Silver electroless plating on 3D printed resins via stereolithography: A sustainable solution

•Low-toxicity surface treatments have been performed on substrates for electroless plating.•3D printed resins have been Silver electroless plated.•Ag coatings are well adherent and highly electrically conductive.•H2SO4 surface treatment results in the highest coating adhesion. Electroless plating is a simple method to manufacture conductive coatings on electrically insulating substrates such as polymers. In this paper silver electroless plating has been performed on 3D printed polymeric samples manufactured by stereolithographic process. Three different surface treatments using acetone, ethanol and sulfuric acid solution, have been performed avoiding the use of highly toxic chemicals (i.e. chromic acid) typically applied in this process. All the surface treatments modify the surface wettability, even if sulfuric acid solution was the best performing one. The resulting silver coatings are compact and homogenous with an average thickness of 200 nm, they show high chemical purity and high electrical conductivity. The adhesion of the coating has been measured by scratch test and the results confirmed that all the three surface treatments produced well adherent coatings, although the treatment via sulphuric acid solution produced the coating with best adhesion.