The circle of electronic life: useless printer scraps become a way to print scraps of other things! Resourceful 33-year-old inventor Kodjo Afate Gnikou, of the West African country Togo, has created a cheap, DIY 3-D printer out of electronic waste scavenged from junk yards. Gnikou is part of WoeLab, a hackerspace in the city of Lomé, as well as a geographer and an occasional maintenance technician, according to a crowd funding page for his project. He gets most of his material from a junk yard in Lomé, though he did have to buy a few parts. All together, the printer ended up costing him about $100, a far cry from the hundreds or thousands of dollars you’d shell out to buy one. (Even the minimalist Printrbot Simple retails at $299. He told a website euronews: He and his printer system are part of this year’s NASA International Space Apps Challenge in Paris, proposing to use e-waste to make 3-D printers that would print tools to colonize Mars.
