Category Archives: Blog

"[Ty Palowski] doesn’t like folding his many shirts. He saw one of those boards on TV that supposedly simplifies folding, but it does require you to manually move the board. That just won’t do, so [Ty] motorized it to create a shirt folding robot. The board idea is nothing new, and probably many people wouldn’t mind the simple operation required, but what else are you going to do with your 3D printer but make motor mounts for a shirt folding machine? The folding board is, of course, too big for 3D printing so he made that part out of cardboard at first and then what looks like foam board. The side “wings” were easy to manipulate, but the top fold required a little more effort. The machine still requires a manual fold at the end and, of course, you have to put the shirt on the right way for things to work...

"It turns out that you can help change the world by just changing your laundry settings. A new study out of Northumbria University in partnership with Proctor & Gamble — makers of products such as Ariel, Tide, Downy and Lenor — found that 13,000 tons of microfibers are being released into European marine environments every year and that this figure could be reduced by up to 30 percent if the Earth’s residents just changed their laundry habits. The researchers found that 96 percent of the fibers released were natural, coming from cotton, wool, and viscose, with synthetic fibers, such as nylon, polyester, and acrylic accounting for just four percent. However, a recent study by Newcastle University suggests that this four percent makes up almost a fifth of microplastics in our oceans. The best way, according to the Northumbria researchers, to reduce the number of polluting microfibers is to make small changes such...

"A Terre Haute dry cleaner reports a decrease in demand for services. Laundromats and dry cleaners are considered essential businesses. Courtesy Cleaning Centers in Terre Haute have remained open throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Courtesy Cleaners employee Pat Bennett says he's glad to have remained open. "We were lucky that we were deemed essential, because people need clean clothes, regardless of what's going on in the world,” said Bennett. As folks work from home, dry cleaning has declined. "Dry cleaning did drop off pretty significantly, pretty suddenly, but they changed the production hours. it used to be we'd have things ready the next day. Now, it's every other day we'll run the plant, so there's an amount of things built up, so we can give the employees’ hours."" Read more on this story here. Like many other businesses, the dry cleaning industry has been impacted greatly by COVID-19. As an essential business,...