STEVENS POINT, WI (WSAU) — They’ve witnessed Stevens Point hockey history, and now they are set to become history themselves.
Officials with the city are teaming up with CREATE Portage County to take the dasher boards out of the KB Willett Ice Arena and recycle them into other items or pieces of memorabilia as part of improvements to the facility.
The plastic boards were removed from the arena last week, and according to CREATE Portage County Executive Director Greg Wright they’ll be repurposed using a 3D printer, and the possibilities of what they could become are endless, but they’d like for the projects to be accessible to the community in some way.
“Benches, public art, oversized game pieces, projects that the community will help us design,” he said. “We also want to use them in a way that celebrates their history.”
That includes last month’s national championship won by the UWSP Men’s Hockey team on home ice at the arena. So Wright says one of the possibilities could be some sort of keepsake honoring that championship, or something for the arena.
“Maybe a bench that sits outside that says ‘this was made from the boards that saw six national championship [teams].’ We are playing through all of those ideas to see what the best use could be.”
Wright says his team removed all of the plastic that they could from the arena and will now have it chipped up into small pieces that the printer will be able to mold into objects as big as 8’x4’x4′. Some modifications to the printer still need to be made to allow it to print directly from recycled plastic.
Wright says they are also open to any other ideas residents may have for the recycled boards. Anyone who would like to submit an idea can do so through CREATE Portage County’s website at www.createportagecounty.org or by calling 715-254-0460.
The ErectorBot printer is the only one of its kind in North America that’s accessible to the public. The machine still needs a few modifications before it can take the recycled plastic, so Wright doesn’t have an exact timeline of when the items will be available.
