14 DAY TRIAL // Insurance companies have a very mixed reputation around the world, but their services are used anyway, far and wide. Which means that, when they start to look into the possibility of covering something new, of their own initiative, the world will take notice.
3D printing technology has somehow managed to draw the eye of insurance companies. Or one of them, Zurich Insurance stationed in Switzerland.
The company has begun investigating the insurance risks associated with the technology, or what is more broadly known as additive manufacturing.
Since the technologies have been available for decades, you might think this would have been handled a while ago.
However, only in the past two or three years have consumer applications begun to crop up often enough to warrant a second glance.
Zurich Insurance publishes a paper on additive manufacturing risks
The role of insurance companies is to cover the cost of reparations for various potential hazards, situations, people, and products that carry “risk.”
Zurich Insurance has published a paper called “SMEs and Risk in 2020” in which it examines what technologies businesses in the UK are likely to employ in 2020.
Technically, the paper was published a bit earlier this year, but that's not the relevant bit. The relevance is in the forecast that additive manufacturing will be a large part of human life by the end of the decade.
Thus, determining the dangers associated with additive manufacturing now, in anticipation of those times, will turn out to be quite profitable down the line.
It might sound callous, to profit off possible health hazards that 3D printers may bring with them, but it's not like insurance companies can afford to overlook such a segment. Especially since effective management of risk scenarios can help save lots of money, time, and even human lives.
Sure, additive manufacturing (in consumer form) doesn't carry the same hazards as a car, but Zurich Insurance is still determined to speculate as thoroughly as possible on what could go wrong.
Where is the danger?
Truthfully, the hazards aren't much to speak of, unless you, say, own an open-air 3D printer and somehow let your toddler wander around in your workshop, and he or she sticks her hand under the nozzle for whatever reason.
Still, Zurich Insurance is looking into things, since every insurance tax will mean fuller coffers for them. Hopefully, the resulting insurance policies won't lead to unnecessarily high increases in operating costs and restrictions in the freedom of production.