Italian company R3direct, which specializes in repurposing post-consumer plastic, recently completed a large-scale 3D printed art project in Florence with the help of WASP’s 3D printing systems. The installation, recently unveiled in the Parco San Salvi, a former psychiatric hospital, consists of a massive 3D printed horse by artist Edoardo Malagigi made from urban waste.

The equine monument, referred to as Marco Cavallo of the XXI century, was inspired by the Marco Cavallo sculpture from 1973, a blue horse that became to be a sort of mascot for mental health. The 3D printed horse’s design, for its part, draws from the works of Leonardo da Vinci, specifically his drafts of an equestrian monument that was never built.

The newly unveiled sculpture stands (quite tall) as a symbol for the well-being of society and the environment. This meaning comes not only from the horse covered in waste motif, but also from the very material the sculpture is made from: urban waste. 3D printed entirely from recycled post-consumer waste, the sculpture “bears the burden of waste and pollution produced by people, imagining itself ideally immersed in it and emerging completely covered,” WASP writes. “At the same time, through an ‘alchemical’ operation, it transforms the waste it is made of and covered with into precious material, in a process akin to the practices of the circular economy.”

In making the statue, R3direct turned to large-format 3D printing specialist WASP, leveraging two of its 3MT HDP pellet 3D printers, which have a print volume up to 1000 x 1000 mm and can process  irregular-sized pellets. The pellets used in the construction were made locally by recycling company Revet, which used post-consumer plastic as raw material. The horse, obviously larger than one meter, was 3D printed in separate sections, which were assembled on a lightweight metal frame for greater stability and transported to Parco San Salvi where it will remain on permanent display.

3D printing public art from urban waste marks a distinct departure from more traditional sculptural materials seen across Italy, from bronze to marble. As WASP says: “today, there are new ‘mountains’ from which to extract valuable raw materials without causing environmental harm.” These “mountains” are of course waste, which is continually generated by urban populations. 3D printing has in this case, and others, provided a new way to repurpose plastic waste to keep it out of landfills.

WASP also sells other large-format 3D printing technologies that are capable of processing organic materials, such as clay, which can be derived locally. For example, the company’s construction 3D printing platform will be used by the United Nations Development Program in Colombia to build structures using locally sourced materials.