James Chou

For the final project, I have decided to experiment with the 3D printer PLA plastic material. More specifically, using failed projects of others and recycling the support for the 3D prints. I wanted to experiment with this because initially I wanted to build the extrusion machine from precious plastics but NYU Shanghai lacked the resources to build this machine on our own and it would also take some time. When I watched the extrusion machine video, one of the things they did was recycled PLA plastics into 3D printer filament and I thought that was an amazing idea. After talking to Andy and Marcele though, I realized that this was something impossible to do for me because the 3D printer is actually very sensitive in terms of the quality of the filament, the length, the width, and it is very difficult to actually re-use the filament for the same purpose. So I began to experiment with the material and I wanted to try to melt it first and see what it would look like. In the big box of used 3D filament, there were couple different categories to separate.

Within the big pile of filaments, I sorted them into three different categories. 

 

Support:

 

Scraps of filament:

 

The actual filament that was thrown out:

I decided first to melt them separately so I could see the effect of each filament. I first picked up some scraps of filaments and I did not cut them or anything I just piled them closely with each other and I put them in the oven. I set the oven to about 180 degree celsius and with these scraps, since they are very thin, the moment I put them in the oven it had already softened. After 20 minutes, they were a bit melted but not the the point I want them to be. I left it for another 10 minutes and they were pretty much melted. I took it out of the oven and I tried to scrap them up but they were accidentally rolled into one.

After finish testing this type of filament, I then moved on to the actual 3D filaments. I tried cutting them up into small pieces with a scissor but they were pretty tough to cut with so I used the plastic shredder so shredded them up to small pieces.

Then I put them all into the oven pan and aligned them so that they are in a square like shape. This time, it took about 40 minutes to melt the whole thing since it was much thicker than the scraps. After 40 minutes, I took it out and it turned out to be a slab of plastic that looked a lot like the stool that we made in class.

It was not completely melted though so it had some rough texture to the slab and I actually kind of liked it. I thought about what I would made out of it and I saw some ideas from precious plastics creations. One of the idea that I really liked was a wall clock made out of plastic. 

However, I would need to buy some materials from Taobao but this is just an initial idea that I have and it might change later on. 

 

Final Project Documentation

For my final project, I have decided to create a PLA material library for future references. This idea came about from talking to Andy after working with him. I’ve created 8 different kinds of sample all from the PLA materials that was used for the 3D printer. I created all the samples with the same technique by melting them in an oven. I left them in the oven at about 200 degree celcius for an hour. The purpose of that was also to make it more accessible for people at home, schools that has 3D printer accessible to them, and also places that has a fabrication lab. 

I melted 4 samples only using only the actual filament which I call them the pure filament, 2 that were mixed of materials, and 1 support filament which had a much stronger texture.

Through out this experiment, I created some amazing pieces that were well liked by others as well. When I took the pieces out of the oven, I really thought the colors and texture was cool. When it just came out of the oven, it had a really glossy look and since it was still melting it looked soft and bendable. When it cooled down, the glossy look went away but the colors were still amazing. The colors and the texture really reminded me this skateboard brand called Penny Skateboard and the back of their boards always has cool colors. 

Therefore I really wanted to create something like that but due to the time constraint I couldn’t. This was another idea that I had other than the clock and I would definitely want to try to do this if I had the time. Overall, I felt that this project was very fun to work with and I had some discoveries about PLA material as well. 

For example, when you melt a filament that is transparent, when it is first melted, it stays transparent but then as it cools down, it turns into an off-white color.

Final Product

For the presentation, since I wanted to make a material library, it was best if i could make them similar to something like this 

  

Therefore, I decided to use a saw and cut them up into little square. 

For the final result, it turned out to be like this. 

And I put a name tag for each one of them. 

 

Conclusion

For this project, I had a lot of fun making these samples and really got to explore a type of plastic that I never really interacted that much with. One concern that I had was that before going into this project, I thought I would be utilizing the whole box of failed 3D prints but after finishing this project, I feel like the amount of failed 3D prints and PLA materials that was in that box didn’t decrease at all. My question was that how can we decrease the amount of PLA waste? There are only 2 to 3 companies in the world that are able to re-use the 3D print PLA material for printing again because that it very difficult to do but for schools and individuals who owns a 3D printer, what can they do with these wastes? It is important to acknowledge that these waste are inevitable. It is quite impossible to never have failed 3D prints so trying to make every print perfect isn’t a good solution. I think this is something that could be done in the next step and for further research. My project was merely just the start and for people who are interested in recycling PLA material, my project was just to show one form of recycling by melting it but there are still so many ways to explore it.

One of the professor at the presentation suggested that I could mix it with different materials like wood, glass, or paper and see what happens. This is something that others could explore and I would be very interested to see how it turns out. In conclusion, I really enjoyed this class as whole and really go to understand the relationship between plastics and our environment and to be honest, it is a little bit upsetting because it is so hard to be sustainable when everyone could care less about it. It is upsetting and disappointing to learn all about the waste humans produces. I hope a course like Re-made in China and or other sustainability classes can be taught at every school as a core class to take so that everyone could be at least a bit more mindful about the waste we produce. 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Over the thanksgiving break, I traveled to Moganshan, a mountain about 3 hours away from Shanghai and stayed at a hotel/retreat place called Naked Stables. Naked Stables is part of the Naked retreat hotels where people could go there and relax and do activities and companies would go there for team building etc.. When I entered my room, I noticed that they use less plastics than any other hotels. In the shower room especially, instead of giving little plastic bottles of shampoo and body wash, they have them in a stone container which was really cool (I forgot to take a picture of that). Most of their products like q-tips, toothbrushes, cotton pads are all in a brown bag that is made out of linen and silk and the packaging for each item is made out of a biodegradable bag. Most of the things they made to contain things like remote controllers, or signs like “no smoking” were all made out of wood and carved by themselves. 

   

I thought it was a really cool experience and design so I looked up their hotel statement on sustainability and I found that they are really committed to sustainability and being environmentally friendly. Here are some of the things they believe in:

Overall, I really enjoyed staying at this retreat and I’m glad that there are hotels and companies out there really trying to make a difference. 

 

More info on the hotel can be found here: https://www.nakedretreats.cn/en-US/about-our-resorts/sustainability

Assignment

• Post your thoughts on the readings.
• Make a step-by-step list of what you will do in the next weeks to test your hypothesis.
• Make a list of items or machines that you will need to perform the experiments.

Cradle to Cradle: A Question of Design 

-The Western view saw nature as a dangerous, brutish force to be civilized and subdued. 

-the ocean, the air, the mountains, and the plants and animals are more vulnerable than they have been. 

-the industry today is more linear, it is focused on making a product and getting it to the customers as fast and as cheap as they can

-however, it did bring higher standard of living. 

-fundamental flaws, ignorance on carbon footprint 

-“you may be referred to as a consumer— some food, some liquids. Everything else is designed for you to throw away when you are finished with it. but where is away? away has gone away 

-human industry’s peculiar relationship in the natural world is terrible 

After reading this article, I was very intrigued by this article and I learned a lot and gained new perspective on trash and sustainability. One of the most interesting thing that I read was on consumerism. The quote, “you may be referred to as a consumer— some food, some liquids. Everything else is designed for you to throw away when you are finished with it”, really made me re-think of the term consumerism. If we only use a little bit of the materials and we throw away most of it, should we still be called consumers? Are we only half consumers then? It really made me re-think of the term and grasped my attention to the things that I buy and throw away. 

Accumulation: The Material Politics of Plastic; Plastic and the work of the biodegradable

-the amassing of plastics in seas and oceans has given rise to new ways of working through plastics, such as the recent European Union (EU) Maritime Affairs and Fisheries initiative to pay fishermen in the Mediterranean to catch plastic rather than fish (Damanaki 2011).

-Fishing for plastics also seems to address the pollution of the seas, which not only affects water quality but also impairs the lives of many marine organisms.

-Yet plastics are accumulating in many different ways, as they break down, enter food chains as plasticizers and generate alterations in the eating patterns of diverse organisms

-Plastics are composites of carbon, both in their physical form as petrochemical hydrocarbons and in the carbon energy used to manufacture them. Eight per cent of world oil production contributes to the substance and energy required to manufacture plastics

-Biodegradability has at times been a sought-after quality for plastics, as it signals the seamless elimination of this highly disposable material. Most plastics do not actually biodegrade, but instead degrade into smaller particles through chemical processes and physical weathering. 

Step-by-step list

1. Add precious plastics Wechat
2. began talking to them about building the extrusion machine and others
3. start experiencing melting plastics and doing some research about the process of an extrusion machine
4. try to replicate the final result of extrusion machine by exploring other types of presses that could be found in a house hold. 
5. explore other type of bioplastics 

In Class Experiment: 

For our in class experiment, we tried to make a plastic alternative, bio-plastic from agar agar, glycerol and water. We measured each portion with a measuring spoon and mixed it in a glass cylinder and put it on a burner to heat it up. We heat it up to about 80 degree celsius and poured it into a flat pan and wait for it to dry. While we were heating the materials up, we had to stir the whole time which was pretty tiring. 

Final Product!

After reading the this weeks reading, I realized that though bioplastics seems like it is a good alternative, however, it is still not the best. There are multiple problems that comes with bioplastic. Bioplastic production itself could result in a greater amount of pollutants, due to fertilizers and pesticides used for growing the crops and the chemical processing that needs to turn organic materials into plastic. Another hazard is that it actually needs high temperature to break down so there are only a certain amount of facilities in the world to break bioplastic down or else they could release methane when they end up in landfills deprived of oxygen. A more concerning issue is that since bioplastic is basically made out of food, there will be a fight in food production in terms of what amount of food can be eaten or made into plastic. The most important issue is money. Making bioplastics in general are a lot more expensive than making plastics out of fossil fuel. This is the ultimate reason why it is quite impossible to switch to bioplastic unless people could find a way to do it much cheaper than how plastics are made now. 

 

Final Project Proposal:

For my final project, I would like to work with something along the lines of the extrusion machine that precious plastics has made. I believe there will be a huge demand for materials like the 3D printer material and just having strings of plastics in general would be helpful. Moreover, if plastic could become an alternative to sewing, then it would reduce a large amount of plastic waste. 

Learn from China

Some local craft techniques that I have seen and known are hand sewing, wood making, and making things out of paper. What I have observed from my ayi is that she embroidered her own bags with a type of silk that looked a bit like plastic and she would sew up and down through a bag. I’m not exactly sure what she’s doing with those bags if she’s re-selling them or just it could just be her hobby. Not only my ayi, there are many Chinese locals that you could see on the street that would be constantly working on some type of craft with certain material and they would try to resell their work. I believe there are definitely techniques that could be replaced with plastics but the question is who will provide the certain type of plastics they need? For example, as we have seen, plastics could replace jewelry, clothing, and other materials. However, they are all built with machines or have gone through a process with machines that transformed those plastics into different materials. For the locals, who is going to do that for them? Are they suppose to replicate their materials to plastics themselves? What is the likelihood of them switching their material?

   

Find References

Solution 1: One popular or up-coming solution people and large drink companies have been trying to implement are paper straws instead of plastic straws. Instead of using plastic straws, the alternative is to use paper. However, there are some cons to using paper straw. From an user experience, the paper itself will start to go soft and people won’t be able to drink as well when the straw goes soft. Another issue is cutting down more trees to make the straw. Therefore even though we are using less plastic, but we’re cutting down more trees. 

From the reading “Bio-Thinking”, we can categorize paper straw as innocent-looking product threaten the environment. Though paper straw seems like a better alternative than plastic straw, it still uses large amount of water, energy and produces carbon footprint as well. Moreover, it cuts down more trees which disrupts the oxygen on earth. 

Solution 2: Another solution is a toothbrush that is made out of a Bamboo wood instead of plastic. I believe some NYU Shanghai students has created this product called Boomi and they used 100% biodegradable and compassable material for the handle of the toothbrush. In the “Bio-Thinking” article, it talked about sustainability and a key factor to remember is that a product can only be considered sustainable when they are fully compatible with nature throughout their entire lifecycle. Therefore, when I drop a Boomi toothbrush on the ground, it should be able to decompose and become soil again. 

Solution 3: Another solution that exists is rechargeable batteries. This is actually a crucial and important invention for the society. The reason is that batteries not only uses a lot of plastics to make but also it contains toxic chemicals. Therefore when they are being thrown out into the trash that may not be sorted and gets dumped into the ocean, a lot of the chemicals from the old batteries would leak into the ocean. Rechargeable batteries would allow less production of batteries and becomes more eco-friendly. As the reading “Bio-Thinking” said, “using less energy or materials means there is often a cost saving as well as an environmental benefit”. Therefore rechargeable batteries are another good solution to plastic waste.  

Project Title: RainBrella

Project Statement:

“This raincoat is made of 100% old and used umbrellas that I either found it in the trash or from lost and found. I wanted to emphasize on the positive aspect of plastic which is their ability of being waterproof. I wanted to use umbrellas to showcase that they do in fact have a second life and there really is no need to just toss them away after they are broken.”

Research:

For this project, I research mostly on how to put together a raincoat. Previously, I have learned how to used the sewing machine in a workshop with Marcela so I knew I could put together textiles but I wasn’t sure if plastics would work the same way. I’ve research a bit on plastic durability with sewing machines and it is actually possible to use a sewing machine with plastic. I first tested with some plastics bags that were ironed together and I stitched them together which worked well. I also looked up online of how to sew and make a raincoat out of plastics. I saw there were people making a raincoat out of Ikea bags which looked amazing. I wanted to recreate something like that but I didn’t want to just directly copy it so I tried to use other materials instead of Ikea bags. Then, I looked up how to make a raincoat out of plastic bags since we have an abundant amount of them in our classroom and they are great resources. I saw a Youtube video of a person using plastic bags and actually attaching each part of the coat with an iron! I was very intrigued by this technique and I never thought about it either. The only part that I think of when I use iron was just to make the plastic materials thicker but I forgot that it actually acts as a glue. So I thought about how I would actually go about attaching my pieces of umbrellas into a coat and I actually tried both of the methods and realized I liked the iron technique more. So I actually looked up and even easier way to put together a raincoat with plastics and saw this website that taught an easy way of cutting up the plastic material. 

 

Ikea bag link: https://www.instructables.com/id/Make-an-Ikea-Raincoat/

Google link for plastic bags to raincoat: how to make a raincoat out of plastic bags

Easier way to cut and attach a raincoat: https://www.prettyprudent.com/2013/01/baby-kid/how-to-sew-a-raincoat/

Significance:

The significance of this project is to demonstrate that when a plastic product or wearable to broken or “useless” it does not necessarily mean it cannot have a second life. I wanted to reuse and give a second chance for umbrellas and also continue to let them serve their purpose as a rain/water blocker. More importantly, most household who own an iron or a sewing kit are able to do this as well. All they need to do is cut up the umbrella material and attach them. This project’s significance works both as an art statement and an actual feasible product. 

Design and Production:

For the design of RainBrella, I used a total of four umbrellas to produce my product. One umbrella for the base which is the coat itself, two for two sleeves and another one for the hood. Now a days the umbrellas are more for personal use than to share with others therefore the material itself is less therefore the raincoat turned out to be quite small. 

This image above the one of the umbrellas that were flatten out and I had to fold it in half in order to make the sleeves. I tried to follow the order that I saw on the website step by step. 

Then I began to measure each sleeve by using my own sleeves from my hoodie so I could try fitting it in myself (that’s was what I was going for initially). 

Then, I cut out the sleeves accordingly and used two umbrellas for it. Then I needed to make the body  or the “coat” itself. I folded another umbrella that I had broken apart into a half and cut a half circle on top of it and cut a line in the middle of the half circle. So when I would open up this umbrella, the half circle becomes the hole for the neck and hoodie attachment and the line would break the umbrella apart so you could wear it like a raincoat instead of a poncho. 

then, I began attaching the sleeves together by ironing them and it actually takes about less than one second to iron the umbrella materials together so I had to be pretty quick and precise. I had a video for it but the upload size is too large for this website so I won’t be able to show it. But what I did was that I used baking paper to put underneath and on top of my sleeves and used an iron to go around the sleeve edges to connect them and I did that for attaching them to the coat as well. Overall, the process went fairly fast and easy but the RainBrella turned out to be a little small. 

Conclusions:

In conclusion, I really enjoyed doing this project because I felt like I was really making a statement by using old or broken umbrellas to re-create it into a raincoat. Though one thing that I would like to focus more on next time is the production of the raincoat. I had no prior experience with putting clothes together or even in fashion studies itself. Therefore it was actually quite a challenge for me when I heard we had to create a wearable for this project. Something that I would focus a bit more on would be measuring the actual size of the model and try to make it possible for everyone to wear. Moreover, the ironing skills were also a bit rough and I actually didn’t do a test try for the iron since I had a limited amount of umbrellas. There were a lot of things that I would focus on again if I had another try and more time to do it but I am happy with what I have created and through this process I really enjoyed the real process of “recycling” plastic waste. 

Here is a picture of my model wearing my project!

 

 

 

For this midterm project, I decided to create a raincoat made out of 100% umbrella material. When I was struggling to find a wearable project to focus on, I tried to look at some inspirations online that maybe I will be able to do. However, when Marcela mentioned that it could also be an art statement as well, I started thinking more about an abstract piece. 

When I was think of what to create, I realized that I wanted to focus on the strength of plastic. Though I know how badly plastics are harming this planet, I also knew that plastic was created for a reason. Qualities like strength, flexibility, durability, and being waterproof are just some of the strong aspect of plastic. Therefore, I wanted to focus on these strengths and demonstrate some positive aspects of plastic. 

I was going through some inspirations on pintrest, google images, and google search and I came across a raincoat that was made out of ikea bags. So I thought to myself, one of the strongest quality of plastic is that it is waterproof.  Therefore, I wanted to make a wearable out of plastic that can be able to showcase its waterproof quality so I decided to make a raincoat. 

Originally, I wanted to create a raincoat made out of plastic bags and while I was talking to Ben about the idea, he suggested for me to use a material that could really make a kind of statement. So I thought about it and realized that umbrellas are also made out of plastics and they have the same purpose as well. And normally when umbrella are broken, the plastic piece are still usable but people just throw them out. So I wanted to used umbrella materials to create a raincoat out of it. 

For the midterm project, I would like to create watch bands for Apple watch. When I first heard the criteria for the midterm assignment that we had to create a wearable, I was a bit stuck at first. I started looking at some wearables that I wear daily and wearing a watch is one of them. I have a couple of watches and one that I really like is my Apple watch. I like Apple watch because it is very versatile and useful for fitness and one of their cool aspect is their interchangeable watch bands. I started looking up online for DIY videos of apple watch bands and what kinds of materials to make it out of. I saw a video that used old boxer elastic bands that goes around the waist and I wanted to try it but since this project needed to include plastic, I couldn’t. Then in class, we started ironing plastic bags together and through this process, I realized that using 3-4 plastics bags ironed together could be a good choice. They are hard and stable while bendable at the same time. Therefore, I used my own Apple watch as a size guidance and cut around the plastic bags. However, another issue occurred, I won’t be able to attach the Apple watch bands without the connectors and I could only buy them online. As the guideline of this midterm project, I cannot purchase any material to make my project therefore I wouldn’t be able to do this anymore. 

As I would looking through other projects made out of plastic, I thought about making a raincoat with plastic and go forth with that idea. 

Video Campaign for NYU trash sorting

For the video campaign, my group got together and decided to interview one of the manager from the Lujiazui property sanitation department. Before that, we were really just walking around campus filming some trashcans and what we have observed. What was interesting was the 7th floor of the AB but we decided not to include it in the video due to the flow of it. The 7th floor, also known as the science floor has many labs for biology, physics, chemistry and more. In those labs, they consist many chemicals and bio-hazardous things that needs to be disposed correctly. Therefore, in the lab, there is a bio-hazard waste bin that you don’t see anywhere else on campus. But the question is, what if students on other floors wants to throw out batteries or lightbulbs and the labs are locked? Where would students throw them? Some suggestions would be actually going down to the B2 and just sort it there because they have all the bins available and it would save the ayis some time to sort if you just threw it in the normal trash.  

After walking around the campus for a bit, we decided to interview someone with real knowledge about trash waste on this campus. I actually knew exactly who to ask because of my previous project in another class so I suggested we go talk to the property management. We wrote down some questions like how much residual, recyclable, and wet waste does NYU Shanghai produce? Also, what are the ayis work time and schedule. We just wanted to create some hard facts that we can inform the community so we could cut down our waste as well as the ayis time of sorting our incorrectly sorted trash. 

Below is our visual representations of the campaign:

Link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gYw1JdQzpE

What we did in class/ ironing notes

In class on Wednesday 10/9, we learned how to use an iron to melt plastic bags. I teamed up with Ben and melted two plastics bags into one and created a little pouch.

We also took some notes for future reference when we use the iron for our project. 

-4 layers of melting: 4 pass through with 160 degree celsius 

-Lower the temperature next time (the temperature was a bit high and melted too much of the plastic)

-Always keep the iron moving then ironing instead of just placing it on the plastic (because it will melt too much)

-Even though the temperature setting was the same for the iron, the longer the iron was on, the hotter it was getting. 

The Trash Map

Through out the week, we walked around campus to track the trash route and found some interesting facts. There are actually two companies that sorts trash in the NYU Shanghai academic building. One is responsible for the sorting of 10F-15F and they cater more towards professors and staffs of NYU Shanghai since most of the are located on those floors. They do not do any sorting of trash but rather they only take out the trash and place them in B2. Meanwhile, another company, which we see more often with the cream colored shirts and pants constantly cleaning the bathrooms are responsible for floors 9F-B2. The ayis collect trash and place them in B2 as well for the final sorting. There will be two to three ayis at B2 who will sort the trash starting from 2pm to around 4pm and then they will sort another round of trash from 6pm to 8pm. 

Sproutworks on the other hand, do not work with any of the trash sorting companies in the academic building but rather they have their own system. They take care of their own trash in the cafe and B1 cafeteria which is why we see different types of trashcans in those areas. They do their own sorting of trash but mostly following the Shanghai trash regulation rules. 

 

Below is a trash map my group and I have created to represent the trash route at NYU Shanghai:

 

The Art Installation

The art installation was what I believe a huge success for our group due to our great collaborative work and creative minds. Thankfully, we had a good amount of plastic waste to create our art installation and the final result was amazing. Initially, we were struggling to come up with an idea because normally plastic trash waste isn’t someones medium to create art with. However, since our purpose was to raise awareness of the plastic waste, I thought about creating a structure of a person with plastic trash in its stomach. This idea was also connected to the movie we watched, “Bag It” in the beginning of our course which talked about humans and animals actually consuming either plastic chemicals, particles or plastic itself without knowing it. 

We looked around the AB for some more material then Eva brought out a round spinning table that you would normally see in a Chinese restaurant that sets at the center of the table and you could spin it around to get the food you want. So we transformed our idea into a dinning table with food that are created all by plastic trash. We had sushi made out of styrofoams, noodles made out of plastic bags, along with table decorations made from all types of plastic.  

We decided to locate our art installation in the cafeteria near the trash sorting bins because there is high traffic around that area and more people would be able to see it. We also wrote slogans like “You are trash”, “我不吃塑” which means I do not eat plastic in English but in Chinese it also means I’m a vegetarian since the word 塑 and 素 are pronounced the same way. We hope that by having this installation next to the trash bins we are able to raise awareness on plastic waste disposal especially with the take out boxes and just to set out a reminder for people to always reduce, reuse, and recycle.