1of26A sculpture of the Notorious B.I.G. that was printed with a Gigabot printer made by re:3D sits in the company’s showroom in southeast Houston, Monday, June 24, 2019.Photo: Mark Mulligan, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer

The Houston startup re:3D is hoping to build its business and maybe save the world with an unusual recipe: Take discarded water bottles, shred them and bake them at 100 degrees until they achieve a certain crispness. These tiny pieces of crisp recycled plastic provide feedstock for the company’s 3D printer. They are coaxed down a tube and into a nozzle, where they’re melted and reassembled, layer-by-layer, hour-by-hour, into a new product.

The printer, known as the Gigabot X and currently in its beta version, could one day help a pressing problem: What to do with the mountains of plastic waste choking the oceans and piling up in landfills. It’s the latest large-scale printer […]

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