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The categories

Waste is worth splitting up, because each kind has a different cause and a different fix. Lumping it into one "wastage %" tells you there is a problem without telling you where.

• Purge. Filament pushed through to clear the previous colour. On a multi-colour print this is the big one — a four-colour model can purge more material than the model itself weighs.
• Supports. You print them on purpose and throw them away. The amount is predictable, and you can often cut it by turning the part a different way up.
• Failed prints. Everything consumed before it let go of the bed at hour six. The most expensive category per gram, because it took machine time and your attention as well.
• Skirts and brims. A small amount on every print, and easy to ignore. Not worth trying to reduce, but worth counting so you can see it.
• Stringing and blobs. Usually a symptom rather than a category — rising numbers here mean wet filament or a temperature that needs revisiting.
• Remnants. The tail left on a reel that is too short to start anything with. Paid for in full, never printed.

Why remnants are the odd one out

Every other category is filament that went through the nozzle. It is already inside the grams a print consumed, so it is measured as part of that print.

A remnant never printed. If you add it to the waste total without also adding it to the amount of filament bought, your waste ratio can come out higher than the filament you actually bought, which is impossible. It has to be added to both the top and the bottom of the sum.

It is a small point, but it takes a while to work out for yourself, so we have written it down.

What a realistic figure looks like

There is no industry number to compare yourself against, and anyone quoting one is guessing. What matters is your own figure, and whether it is going up or down.

Single-colour prints with few supports and a settled profile lose very little. Multi-colour work is a different activity entirely — the purge tower is a real, planned cost, and pricing multi-colour items as though they waste what single-colour items waste is a reliable way to lose money on your most impressive-looking products.

Asking whether 12% is good won't get you far. Asking why it was 8% last month will.

Measuring it without it becoming a chore

Weighing every purge block is not sustainable and nobody keeps it up. What works is setting a purge figure per colour change for each machine (around 8g on some, 6g on others) that gets added automatically, and recording the kinds of waste you can't predict when they happen. A failed print is worth thirty seconds of logging; skirts are not.

That way the routine waste fills itself in, and you only have to record the unusual.

What the number is for

It goes into cost per unit, so your prices are based on the filament you bought, not just the filament that ended up in finished prints. It also tells you when something has changed — a supplier switch, a damp reel, a profile someone tweaked — usually before the failures themselves become obvious.

MakerProof treats waste as first-class rather than as a note: every print logs it by category, and the waste report shows the ratio and what is driving it. The full cost breakdown shows where it lands in the arithmetic, or start free.