Filament standards rarely make for dramatic viewing, but they quietly shape everything from spool waste to how easily one printer can read and load a material it has never seen before. In Could this be the new Filament Standard? The whole filament lifecycle at Formnext, Thomas Sanladerer of Made with Layers walks the floor of the industry’s biggest trade show to look at filament from production through the spool on your desk — and asks whether the way we make, ship, and consume it is due for a rethink.
Disclosure: Sanladerer’s video is partly sponsored — its YouTube description states that Anycubic sponsored a portion of it. This ZephyrLeads post is independent commentary and is not sponsored by Anycubic, Prusa, or anyone else; we earn nothing from it.
What the video covers
As the title spells out, the through-line is the whole filament lifecycle as seen at Formnext — the production, packaging, and ecosystem questions that sit upstream of the part you actually print. It is the kind of behind-the-scenes industry context hobbyists rarely get to see, framed less as a verdict than as an open question: whether any single approach is on track to become “the” standard is exactly what’s up for debate.
Rather than recap the segment beat by beat or put words in the creator’s mouth, treat the video as the primary source for what Thomas covers and concludes; what follows is the verifiable landscape it sits in — because there is a lot happening on this exact question right now.
The bigger picture: why a filament “standard” is suddenly a live topic
Formnext is the natural place to have this conversation. Held annually in Frankfurt, it is the world’s largest additive-manufacturing trade show; organizer Mesago reported the 2025 edition — its tenth — drew 38,282 visitors and 804 exhibitors. When materials makers, machine builders, and recyclers are all under one roof, the boring-but-important infrastructure questions get aired.
Two threads have been converging. The first is the physical spool. The plastic reel filament ships on is largely waste, and the industry has spent years chipping at it: FormFutura moved to recyclable cardboard spools and refill filament for use on reusable master spools, and SUNLU has shipped successive generations of detachable, reusable spools. The community “MasterSpool” idea — print your own reusable core, buy filament as a coreless refill — has circulated for the same reason.
The second thread is data. Modern printers increasingly want to know what’s loaded — material type, recommended temperatures, color, how much is left — without you digging through menus. The problem is that smart-spool systems have largely been proprietary and locked to one brand’s ecosystem, which is precisely the kind of fragmentation an open standard is meant to solve.
A concrete example: OpenPrintTag
The clearest recent attempt at an open answer is OpenPrintTag. Prusa Research announced it on October 31, 2025, describing it as an NFC tag standard for smart filament that is, in the company’s words, “completely free to use, free to extend, and works across brands.” The tags are rewritable and reusable — you can peel one off an empty spool and re-program it for the next roll via a phone app or the printer — and the full specification is published openly at specs.openprinttag.org. Prusa has said it began shipping the tags on its redesigned Prusament spools and that other filament makers were in discussion to adopt it.
We mention OpenPrintTag as one prominent, verifiable example of the open-standard effort the topic touches — not as a stand-in for what the video concludes.
What to watch for
- Open vs. proprietary. A standard is only useful if more than one company adopts it. Note who is actually committing versus who is “in discussion.”
- Spool waste vs. spool data. These are two different problems — reducing plastic, and tracking material. Some proposals tackle one, some both; it’s worth keeping them straight.
- Lock-in. A “smart” spool that only works with one brand’s printers solves convenience at the cost of choice. Open, rewritable formats are the antidote.
- Backward compatibility. The filament and machines you already own outnumber anything new. The standards most likely to stick are the ones you can retrofit cheaply.
More from Made with Layers
For more from the same show floor, his Everything’s Changing: Updates from Prusa and E3D at Formnext rounds up announcements from two of the most-watched names in desktop 3D printing. (This video is also partly sponsored — its description credits Snapmaker.)
Credit: All footage by Made with Layers (Thomas Sanladerer) — we summarize and embed creators’ work to point you to the original. Watch the full videos and subscribe on Made with Layers’ YouTube channel. Note: both embedded videos are partly vendor-sponsored — the first credits Anycubic and the second credits Snapmaker for sponsoring a portion — while this ZephyrLeads post is independent, unsponsored commentary and earns nothing from either. Trade-show figures are from Formnext’s organizer; OpenPrintTag details are Prusa Research’s published claims.
