First, Scranton, next, the world

By ANDREW MCGINN
a.mcginn@beeherald.com

Speaking in 2015 to The Jefferson Herald, Matthew Fiedler floated a vision of the future that made him sound like a cross between Willy Wonka and a character in a Ray Bradbury book.

“Wouldn’t you like to have a machine that could make almost anything?” the Scranton native asked.

The answer is yes, of course, along with an Everlasting Gobstopper.

Already this year, Fiedler’s Texas-based startup, re:3D, has reaped more than $1.2 million in awards from people who agree.

A 1994 graduate of Jefferson-Scranton High School and a veritable poster boy for the high school’s vocational education program, Fiedler is on the leading edge of 3-D-printing technology.

“Lots of good things have happened in the last several weeks,” he said.

On Jan. 17, re:3D claimed the top prize of $1 million at Madison Square Garden in the WeWork Creator Awards Global Finals, a stunning show of confidence in Fiedler’s flagship technology — an affordable, industrial 3-D printer  about the size of a toilet called Gigabot.

“Other people believe in the work we’re doing,” Fiedler said, “and they’re willing to put their money behind it.”

The $1 million prize followed a National Science Foundation grant of $220,549 that will assist re:3D with developing a way to feed ordinary recycled plastic into an industrial 3-D printer.

“The work begins now,” said Fiedler, who lives in Houston.

That’s really saying something considering he’s already been everywhere, Gigabot in tow, from the South by Southwest festival to Chile’s Atacama Desert, where he personally demonstrated the technology’s possibilities to a tribal leader in an adobe house with a thatch roof.

Also known as “additive manufacturing,” 3-D printing builds an object one layer at a time out of plastic, ceramics, metal or other materials.

Greene County’s own Vision 2020 plan calls for 3-D-printed workforce housing in Paton.

Most 3-D printers build objects using a rope-like plastic filament.

But what if you could feed a plastic water or pop bottle right into Gigabot?

“We all know intuitively that plastic just doesn’t go away,” said Fiedler, who grew up the eighth of 10 kids on a farm near Scranton. “We need to find a way to use that in order to create a true circular economy where things are reused.”

In March at the annual South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, re:3D will unveil a version of Gigabot that can accept plastic pellets via a hopper, an industry first. However, Fiedler explained, the pellets need to be uniformly sized and of virgin plastic.

An ensuing Kickstarter campaign will help Fiedler and re:3D modify their technology so that it will take any type of chunk plastic.

That would enable a company to recycle right on the factory floor, locally sourcing raw material.

“More and more,” Fiedler said, “shareholders want to know that you’re not only doing good by the money, but doing good by the environment.”

Finding a way to grind up the plastic and create consistently sized chunks in the process is what he calls the “billion dollar question.”

Recycled materials are inherently weaker, he said, so they’ll also have to tinker with additives to the recycled plastic.

Already, Gigabot’s customers include the Field Museum in Chicago, where it’s been used to print replicas of animal skulls, and Northrop Grumman, which has used it to prototype parts for tanks.

The Air Force, Navy and NASA are all customers as well.

The organization e-NABLE uses Gigabot to print prosthetic hands for kids in the developing world.

“This isn’t mass production,” Fiedler told the Herald in 2015. “This is mass customization.”

A product of Dan Benitz’s shop program at Jefferson-Scranton High School, Fiedler is most in his element when engineering a solution.

But as co-founder of re:3D — which employs 15 people directly with plans to hire five more — he’s also had to learn the role of businessman.

“For the first five years,” he said, “we had to learn how to become a manufacturing company.”

The WeWork Creator prize will go in large part to establishing benefits for their employees — namely, health insurance.

After all, it’s hard to reshape the future without health insurance.

“We need to take care of the team we have,” Fiedler said, “and to grow our team.”