Italian artist uses 3D printing to help restore coral reefs

An Italian engineer has gone from playing with sand to printing with it. Enrico Dini hopes to re-shape the world for the better by replicating natural objects with the D-Shape - one of the world's largest 3D printers.

His website

Dini spent his childhood playing with sand. Now many years later, the Italian inventor is using it to create large-scale replicas of reefs.

In the last few years, Dini has been perfecting a technique for moulding lifelike coral reefs from sand using his massive D-Shape 3D printer. He and his team have been dredging sand and sludge from the seabed along the coast, drying it in the sun, ticking it through D-Shape and printing the reefs one layer at a time using a mixture of sand and a seawater-based binder. Once this has been done, it's placed back in the seabed from whence it came to protect the coast.

Dini said 3D printing allows him to create things which is almost impossible to make by hand. The idea is to mine the seabed and take the binders and sand from the exact same spot where the 3D printed object will be placed.