🇺🇸 Benjamin Davis

Benjamin Davis, of Wrentham, Massachusetts, was a high-school student, a sophomore at Bishop Feehan High School, when he turned his attention to a problem hiding in plain sight inside the 3D-printing boom. As desktop printers spread into schools, workshops and homes, so did their waste. By some measures up to two-thirds of the plastic filament used in a typical print job ends up discarded as failed prints, rafts and supports.

The obvious answer, recycling that plastic back into filament, existed in theory but not in practice for most users. Commercial recycling machines were expensive, slow, and produced filament of inconsistent quality, putting them out of reach of the very hobbyists and classrooms generating the waste. Davis set out to build something a home user could actually own and operate, closing the loop between printing and recycling on a single desktop.

His engineering solution was unusually sophisticated for a high-school project. He combined two plastic-forming processes that are normally used separately, pultrusion, which pushes material through a die, and extrusion, which pulls it, into a single system. Blending the two, along with careful electrical, mechanical and chemical engineering, made his machine roughly 45 percent more efficient than conventional home recyclers while producing a higher-quality strand.

The results were striking on every axis a user cares about. His device was faster than existing home recyclers, produced a better product, and, crucially, cost around 90 percent less than commercial alternatives. It reframed 3D-printing waste not as garbage but as raw material, a small circular economy that could sit on a workbench and pay for itself in saved filament.

In May 2025, at the 75th Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair, Davis received the $75,000 Regeneron Young Scientist Award, one of only two given, placing him among the very top competitors from a field drawn from around the world. The recognition opened doors well beyond the fair, including an invitation to present at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference and a fellowship in the American Junior Academy of Sciences.

The scale of the waste problem he targeted is easy to overlook. As desktop 3D printing has spread into schools, makerspaces and homes, so has its by-product: by some measures up to two-thirds of the filament used in a typical print job ends up discarded as failed prints, rafts and support structures. Most of that plastic simply goes to landfill, an invisible cost of a fast-growing technology.

What made his machine notable was not a single trick but a clever combination. Davis fused two plastic-forming processes normally kept apart, pultrusion, which pushes material through a die, and extrusion, which pulls it, and paired them with careful electrical, mechanical and chemical engineering. The result was a system roughly forty-five percent more efficient than conventional home recyclers, faster, and capable of producing a higher-quality filament.

The economics were as persuasive as the engineering. His recycler cost about ninety percent less than commercial machines, putting closed-loop recycling within reach of the ordinary users who generate the waste. The $75,000 Regeneron Young Scientist Award, one of only two given at the fair, opened further doors, including a presentation at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference and a fellowship in the American Junior Academy of Sciences.

Davis has said the top prize came as a genuine surprise, and that the award unlocked a cascade of new opportunities and experiences. More tellingly, the project appears to have set his course: his work on plastics and extrusion has firmed up his intention to study advanced manufacturing and mechanical or materials engineering in college. For a teenager, he has already done the thing most engineers spend careers chasing, taken a wasteful process and quietly made it whole.