Beneath the labs and offices of the materials building at Michigan Tech, in a sprawling basement, a young physicist named Josh Pearce is making a five-cent water filter. Or rather, it’s being made for him, a 3-D printer whirring back and forth across a heated bed, a laptop telling the nozzle which way to move back and across.

Pearce’s research team is gathered round, watching to see if the machine can handle the tiny latticework in the filter’s core. Around the room behind them, among cluttered shelves and workbenches, there are half a dozen other printers, large flatbeds, and narrower, taller delta ones moving up and down.

On the other side of the basement, a technician is working on a shredder that will make it possible to recycle plastic waste into the “filament” polymer that the printers use as raw material. She occasionally glances at a smaller machine nearby turning out a new creation. “Oh, that’s a DVD tower,” she says, distracted. “I’m doing it for home.”