infodumpling

quattro bajeena had some good ideas

  • she/her, they/them

some nerd who's into estrogen and giant robots. also critical theory.

currently in my »theory tranny« / »that weird girl with a synth« era.


So with my next gunpla kit I also ordered some sanding paper, but now I wonder... How harmful is sanding the gunpla plastic material for the environment? You literally rub it into microplastic, right?

Like Gunpla by itself is not a sustainable hobby and it produces quite a bit of plastic waste to build a kit, but from cutting and plying you at least get visible controllable trash pieces that can theoretically be collected and recycled or dealt with otherwise (I'm aware we haven't moved to sustainable ways of dealing with plastic trash on a global level though). But the dust from sanding is probably just... bad, and floats around, right?

Would be happy to hear thoughts on this from more active Gunpla builders (and folks who know more about microplastic and the technicalities of it)!


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in reply to @infodumpling's post:

hello i was looking at the gunpla tag and i saw your post but perhaps i'm a little late

on an individual level, wet sanding both prolongs the life of your sanding gear and also lets you contain the plastic dust better, so it's a good habit to build up. it's also very important if you work with more advanced resin kits because that material is more dangerous to you than polystyrene. more advanced builders are likely to work with powerful filtration/ventilation systems which will also trap the material. what happens to it after that, who can say -- but even a prolific builder's career producing a few jam jars of nasty plastic water is doing pretty well in this sense, i'd say

in japan, bandai have started taking used runners (possibly nubs?) back from people and have produced a few ecopla kits which are made from recycled material (one's made from egg shells and it's apparently horrible to build). it's certainly feasible, but i don't know if it's actually cost-effective for them

ty for your answer!! i also tried asking on the gunpla subreddit but there my post was automatically moderated because i formulated it as question, which are apparently not allowed lol. so you're the first one to tell me anything about this :D

as i'm a total newbie i haven't even heard about wet-sanding yet, so that's good to know! prolly not really helping the overall environmental impact, but at least keeps the dust out of the lungs, ha. i'll give it a try, trying to figure out sanding a bit better while building my HG Psycho Gundam kit anyway…

i've heard abt the ecopla from used runners, but we all know plastic recycling is mostly a scam… like i'm glad it partially works for gunpla, but i'd assume it's mostly a gimmick that makes for some nice pr. egshell gunpla truly sounds horrible to deal with, not gonna lie

wet sanding tends to take a little bit longer, but that can really be an advantage if you tend to over-sand (i certainly do), and who's really out here speedrunning their gunpla?

i think nice colour separation/reproduction means the hobby is always going to require virgin plastic or some kind of miracle new material, but at least it's something you'll enjoy/display for years and spare parts / runners can still be used creatively