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Swap event (Beach cleanup substitute event):

On Dec 5th, along with other students that could not make the beach cleanup organized an old clothes swap event. The idea was that students would meet in the 2f cafe and swap items that they np longer wear or use and exchange them with each other free of charge. However, there was no turnout for the event, despite the posters that we distributed throughout campus to promote the event. We moved the event to the 8th floor lounge and left the items: a bug jacket, water bottle, umbrella and several kitchen utensils in the bins in the lounge. We did this, along with a “Free for all” sign so that students could take whatever they liked, free of charge. What I learned from this event is that people have a desire to reuse items and limit the amount of things they buy, however they often lack incentive to devote the time to doing so. As a continuation of this event, I would like to host a similar event in the future, where students perhaps donate old IMA projects and students can pick them apart and select pieces that they might want to use for future projects.

Name: Eva Solo

Date: 05/12/19 

Professor: Marcela Godoy 

As I mentioned before, I really enjoyed creating the potato starch plastic replacement and have been continuing exploring this recipe as my first attempt was somewhat burned. I identified the mistakes in the first trial due to the temperature being too high, the stirring tool was not effective (used the end side of a brush, so the scope was small in diameter), and the pan was too large for the amount I was working with. 

To tackle these issues,

I replicated the steps using:

• 100mL of water
• 10mL of vinegar
• 10g of glycerol
• 14g potato starch

which is double the recipe, as I wanted to create more density. I only turned the pan on as I was ready to place the blend inside, and only turned it to low-height. I also attempted to heat the material in the beaker first to see if the consistency would begin changing, but after the first minute the colour stayed the same, and I poured the contents directly on the pan, followed by swift stirring with a proper wood stirring tool.  This tool allowed me to push the mass with a large scope, thus preventing immediate burning.

 

Due to a larger mass, it took around 2 minutes to stir the blend into the consistency I wanted. I turned the pan off and began gathering my materials on the test plates. The reminding material in the pan pealed off seamlessly and perfectly resembled plastic. Its properties were: flexible, quite strong as I tried to tear it, and translucent to some extent. 

I placed the main batch of materials on top of the oven to dry during the following week.

The results were great in comparison to the first attempt, as the material was consistent throughout and the same in pigment.

The reasoning why I was so drawn to this recipe was the aesthetic appeal, and my liking of this slime-like texture. I was thinking about creating some visual art with this batch and will continue to share my progression on a future journal entry.

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.

During week 12, Eva and I continued gathering and collecting more #2 and #4 plastics so that we could have enough for our first experimentation. Most of our collection included bottlecaps, PPE bottles, and lids. We shredded a large amount of plastic in class last week but we realized it was not enough to make a whole frisbee. We, therefore, made the decision to create a smaller size frisbee so that it does not take as much plastic because we underestimate how much plastic one needs as it shrinks as it undergoes heat and compression. 

The images below show the process of gathering materials and preparing the plastic for the oven. We have yet to figure out the molding but we are attempting to use pans because of the accessibility factor to everyone. The other option was to create our own mold out of wood, but we had decided that this option would be our absolute last plan because it would be much harder to replicate at home. We plan on taking measurements and adjusting our mold accordingly so that we can achieve that ideal curvature and shape.

Name: Mehr Un Nisa Javed

Date:4th dec’2019 

Professor: Marcela Godoy 

Objective: Record your experimentation done to test your hypothesis

For my final project since I am working on creating awareness and that I intend to do through sharing information, doing some experimentation myself etc. 

I found a very interesting way of making a new bioplastic on which I did the experimentation and that is;

This week I experimented with the milk and vinegar mixture to try and make a moldable bioplastic, following this article as a reference. I wanted to see the difference between using milk vs. soy milk, so I conducted two experiments:

 

Experiment 1: milk + kangle vinegar

There wasn’t enough white vinegar for both of the experiments and I could only find kangle vinegar on my FamilyMart run so I decided to try it out with the milk. I also adjusted the amount of vinegar to keep the same ratio as the recipe (depended on how much milk was in the small carton I had):

Ingredients:

• 200 ml milk
• 50 ml kangle vinegar

Before I even added the vinegar, the milk curdled/got plastic-y at the top as I was heating it:

I think I also messed up because I got distracted in the middle of experimenting and turned off the heat (before adding the vinegar), and came back to the mixture with it already curdled. I then turned the heat back on and added the vinegar, but the result was super crumbly and not what I expected at all.

I’m not sure if this was the result of me getting distracted in the middle, or the use of kangle vinegar rather than white vinegar.

When it dried, however, it was quite hard and reminded me of concrete:

 

Experiment 2: soy milk + white vinegar

There was enough white vinegar left to try it out with the soy milk.

Ingredients: 

• 245 ml soy milk
• 59 ml white vinegar

This worked a lot better. It didn’t really curdle as much as the milk, but when strained, the result was much closer to the moldable dough I was expecting with the milk:

When it was dry, it was stronger than I had expected: it didn’t seem too brittle with the exception of the very edges – it stays in tact if you give it a little tug.

 

Experiment 2: soy milk + white vinegar on a larger scale

After these results, I decided to pursue the soy milk + white vinegar bioplastic and try to mold it to a food container using more soy milk.

Ingredients

• 1225 ml soy milk
• 295 ml white vinegar

It’s currently drying, so we’ll see how it turns out!

This week I experimented with which kinds of plastic bags made the best “plarn”. Plarn is short for plastic yarn, which is made from plastic bags cut into strips. The three kinds of plastic that I tested were all plastic bags made with #2 plastic, High-density polyethylene. The texture and color of the bags were different, and I wanted to see how well they would hold up when cut and crocheted together.

I used this easy to follow plarn tutorial graphic from http://www.plasticbagcrafts.com/make-plarn/

The finished plarn from the thinnest plastic bag broke very easily, but I was able to crochet a simple circle with it. For the thickest plarn, the texture was rough and hard to work with. I found that the plastic bag with middle-range thickness was the easiest to work with both in terms of cutting and crocheting.

Left: Thin plarn, Right: Thick plarn

I also experimented with the scraps from the handles and bottom of the plastic bags, cutting them in ways that would make a continuous strip. However, this experiment failed as the strip ripped right away from the cuts that I made.

For my next steps, I will be collecting plastic bags with the same texture as the #2 HDPE Family Mart bag and begin creating large amounts of plarn. I have also decided to make a crocheted stool/seat cushion in order to test crocheted plarn’s ability to hold weight.

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

Test#1

According to my research, there is a fab textiles lab in Barcelona. They tested a bioplastic recipe before and successfully used the bioplastic to make fashion accessories. I think that the textile matches the description I mention in my proposal: durable, elastic, strong and soft. Therefore, I start my first try.

Ingredients: 

Gelatins: 48g

Glycerol: 12g

Coldwater: 250ml

Machines:

Pan

Heater

Spoon

Spoon scale

Molds

Experiment steps

1. Mix gelatins and coldwater 

Then I kept stirring it and gradually it turned to something like Jam.

2. Heating process

I turned on the heat and kept stirring again, this time it gradually turned back to liquid. When it completely transformed into a liquid, I pour glycerol into it and kept stirring.

3. Pour to mold

When there were some whitish appearing, I pour the liquid into the mold.

4. Some changes

Because the color of this bioplastic is deep, I decide to add more 50ml cold water into the rest of the liquid. And I kept heating the second test. I want to know what will happen if I add more water. 

I pour the liquid into another mold.

5. Waiting for dry

I place these three products on the table in 823. They need at least three days to dry out. Let’s wait and see the result.

Appendix:

https://materiom.org/recipe/22