Joyce

⚠️This is the old version that I could not find but now I find it. You can just skip it and scroll down.

During the class, I didn’t really start the experiment, since the experiment needs the mold so I spent most of my time doing the mold. Special thanks to Marcela and Andy, I could not finish the mold with their help.

So first I learned from the video of making recycled paper and drew a draft. Andy told me that we could simply make the mold by cutting by ourselves, we chose thinner woods and cut them into 30cms/27cms long pieces. After finishing the frame of the mold, what net I should use became a problem. The window screen net I have is too big to filter the paper thick liquid. Marcela helped me find some left materials of the trash fashion show, which looks like nylon net and water can go through it. Therefore, after using the big staple stapling the net on the frame, the basic mold was finished. There is still a problem: the surface of the net is even, so the paper might not be flat enough. I will test later and update the result of my experiment.

 

What’s more, for the thought of cooperating with the campus store, I went to ask for the sales of notebooks. The worker there told me that they don’t have a record of how many books they sell every week/month (maybe they just don’t want to tell me 🙁 ) but it is definitely not a small number.

Update:

I FAILED. 

I know that usually, the experiment won’t succeed for one time but I really didn’t expect it to be that hard.

Ingredients:

Paper (mostly from paper shedder)

A lot of water

Tools:

Mold

Big Plastic Container

Sponge

Blender

Iron

Gloves

Cloth

Here is the video of my main experiment process. (If watching the video is too boring  please listen to this)

The main process:

cutting paper – put them into the blender – add water (the first time there is too little water so I added twice) – pour the thick liquid into the container – put the mold into the liquid and get a layer – dry – dry- dry- take the paper off – dry – you got it!

  

During the experiment, I met a few challenges. The first one is to choose the best mode from the blender… I know this sounds a little silly but it is really important. At first, I chose the “fast soybean milk” mode, but it is heating, and the blending process is not successive, with vapor coming out and the whole machine is shaking. Later I switch to “juice” model  and “icy smoothie”, both of them work pretty well. 

Another one is which side to use of the mold: I need to put the one with the net below and the side with net up, and I mixed it several times. Therefore when trying to peel it down, it is hard for me. I think another key element is the unevenness of the net. I am going to talk about it in future improvements in the coming two (1.5)  weeks.

Future improvements:

1. The net is not working well. I am buying a better piece of net from Taobao, and I will test again if that works better.

2. I am also buying a better sponge, the one that can absorb water rather than for cleaning. I will buy a big towel again to help absorb water

3. When I first get the thick liquid layer out of the container, it was a little sticky, so I thought that I might have to add more water next time.  But when I was drying it, it took me so long and there was too much water. Hence, the critical problem so far is to find the balance of water.

4. It takes toooooo long… This piece of paper cost me more than 4 hours. I think with practice I can reduce it to around 1 hour but it is still really long. Remaking is not an easy thing.

 

      

By Joyce Zheng

Final Project: Remade Paper 

Inspirations

I can often see my friends complaining in social media that they are producing “academic trash” every day. I see piles of paper go to the professor’s paper box which collects essays, but then where the paper go? Probably a real trash bin. What’s more, Tracey once posted a message in the group chat says if anyone wants the poster as scratch paper. Countless posters are hung on the whiteboard and sometimes they just fall and frighten me. I learned the basic knowledge of making paper (Cai Lun) when I was in primary school, and I started to think if I can do something about paper for my final project.

I looked up some researches and reports online about the phenomenon of paper waste. From “Paper Steps on Campus”, “Today in the United States only 50% of office paper is recovered for recycling. The majority of the rest is lost to landfills or incinerators.” Going back to the guest lecture from Mr.Brubaker and the known pollution influence of incinerators, paper can also be regarded as a significant polluting source. Besides, this passage argues that “47% of campuses surveyed have set goals to improve purchasing environmentally sound goods. Environmentally-conscious purchasing can result in less waste, increased cost-saving measures, energy conservation resulting in positive climate change, and overall awareness on campus of the necessity to conserve and reduce.” The article raises examples of creating visual installation by collecting printed but not taken away paper on the campus to remind people of their waste on paper, and so on. I went to the campus store to ask how many notebooks they sell every week/month, they didn’t give me a specific number, but “pretty much”. Bioenergy Consult also provides different methods of reusing paper, including making your subscription digital and double-sided printing, which I think is feasible inside a college (if we don’t consider the energy-use on your digital devices). In conclusion, paper waste is a serious thing around the world, and it cannot be ignored inside colleges as well. 

Experiments

For the specific process of remaking paper, I first go to Youtube to see if there’s any tutorial. The videos help me a lot and are one of my biggest inspirations. Following the tutorial, I made two deckles (the first one does not work well because it is too big) with Marcela and Andy’s help. I met a few challenges when making the deckle, including the size of it and also the material selection of the filter screen. 

I mainly had 3 big experiments on the making of paper. For the first experiment, I tried to see if I can make paper out of printed paper and I recorded most parts of my process in a video.

Check the first experiment and video

For the second experiment, I remade a deckle and tested the application of different pigments. I added around 1 drop of violet pigment into the blender and repeat the experiment process in experiment 1. 

Check the second experiment  

So far, I was not satisfied with what I got through the two experiments. For the final experiment, I took suggestions from Marcela and Ben to use the heat press to dry my paper and it worked pretty well. I also used a pile of posters of a certain color to test if it can give the remade paper a certain color and added leaves as decorations into the paper.

Check the third experiment 

For the final product, after a long time (about 3 days) of drying and flattening in a magazine, I got the final product pretty successfully. The texture on it and the touch are pretty good despite some fissure on the paper caused by the drying process. And due to limitation of time, I cannot make enough pieces of paper that can form a notebook: but they do work well as postcards. Sopia suggested to me that I could make a journal out of this kind of paper which would be amazing, which is also good advice. 

                

Implementation and Significance

Regarding how the project can be implemented in Shanghai or any other place, it is easy to do as long as you follow the tutorial. Personally speaking, using an old photo frame would be much easier to implement than making a deckle than yourself since not everyone has the tools that we have in the wood lab. All you need for the experiment are shredder (if you don’t have, just cut the paper into pieces as small as possible), the deckle (photo frame would work well), blender, drying tool (towel, sponge) and water. This can be easily done at home. However, concerning the fact that you don’t have that much waste paper in your home, it will be more feasible at schools and offices. I am not sure if I make good pieces of paper out of old paper can educate people and raise awareness of environmental issues in what way, but when remaking paper, I would assume that people will think “oh old paper can function and be reused in this way…” and then, maybe, reflecting on their use of paper. I am thinking about printing words like “this used to be 4 posters, and they are wasted” on the paper I made so that people who use them are aware of its origin and the environmental problem paper has brought.

Conclusion

In my first week response, I said: “But the plastic pollution is a global issue, and all the human beings who have used plastic should be responsible. (Though I don’t know what we should do either :p).” I still – somehow don’t know what we should do, but no matter for the art installation I have done for my midterm project or the experiment process I do for my final project, they function as a tool to raise people’s awareness and seek a new way to recycle/reuse existing materials. People may not know what they are doing, but should be on the way to explore what they should do. Going back to the project, to be honest, I am a little surprised by the final paper I got, they are in pretty good quality and I never thought that I can turn a few old posters into a piece of paper like this. 

There are further improvements can be done as well. An IMA professor (Prof. Minsky?) suggests to me that I can do more research on fiber: can I remake something else?  From Wikipedia, “some people and groups advocate using field crop fiber or agricultural residues instead of wood fiber as being more sustainable”, and carbohydrates including cellulose and hemicellulose, lignin, proteins, SiO2 are all ingredients that can be used in pulping. Therefore, testing a new recipe for making paper is feasible. The problem is since the paper is a huge consumption, the current technology to produce paper is possibly the one with the lowest cost. 

About raising the awareness part as I have mentioned, I once considered using all the waste paper to make an installation by the technique I found from Ten Thousand Villages. The website provides many fantastic ideas about how to deal with waste paper.  However, since it is a commercial product, I didn’t find a tutorial and go back to remade paper. But it is a good direction for remaking paper. Eva also suggested that I should try to remake the remade paper which is an amazing idea, but since what I got before the remade paper is just the thing inside the blender with more water, I think it will not be a problem to remake from remade paper. 

 

The class shows me so many aspects that I will never know living inside the “beautiful” and “clean” city or academic building. The waste we produce every day is beyond my imagination, and though I have heard of the serious pollution in China brought by the burning of straw, how we treat those trash still shocks me. We cannot launch an initiative globally, but we can have campaign inside the school, and collect useful trash like paper/plastic we make every day, use our bottles instead of plastic bottles, and think about what we can do with the left plastic treasure. 

At the end of the end, sincere thanks to everyone who has helped me during the class 😀

 

For today’s class, I remade and reremade the deckle due to the size limit of the water container. What goes beyond my expectation is the metal net doesn’t work well — it was sent to me as a roll so it is even more uneven than the nylon net. Therefore I remade the deckle with nylon net. 

When making the thick liquid, I added some purple pigments in it to experiment. First I poured the water to the line near 1400, but after blending the paper and water together, the volume went down and the thicker liquid was too thick, so I added more water to 1400ml again. The first piece of paper I filtered was super good, however, it was still too wet and easy to be broken when I tried to peel it off. But the new towel and sponge worked pretty well and I got the first paper kind of perfect (despite the leftovers in the marginal area and I am always taking small pieces off it…). But when I tried to make the third piece, it is too broken. I think it might be because the net is not clean enough/ the thick liquid in the container already starts to subside. 

Below the order of the picture is mainly the steps.

a brand new deckle! (though I recut it later…) – paper shredders – 1400ml – water amount in the container – toooo thick – more water to 1400ml again – ✅- almost perfect first paper – leftovers on margins – terrible third paper

 

 

For the following days, I am going to test different kinds of paper: 

1. See if the color on the original paper will make a difference on the remade paper
2. If not, maybe use pigments
3. Add different things on the paper, e.g. leaves, and see if I can print something on the paper produced (like in the tutorial video)
4. If enough paper, see the make of notebooks/postcards
5. Try to see if I can make a certain kind of material that can be applied in other use with remade paper

 

Update:

After around 6 hours I go to check my paper. It is still not fully dry but can be peeled off pretty easily. I also found that after using the iron to dry it, the color will get lighter (not because it is drying but almost white in fig.3). Though it is still broken, the quality of the two full paper is pretty well in general.

 

For the class on Wednesday, I spent most of my time doing my mold since without the mold I cannot do the following experiment. Special thanks to Marcela and Andy who helped me so much during the making process, without them, I cannot make the mold at all.

So at first Andy and I drew a draft of the frame of the mold. We basically follow the mold making from a Youtube video. We went to the wood lab and decided to make it by hand. We chose some thinker wood pieces, cut them into the length of 30/27 cms and pin them together. One of the most difficult things I have met is the use of the net: it is even more important than the frame. At first, I wanted to use the window screen net from home, but it is too big and thick liquid could pass it. Marcela advised me to use the leftover materials from the trash fashion show and it worked pretty well. With Marcela’s help, I stapled the net on the frame, and the final mold looked pretty well. The potential problem is that since the net is soft and easy to change its shape, the surface of the net is uneven, which may lead to the problem that the paper is not flat. I will do the experiment later and see how it goes. 

 

Update:

I failed but I still got some paper 🙂 

I recorded the main making process of making the paper and the video is below. If the video is too boring/having a better feeling watching the video please listen to music.

 

 

 

A few pictures of the final product/leftovers:

      

 

Challenges:

During the making process, I have met some challenges. The first one is which mode to use of the blender. I know this sounds a little silly but it matters. At first, I used the “Rapid soya-bean milk” mode, and it was HEATING. The heating costs time and the vapor also worsen the making process. Later I figured out that the “juice” or “icy smoothie” mode works better since it neither heat nor requires a long time. The juice mode works especially well. 

Another challenge is to use which side to filter. Actually, it is easy as long as you follow the tutorial but I messed it up a few times. The frame with net should be put above another frame, with the net between them. The mistake made me repeat the filter process, which may also be a reason why my final product is not as good as I have imagined. 

 

Future improvements:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. As the pictures above have shown, the uneven surface does cause a lot of problems. The wet paper is too easy to break or stick together, especially the marginal area. I am going to buy a new net from Taobao and remake the mold, and experiment again to see if it works. Also during this experiment, I spent too much time on drying, therefore I also buy some new sponge (the one designed for absorbing water, since the previous one is more like a cleaning sponge) and towels that can absorb water well. 
2. The critical problem I have met is the amount of water. Most tutorial videos I have watched don’t give a specific amount of water. When pouring the thick liquid out of the blender I thought there was too little water since the liquid is too thick — it looks like black sesame paste… However, when I started to dry, I feel there was too much water in the paper. I am not sure if this has to do with the uneven net surface or not, but it does bother a lot and prevents me from having a healthy piece of paper. 
3. Before the experiment, since I once wanted to build a connection between our campus store and the remaking paper inside the academic building, I went to the campus store and asked them how many notebooks they are selling every week/month. The worker there said they don’t know the actual number (maybe they just don’t want to tell me 🙁 ) but it was a lot. But making one piece of paper in the experiment took me more than 4 hours. I told myself it would be slow but 4 hours is still far longer than my expectation. I think with practice I might shrink the time to around 1 hour but it is still too long. I don’t know if I can really make products through this. 

 

Updaate:

I bought the third kind of material I am using for the deckle… It is still too soft for the deckle mold. I am buying the stainless steel net and see if it works.

This material (polyamide fabric) is still too soft and will fall down naturally.

 

Updaaate:

My friend gives me a lot of paper… The source part of my hypothesis of building a cycle inside the school works now. Hope the bridge works too.

 

 

Reading Response

I have learned about the industrial revolution everywhere since a very young age – It leads human beings to walk into a brand new era, it increased people’s standards of living and the development speed boomed. I know that London is called the foggy city is because of the serious pollution once brought by the industrial revolution. However, I have never thought that the negative industrial revolution brought can last so long and rooted so deep. According to William McDonough & Michael Braungart, “industrialists wanted to make products as efficiently as possible and to get the greatest volume of goods to the largest number of people” (21). This kind of thinking leads to two results, while the first one is those technical developments centered on increasing “power, accuracy, economy, system, continuity, speed”, and the second one is that “Neither the health of natural systems, nor an awareness of their delicacy, complexity, and interconnectedness, have been part of the industrial design agenda” (26). The complete and utter design error leads to our terrible environment today. The cradle-to-grave model impressed me deeply since I am one of the masses who contribute to this. I am used to buying clothes from shops like H&M, where the clothes can usually be worn for one season, and next year it will be out of fashion then never get worn or be thrown away. I also often buy something online which is useless and meaningless – I just buy them for fun, they may even be crude products. After I throw them into the trash bin, they just disappear, as McDonough and Braungart have said, “Away” does not really exist, “Away” has gone away. Maybe they have already become a piece of microplastic floating in the ocean as Accumulation: The Material Politics of Plastic has pointed out. 

To solve the problem, Cradle to Cradle suggests us to take action right now so we won’t keep harming our environment and future generations. “You can continue to be engaged in that strategy of tragedy, or you can design and implement a strategy of change” (44). In Accumulation, the authors provide us with a few feasible ways and examples of people reusing plastic/ using new materials instead of normal plastic. “For example, the amassing of plastics in seas and oceans has given rise to new ways of working through plastics, such as EU pay fishermen in the Mediterranean to catch plastic, rather than fish” (208). 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. 

Therefore, along with government regulations, there are also other people putting the effort into figuring out the best way to reduce plastic pollution. In my perspective, one of the biggest problems of human beings is that most of us have thought of Anthropocene: we don’t consider what will be brought to the environment when producing, and Marx excluded the non-human from his definition of human labor (215). However, now most proposals on solving the plastic problems focus on non-human labor. 

 

Rather than having crude oil as their primary substrate, biodegradable plastics are usually made from starch and cellulose – what otherwise is referred to as ‘renewable’ materials. Since these materials are derived from plants, and maybe composted or degraded through anaerobic digestion rather than put into landfill, they are seen as a possible way to address the accumulation of plastics in environments (Song et al. 2009: 2127).  

 

Same as what we do in class, this article raises the idea of making biodegradable plastic by using natural things (e.g. starch). What’s more, Murakami and Kieren Jones, develop their project as a response to the increasing amounts of plastic found in the seas and at the littoral margins. The project participants have developed a ‘nurdler’ device, a ‘sluice-like contraption’ for collecting and sorting plastic debris and microplastic pellets from the ocean, just like what we do in class (220). However, this might lead to danger. We have bacteria when creating bioplastic from tea and sugar, and they are killed because of vinegar, what if those bacteria evolves? In Accumulation, they tell a story of bacterial run amok in London, causing the whole city degrading. But so far everything about bioplastic seems to be under control – at least these material residues also provide fodder for rethinking the trajectory of our material politics, outside the closed loop of renewed capital, to a more extensive understanding of and speculative approach to the complex and collective carbon work that emerges from our lived plastic materialities (224). 

 

Final Plan

 

So according to this map that I drew my plan will mainly be the following steps…

1. Collecting – A4 paper, posters, other paper-related materials
2. Making – use the materials I have collected to remake new papers （and when blending them, the time will decide how it looks, and if there remain any patterns or not)
3. Application – different applications, including souvenirs, notebooks, printing paper, and some planning application: usable materials (e.g. for laser cut), waimai box, reusable flower pot…

Following these 3 steps, I will test my hypothesis:

 By remaking paper, it will gradually build a circle of paper using inside the school, as well as contributing to other areas that can use remade materials. 

A list of items/machines I need:

1. paperssssssss
2. blender
3. mold (I think I am going to use laser cut or the digital fabrication machine) 
   

   Digital Fabrication Machine will be a good choice for me to make the mold

    

4. heater/dryer/iron
5. sponse&bath towel&huge paper towel (maybe the kind we use in the toilet)
6. windowscreen
7. cooking spray

 

Why I include a waimai box in my project applications is that when I ordered a salad waimai, the container they use is special. It is soft, proteiform, and not water-proof. I examined it and found it pretty interesting, but with the time goes the sauce in salad almost soaked through the box. There is a recyclable sign at the cover of the box, but personally speaking, I don’t think the dirty box can be recycled again – it is also difficult to be cleaned. This box provides me with some inspiration, but I don’t feel like it is truly a successful example. 

 

 

 

 

Workshop Reflection

Recipe (Ingredients):

1. 4 gram Agar Agar
2. 2.5 ml Glycerol
3. 420 ml Water 

Our group’s work is to make Agar bioplastic. Our ingredients include Agar-Agar, glycerol, and water. The process of mixing them is easy, however, we failed to get the result till the end of the class since heating the mixture to 95 degrees celsius (Instructions: step two: put the pot on the stove and heat the mixture to 95 degrees or to just below boiling. Keep stirring the whole time) causes too long. Our final temperature reaches around 73 degrees, and there was already some solid, but humid and soft things coming out. We also need to keep stirring to make sure there are no bubbles in the liquid. The process of making the bioplastic material needs waiting, and the cost of time is truly high. Indeed, as Biomimicry has argued, “nature’s solutions are more efficient, more sustainable, and create no waste”.

 

 

 

 

 

What’s more, since all the materials come from nature itself, and the Agar bioplastic we create can be fully degraded, it is proved that “nature can serve both as a source of inspiration and a source of materials and processes that we can use and emulate to create better more sustainable solutions”. However, according to The truth about plastics, “while bioplastics are generally considered to be more eco-friendly than traditional plastics, a 2010 study from the University of Pittsburgh found that wasn’t necessarily true when the materials’ life cycles were taken into consideration”. The creation of the bioplastic costs too long, and the final product, the agar bioplastic does not seem to be something that can last very long either. I guess that’s also why bioplastic is still under the stage of discovery, but not to production, or use in our daily lives. 

Step three:

Pour liquid onto a flat surface or mold… Let dry for 1-2 days, depending on temperature and humidity levels. 

Week 11 update experiment result: In the class the following week, we received our final agar plastic. Because there was too much water in one container last week, we split them into two containers. However, the one with more shallow water surface produces less bio-plastic and it is too soft that it breaks when we tried to take it down. Another one tends to be much stronger, hard to tear. I think when doing the experiment, two factors are that we need to really boil it, at least to 95 degrees, and we cannot expect too little amount of ingredients to produce solid plastic. Therefore, plenty of raw materials is especially important.

 

 

 

Final proposal

Questions:

What do I think I can do/invent to improve Shanghai (the range can be smaller, e.g. our school building) trash sorting/city developing? 

 

1.Bio-plastic for the plastic bags in the trash bin in the subway station and other places, especially for household trash (but the cost is too high)

Why this: After Shanghai has published its trash sorting policy, in most neighborhoods household trash cannot be thrown away with the plastic bag. But for most families household trash are wet, dirty and with a bad smell, so it is hard to deal with it. Some people can take trash within the container and pour them into the trash bin, but it is not feasible for people who go to work every day. The related department said they have thought about using degradable plastic bags, but those bags can only be degraded under certain conditions and usually takes 1-2 weeks, therefore it cannot be mixed with the household trash, and the cost of degradable plastic is also too high. 

 

 

 

A report of 破袋(not using the plastic bag) for household trash

where household trash goes

About household trash in Shanghai

What we need: a kind of bio-plastic that is durable (so it won’t break) but also easily degradable, while the cost is low enough, which means the ingredients need to be cheap. If the degradable is hard to achieve, we can only consider the situation when landfilling household trash.

Possible materials: Agar bioplastic – simmered

 

2. Using recycled paper to make a notebook/print/souvenir/decoration (at NYU Shanghai store or bigger range and when people finish the notebook they can use the old one to change for a new one with a discount, also provide some services like having an e-document for the notebook)

Why this: Everyday there is so much wasted paper (academical trash) being produced inside the ab and students like purchasing notebooks from the campus store. If we build a circle between these two, the circle will save a large amount of paper. 

remaking paper DIY

What we need: used paper, board (to place paper pulp)

Week 11 update: I decided to take this one as I am going to do in the following weeks.

Hypothesis: By remaking paper, it will gradually build a circle of paper using inside the school, as well as contributing to other areas that can use remade materials (not 100% achievable but I will test). 

 

3. Home-made clay/ beer spent grain composite / Cork | agar – starch Cor03 to make degradable flower pot that can truly grow plants, which can replace the plastic pots on the street. 

 

 

Why this: To avoid the use of one-time plastic, and help the flower grows better

What we need: the ingredients from the recipe

 

Reflection 

The workshop about remaking plastic was really amazing. When watching the advertising video about Precious Plastics Shanghai, I was super happy and excited seeing a group of people doing such interesting and meaningful things by themselves and wanted to participate in it. I am also surprised by the plastic products they made since they look so beautiful, just like marvel and are even more colorful. Remaking plastic is great, but when watching the video they made and heard Adele mentioned that she took remaking plastic as her full-time job, I became curious about how the group of people from Xinchejian can make a living on this and spread the ideas to the people, to the government. 

 

Plastic products from Precious Plastic Shanghai

 

Process of making plastic products during the workshop

 

According to “Multiple-Helix Collaboration for the Development of a Circular Economy”, NGOs are becoming more and more important since they support important aspects of development in industry and society at large, such as activities to protect the environment or support business development in different sectors. After looking through Precious Plastics Shanghai’s Instagram account and how they remade plastic in the workshop, I get some basic concepts on how they work. As an NGO based in Shanghai, there are many critical stakeholders in the company, such as non-profit-leaders, employees and universities. Since Adele mentioned that they are going to hold activities and lectures in Chengdu to talk about precious plastic for future plans, and they are having activities in our school and other colleges, companies as well, I simply assume that they have already been able to make a living on this, which is a really big step on contributing to the development of remaking plastic. During the talk, Adeld also said they post more information on We Chat instead of Media platforms like Instagram since most Chinese people are used to We Chat. This also corresponds to the localization of the platform mentioned in Social Innovation in China, as well as the funny detail is shown in the video that a nice, friendly grandma from Shanghai appreciated what Precious Plastic Shanghai is devoted to. The precious plastic organizations’ global map shows that these organizations work in an “affiliation” model (pp.28), which contributes to the development of organizations themselves. 

 

However, as Carol CHyaucai has pointed out, “People treat every part of the manufacturing process like art, but it’s actually science. The process goes by many factories, if there’s not a set method and everyone does it by their feelings, products come out all different. That infrastructure isn’t there so it’s a lot of little battles. (pp.16)” To achieve further success in recycling/ upcycling plastic, the process also needs other important rules. Mats Larsson argues that governments play a critical role in the development of circular economy since they are usually “providers of financing for research and in their capacity as customers in the early stages of development”. Additionally, “unlike companies or private investors, governments can take a long-term view of investments, investing in technologies, systems, and methods that are important for the development of society at a stage when these technologies are not cost-effective or competitive enough to meet investor criteria for sales and return on investment”. This kind of long-term perspective is especially important when solving the issue of plastic because we all know that plastic won’t disappear in the following hundreds of years and its pollution will continue. Governments also supply the basic financing for research, education, and training, which are also important factors in spreading knowledge during generations and in space. Along with the government, there are also significant roles like the powerful community of consumers and Buyers in the public sector. Without large numbers of consumers or procurement officers at companies that put circularity ahead of other criteria, it will be difficult for the circular economy and companies with offerings based on circular flows to grow. But this dilemma can be saved by the public sector, who are easier to reach and their choices can to a large extent be influenced through political decisions. To develop a circular economy, particularly in the solve of plastic (pollution) issue, we really need the cooperation from all perspectives and Precious Plastic offer great and brand new solutions on solving it.

 

Field Trip Documentation

 

“Do you hate human now?”

“Even more than before.”

 

The strongest feeling I had after cleaning was I will NEVER throw away any trash outside of the trash bin. When I first entered the park I was happy and optimistic that the environment here seems to be super nice — what cleaning do we need to do? It is even cleaner than my room. However, my black trousers turn into greyish black when I finish the cleaning. It is indeed beach cleaning, where the beach is made up of microplastic, shoes, bottles, clothes, big plastic pieces, condoms, lighters, everything that you can imagine. When cleaning, an old couple asked me is this trash from the ocean, I said I am not sure but I think so. They then asked me if we can clean all the trash, I shook my head and smiled bitterly.

 

How could that be possible? In less than two hours, we have collected more than 30 kilos of trash, but it is just the tip of the iceberg. I climbed out of the sea wall, seeing floating plastics just near the shore. All the gaps among the walls are filled with different types of trash, flowers and plants grow among the trash and then covered by the growing amount of trash. I wanted to take a picture of the wildflowers, but I cannot get rid of any plastic trash since the flower is rooted in the trash.

 

 

When I and Kimmy were squatting and picking up trash, a lot of people passed by. Most of them were primary school students, and the three words they repeated most often were “捡垃圾”, which means picking up trash. However, when adults passed by, some of them would come and have a close look at what we are picking and asked what we were doing. I know that my knowledge about recycling and environmental protection was almost 0 when I was a primary school, even as a middle school student. I saw the students having different varieties of activities today in the park, so is it possible to hold activities about trash sorting for them, or bringing in the Picking up Trash Run into the school? We are able to distinguish different kinds of trash and contribute to cleaning up a little today, but as the TED talk has shown, to solve the plastic pollution better, we need cooperation globally, and this is also an issue that multiple generations will face, that needs the contribution from those primary school students.

 

Learn from China

As a country with a huge population, Chinese people have been using different kinds of local materials, including different minerals: iron, nonferrous metals, coal, petroleum, and other chemical elements. Local craft techniques are mainly divided in two aspects, the first one is in the art area, there are painting, silk, paper-cut, embroidery, folk toys, etc, while another is in the industry field, where plastic is more widely used. In electrical and electronic industries, plastics are used as insulating materials instead of wood. In the engineering industry, plastic is a great replication of metals when making gears, bearings and many other parts. In the construction industry for doors and windows, stair railing, floor tile, ceiling, insulation board, downspouts, decorative board, and sanitary ware. In the defense industry, whether conventional weapons, aircraft, ships, rockets, missiles, satellites and other fields, plastic is essential materials that can replicate all kinds of other materials. 

Kongming Lantern

 

 

 

Finding References

 

-Solution 1: Plastic bottles for different design

Since not all the plastic bottles have a chance to be recycled and made into reusable micro pieces, reuse them in life as a long-term thing is a good way. There are different ways of reusing them in our daily lives, such as hanging herb baskets, jewelry towers, bird feeders, zipper case and so on. These designs follow the rules of cyclic mined, also utility since they can be kept for a long time. 

                

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

-Solution 2: Glass/thick bottles/tires for furniture

Glass bottles or thicker plastic bottles, as well as old tires,  can also be turned into parts of your furniture. Easily to be broken outdoors, they can be kept perfectly indoors and work as good-looking decorations in your room, while useful as well. You can even put some plants inside the bottle at the same time. These products follow the cyclic mined rule since the furniture can be recycled for even the second or more times. 

 

 

-Solution 3: Waste PVC as plant-pot

PVC is a plastic that cannot really be remade since when it is burnt it will release toxic fumes, dioxins, and hazardous chlorine gas. Therefore, use the original PVC pipe without burning or other dangerous processing is the best way to reuse PVC pipes. Since PVC is hard to degrade and is water-proof, its durability and efficiency can be guaranteed using as a plant-pot.

 

 

References:

http://www.sohu.com/a/120888600_390065

DIY Projects You Can Make With Humble Plastic Bottles

https://www.goodairgeeks.com/ideas-for-earth-day-projects/

17 Surprisingly Useful Things You Can Do with a Plastic Bottle

https://memes.com/incredibly-useful-things-you-had-no-idea-you-could-make-out-of-an-empty-plastic-bottle4

 

By Joyce Zheng

 

 

PROJECT TITLE: Ocean Plastic Cage 

 

              

PROJECT STATEMENT:                                                   

From the surface to the depths of the ocean — it is plastic. Plastic surrounds the dolphins and turns them into white foams, under the iceberg is the graveyard of plastic and whales, while fish nets twine their bodies, leaving no place for them to breathe. When will they all become transparent and escape from the plastic cage?

 

RESEARCH

I have conducted a few research in the art area. At first, I was looking through the “trash accessories”, like the pictures I show below. 

Necklace of plastic, decorated with large flowers and leaves (2)

 

 

 

 

Source: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/211458144988843963/

 

   

 

These trash accessories look great, and inspired by the first necklace, I decided to use laser cut to create transparent ocean animals as components in my accessories. But I want to use more plastic in my project, so the materials in these accessories don’t match mine. What’s more, they look more like trash instead of accessories. How to transform trash into something that doesn’t look trash proves to be a problem. So I did some research on contemporary jewelry, also my jewelry.

 

 

Source: http://lucyclaregibson.com/jewellery  

Contemporary Gold And Silver Earrings

My Accessories

 

From the beginning of the design, I have decided to make a set of accessories. But I want them to be easy to wear, so I chose the type of metal chains that people will use in daily lives as the frame. But for the bracelet, inspired by a kind of bracelet that was popular in China, I tried to use the cables as the frame. Though finally, the bracelet doesn’t match the earrings and necklace, my initial aim was to make the kinds of materials to be as variable as possible.

 

Source

 

 

SIGNIFICANCE                     

Although the style of the necklace is a bit exaggerated, it does not fit well with daily collocation, as wearable accessories, the meaning of the earrings can be spread when people wear them in daily lives, especially when someone asks you where you can get the earrings/what’s the meaning behind it.

For the project itself, the components of different animals are obvious: dolphins, sea turtles, and whales. According to WWF, whales are ENDANGERED. Few as 300 North Atlantic right whales remain; other species vary 10,000-90,000. The Irrawaddy dolphin is VULNERABLE, and according to WWF Hong Kong, The population inhabiting the Pearl River Estuary, including Hong Kong, is believed to number around 2,500 individuals. During the past few years, there has been a worrisome decrease in the number of young dolphins sighted in Hong Kong waters. Sea Turtles are VULNERABLE too, since “Human activities have tipped the scales against the survival of these ancient mariners. Nearly all species of sea turtle are classified as Endangered. Slaughtered for their eggs, meat, skin, and shells, sea turtles suffer from poaching and over-exploitation. They also face habitat destruction and accidental capture in fishing gear. Climate change has an impact on turtle nesting sites. It alters sand temperatures, which then affects the sex of hatchlings.” 

 

For the design of the earrings, between fishnets and cans, there are big white dolphins that look like white foam. With the pollution of different kinds of plastic, one day there will only be plastic dolphin bodies in the ocean rather than the cute spirits who could save humans. The transparent small dolphin is a wish that there will be one day when the ocean becomes clean and all the dolphins, all the ocean animals who are trapped in the plastic cage can be free again.

 

 

My Earrings

 

For the necklace, the plastic silver wave represents that the waves you see may already become plastic trash, and the bottom of the shape of an iceberg is all plastic. This does not only mean that from the surface to the depths of the ocean is all filled with plastic trash, but also that the plastic trash we have already seen is only the tip of the iceberg. Some of my inspirations come from the posters below.

 

Source

Source

 

My Necklace

 

Though my bracelet was not in the final exhibition, how it looks reflects a picture that has been spread widely. The transparent turtle’s head and tails are pierced by the cables, which indicates that this species is becoming extinct due to plastic pollution. 

 

Plastic pollution chocking water bodies in Lebanon

 

   

My Bracelet

 

DESIGN & PRODUCTION

My project is based on the theme of Marine animals, so the first thing I have considered is how to make those animals. Since I want them to be part of accessories, they need to be good looking at the same time. Therefore I chose laser cut acrylic to create those components. I searched about pictures of whales, dolphins, and turtles and draw some sketches about the design. However, I met a lot of problems when laser cut the animals. The first is that the initial size is too small and the material of acrylic is easy to break, so many parts melted together and it cannot be used. I scaled up the size of the component, and make the engraving part stronger so that the pattern on it more clear. Nevertheless, the transparent material makes it hard to be seen, so later I added the white dolphin and change the color of whales into bluish-grey. These two colors also indicate that the ocean animals are being seriously polluted by plastic and other trash in the ocean.

 

Sketches

 

Design of the animals

Laser-cut and some finished and defective products

 

 

I also started preparing other materials for my project. Since what pollutes the ocean is mainly plastic, I used plastic as my main material. My mother sent me some window screens leftover from home decoration, which looks really like fishnets and is used a lot in my project. What’s more, she also sent me the left cables and blue cans, whose different parts, like the rings and bodies, are used in my project. The ring-pull can is also one of the main trash that pollutes the beaches and the ocean. 

 

Materials preparation

 

The use of cans and fishnets

 

For the necklace, inspired by the shining plastic leaves necklace, I decided to make a large piece of all kinds of plastic melted together as the background under the whale and the iceberg underneath it. I used the plastic-melting machine to stick all the blue plastic pieces I have collected and made. I also added some plastic pieces cut from the dumplings box, which looks like nylon fish cages people use to catch super small fishes.

 

Plastic being melted

Plastic melted together

Design of the fish cage

Figuring out ways of connecting them

 

However, it turns out that the melted big plastic piece looks messy and likes a real piece of trash. Thus, I cut them into a triangle and glue them with the dark-blue plastic bag which has also been cut into a triangle shape, more like a deeper layer of the fishnet layer. I also added the inner shining side of the dark-blue plastic bag to show the wave on the surface of the ocean, also as a decoration.

 

Cutting out the triangle and glue the two parts together

Adding the silver wave in the above

Adding the bluish-grey whales at the top layer

 

From the beginning, I decided to make a set of accessories, so it includes a bracelet. I choose the cables as the materials since it is a good frame. However, I met some problems gluing them together. I twined them together tightly and then glue it, twisted the wire to make sure it can go through the hole on the sea turtle without breaking it.

 

 

It looks good and it is one of my favorite designs. However, cables are not one of the main plastic pollutions in the sea and it does not match the necklace and earrings. It is great, but it is independent. I consider using the plastic straw and twine them together as the frame in the future. That is why it is not added to the final exhibition. 

 

CONCLUSIONS:

 

When will people realize that ocean animals are becoming extinct because of the plastic trash they have thrown into the sea? By designing a set of accessories of earrings and necklaces, I want to illustrate the ocean animals represented by dolphins and whales have been suffering the plastic pollution in the ocean severely. The white foam body of dolphin surrounded by different kinds of plastic, escaping transparent soul of the dolphin, depressed color of the whale, mountains of rubbish under the icebergs — we are already killing these animals in person, how can this be solved?

The biggest difficulty I have met is how to fit those animals into the accessories since they are the key parts of my project. I designed with the precise size of the holes and animal bodies, but it turned out that they cannot be that small because they will be melted when being cut by laser. Additionally, I chose to use transparent plastic at first so they are hard to be found, which makes the subject less obvious. I did 4-5 times of laser cut to achieve the final effect of my project.    

I have learned a lot from the project, one is how to use the laser cut to achieve the result I want. Second is the use of different plastic materials, for instance, cans and fishnets are harder, while plastic bags are softer and super easily to be melted, the inner side of some insulated plastic bags is silver and are great decorations, some thick cables are super hard to be twisted and stay at a fixed position. The most important thing I have learned is that when making projects expressing a certain theme, the related elements (no matter the materials or the way it is created) must be obvious and explicit enough so that people can notice and understand them.                                                

For future improvements, I would like to add the bracelet to the set of accessories. I am thinking about a better frame of the bracelet, for instance, the plastic straw or maybe the nylon ropes. Then I can add some plastic pieces on the frame, so it will look more matchable with the necklace and earrings. 

Accessories are just a small way to raise people’s awareness. The ocean animals are becoming extinct even at a twice speed than land animals. “These impacts are already happening. It’s not some abstract future problem.” To prevent those cute and intelligent ocean animals from being extinct, the road ahead really has a long and heavy.

 

References:

http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/12/02/cleaning-beach-taking-away-trash-cans

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/07/how-lasers-can-help-clean-up-beach-trash/490952/

https://www.worldwildlife.org/species/whale#

https://www.wwf.org.hk/en/reslib/species/chiwhitedolphin/

https://www.worldwildlife.org/species/sea-turtle#

https://sailhawaii.com/what-can-we-do-to-help-wildlife-cut-plastic-rings/

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/04/ocean-species-disappear-faster-climate-change-impacts-cold-blooded-animals-harder/

Special thanks to Marcela Godoy who helped me so much during the process of making the project and the make of the installation model frame. 

 

Workshop Documentation

For the workshop in class, we were taught how to use the plastic melting machine. I and Mehr tried to distinguish the type of plastic inside the huge trash bag but only a few of them has the type printed on the plastic bag. Therefore, we chose Plastic 2, which is high-density polyethylene and could be melted at a temperature of 75 degrees.

 

The plastic bags we chose to use

 

Since there is a cute smiling face on one of the bags, we decided to cut off the smiling face, melt if on the yidiandian plastic bag and made a book cover. After finishing the design, we started to melt them.

 

Our design of the book cover

 

             

 

The processing of melting

 

After melting them at nearly 120 degrees for more than 30 seconds in total, we found that the smiling face was stuck on it but the “happy every day” failed. Only 1/3 of it was melted and stuck. 

 

We failed 🙁

 

In the end, we just melted the smiling face and half of the yidiandian bag together to make the book cover. Below is the video of it. 

 

 

Midterm Proposal

My first 18 years were spent in a sea-side city. From around 2008, the sea and beach near my home got super dirty, with plastic bottles, glasses, nylon nets, green and ugly enteromorpha covering the ocean every summer. I was too young to define what was going on at that time. And when I was 12 years old I went to Australia, where I found the sea different from the one in my hometown. The ocean in Australia is transparent — I was able to see a turtle and a batfish swimming in the light blue water, coming near to me.

I was excited, sad and angry. I went to the activity of cleaning the beach almost every summer, but that was too little for me to rescue the sea, like a drop in the ocean. As I get older and the ocean pollution gets even more serious, I started to read the news and there were pictures of the polluted sea, suffered animals on social media very often. So from the very beginning, I wanted to do something about the ocean. I love earrings and bracelets, so I decided to do a set of earrings, a necklace and a bracelet about pollution in the ocean. I safaried pictures about the trash jewelry.

 

Necklace of plastic, decorated with large flowers and leaves (2)

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/211458144988843963/

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/211458144988843963/

 

Below is the sketch of my project. 

 

The earrings and the necklace (it seems to be less clear when I upload it 🙁 )

 

The bracelet (first version)

 

Details about the bracelet

 

The bracelet (second version)