printer enclosure, dirtying everything.
But the point is, that filter is changed after some 6 or 8 months (we use the printer pretty much always in our lab, to the point of never turning heat off to never need to wait to heat up the cabin) and it’s usually very dirty.
We got the printer in an external area with just a roof and very good ventilation, but one thing I learned from it: after time there’s a lot of plastic coming out of those prints.
Using ABS filament is well known not to be done without appropiate fume extractors etc. While PLA is less toxic, again ensuring suitable ventlation is made available is a well known fact. I think it comes down to how much printing your doing and following the guidelines. :-). I have 4 printers in use and always make sure the appropiate ventilation is provided, 10 years on, no complaints from me.
One simple fix is to put your printer in a place you don’t go often, like a garage, spare room, closet, or mother in laws bedroom.
Unless you’re someone who likes to stare at the print in person, this should cut your exposure risk down by a lot.
I only print PETG (while smoking my hand-rolled filterless cigarettes, living near a major road with buses and lorries trundling by) – so I should be fine.
Well according to the state of California, my printer does contain carcinogenic materials. The warning was there the whole time, doesn’t anybody take that sticker seriously?!
Below is a similar study on exposing cultured human airway cells (lungs) to the type of particulates emitted by ABS and PLA printing. With interesting evidence of cellular impact (but a a very micro level, not at a higher whole function level). They found several changes in cellular mechanisms and expression pathways, albeit different ones btwn PLA and ABS:
“ABS emissions induced metabolic perturbation primarily in pathways related to amino acids, energy metabolism, and redox-regulated metabolisms. Exposure to PLA emissions resulted in metabolic alterations in fatty acids and carnitine metabolisms.”
“indicating compromised cellular redox homeostasis, and stimulated inflammatory responses that could contribute to the progression of lung diseases such as pulmonary fibrosis and COPD”
Still early research, with many more steps needed to confirm or deny, as well as quantify, the actual impact at the whole body level.
Paper: Real-Time Exposure to 3D-Printing Emissions Elicits Metabolic and Pro-Inflammatory Responses in Human Airway Epithelial Cells https://www.mdpi.com/2305-6304/12/1/67