Week 1 BioPlastics

“Do we make new things in order to continue business as usual or to find other ways of doing things…“

paraphrased from Maarten Smith’s lecture - Introduction to Bioplastics

“A bioplastic is a biobased polymer derived from a biomass, and it may or may not be biodegradable”

from bioplastics cookbook

BIO- ‘plastics’ made from organic materials

Begining with Agar as a plant based polymer
Based on the cookbook the suggested recipes are:

Agar	Glycerine	Water	Brittleness
0.6 g	0.0	40 ml	1
0.6	1.4g	40 ml	0.75
0.6 g	2.7g	40ml	0.5
0.6 g	5.4g	40ml	0.25

First recipes tested:

polymer	glycerine	water	extras	results
agar 3.2 g	2.8 g	80 ml	dandelion extract for colour	disk of jelly like substance
agar 32.g	2.8 g	80 ml	coffee extraction

Observations:

Working with small quantities of water makes it hard to control the evaporation and substance - this was supposed to be one up from brittle but was a loose jelly like

• second attempt to create a more brittle substance :

Agar	Glycerine	Water	extras
8g	0g	200ml	chili powder

• Will the chili which is a powder and was ‘eyeballed’ in affect it
• the substance was thick and viscous when poured still hot into a plate and a metal mould of an elephant