Co-Design with Biomaterials from food leftovers in Poblenou Exhibition catalogue 1
Preamble Over the last 30 years, plastic production has increased by 620%. Every day in Catalonia, 720,000 kg of food is thrown away. This wasted food, totalling 260,000 tonnes per year, is equivalent to the food needs of 500,000 people for one year. With the International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste and the new Catalan law on food waste, the need to rethink our relationship with both food and the concept of waste at all levels is reinforced. Many actors (restaurants, markets, producers, gleaners, cooperatives, associations, public administration, and neighbours...) are coming together to prevent food waste, to increase the use and value of food along the food chain, even more in a context of pandemic. The urgency of awakening and enhancing the value of local design to find relevant ways to collectively respond to these challenges is now evident. Remix El Barrio was born with the ambition of proposing a place of learning to encourage and nurture new practices based on food-waste crafts. The collective was created during the European project SISCODE and was facilitated by IAAC|Fab Lab Barcelona, an innovation centre that analyses the way we live, work and share in cities.
Photo credits: Fab Lab Barcelona, Poblenou Urban District, Remixers
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What is Remix el Barrio? Remix El Barrio is a collective of designers who propose projects with food leftovers using artisan techniques and digital manufacturing. They collaborate with agents from the Poblenou neighborhood to promote a more local and circular ecosystem. They claim the need to imagine new models and techniques to innovate with what we commonly call "waste". They affirm the potential of co-design, digital manufacturing, and crafts to reinvent our ways of producing, consuming, and living with an awareness of environmental ecosystems. They value innovative and artistic practices as a motor for social change. They are convinced that living shared design experiences can facilitate the empowerment of territories to implement a circular economy. They experience circularity not only by creating materials with olive and avocado pits, coffee skins, vegetables, and fruit peels or restaurant waste but also by exploring collaboration, inclusiveness, self-management towards shared knowledge with local actors.
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An ecosystem of co-creation in the Poblenou district
The designers
Arleny Medina Circular Gos @circulargos
Dihue Miguens Kofi @dihuemiguens
Clara Davis Dulce de la piel
@biotecamaterialarchive
Silvana Catazine y Joseán Vilar Re-Olivar @naifactory_lab
Laura Freixas Organic Matters @organicmatters
Lara Campos En(des)uso
@bio.materiality
Giorgia Colores Aguateria
Secil Asfar Circular Gos
@3d_printed_healthy_snacks
Elisenda Jaquemot, Susana Jurado Gavino, Nuria Bonet Roca @squeeztheorange
The Facilitation team of Fab Lab Barcelona
Anastasia Pistofidou Director “Materials and Textiles” @fabtextiles
Marion Real Coordinator of the Milena Calvo Juarez Ambassador of Circular Communities EU-Siscode project
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The Partners
A special thanks to:
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An exhibition to enter in immersion with the projects
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P. 8-9
SQUEEZE THE ORANGE
P. 10-11
CIRCULAR GOS
P. 12-13
KOFI
P. 14-15
REOLIVAR
P. 16-17
LOOK MA NO HANDS
DULCE DE LA PIEL
EN(DES)USO
ORGANIC MATTERS
COLORES - BIOPANTONE
FEM CIRCULAR EL BARRI
P. 18-19
P. 20-21
P. 22.23
P. 24.27
P. 28-29
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Squeeze the Orange Orange Bioplastic For Fashion
Squeeze the Orange is a research project on the reuse of the orange peel to make biodegradable and compostable materials for the fashion industry. The orange peel is a food waste residue that is generated abundantly in the Mediterranean diet and we can give it another life as many other things that we consider "waste" today. Through the work and knowledge shared between makers and designers, we have investigated orange waste to design a material that all fashion designers can use. The project has been developed in collaboration with restaurants in the #Poblenou neighborhood with the purpose of manufacturing a waterproof bioplastic that is totally biodegradable or compostable using the dehydrated orange peel for the production of clothing and accessories for the fashion industry. It is innovative to use local orange residues to manufacture a piece for fashion design using environmentally sustainable and locally produced materials. Our collaborators are the neighborhood restaurants that can provide us with orange residues; local artisans and fashion designers; urban gardens and compost services; and workshops and collaborative entities in the neighborhoods like the 3D printing community spaces labs.
Participants: Elisenda Jaquemot, Susana Jurado Gavino, Nuria Bonet Roca Partners: Restaurant Market Cuina Fresca, Connect Hort Contact: @squeeztheorange
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Squeeze the Orange Orange Bioplastic For Fashion
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Circular Gos CIRCULAR GOS - Snacks for pets with environmental awareness Food waste contains significant amounts of nutrients that could be recovered. These foods are all the leftovers that we throw away, many times because they expire in the fridge or because we don´t know how to handle them properly. In the current context, where nearly one billion people worldwide suffer from hunger, food waste has a serious social and ethical impact. In the continuous search for sustainability at LEKA Restaurant, Circular Gos is a project based on turning food waste into snacks for pets. Our idea is to reuse food leftovers with high nutritional value, transforming it into a mixture of proteins with a high biological value that results in a crunchy cookie for pets, without preservatives, nor additives and with food traceability. In LEKA we believe that food loss prevention should be a priority in the management of restaurants in order to valorize nutrients in the food sector. Circular Gos proposes a change in waste management not only in restaurants but also in school canteens as a way to reuse and transform these residues into food for pets, to create smart, productive, and self-sufficient cities.
Participante: Arleny Medina Colaborador: Restaurante Leka Contact: @circulargos www.restauranteleka.com/
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Squeeze the Orange Orange Bioplastic For Fashion
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KOFI Coffee Shell Paper and Packaging The Remix el Barrio initiative has allowed us to collectively explore what types of organic waste we can rescue locally, and what materials can be obtained from each one. My research began with pressed materials that, during the drying process, can be adapted to various organic forms creating light, imperfect and beautiful objects. The decision was to work with the raw material that was most efficient and provided the greatest conceptual value. The coffee peel is an inevitable residue of the roasting process, and it has the advantage of already being both dehydrated and in small pieces, two requisites that all organic material needs in order to work in the context of biomaterials innovation. Plus, it already smells good. The process of making paper with coffee peels opens a new level of opportunities. This is a much more accessible process than obtaining a large press, and it allows you to make much larger formats. It can also be combined with industry standardized processes. The final process requires separating the fibers by cooking and suspending them in water with natural binders. When collected with the proper frame, the mixture of fibers and water forms a thin layer, giving shape to the paper. This paper has the imperfect and unique qualities of being handmade but allows it to be combined with precise processes such as digital manufacturing. I have used the laser cutter to engrave the graphic content on several posters, and to cut a die from a packaging for a cup of coffee. The organic waste is being reintroduced into the value chain of the same product. And like that, so we can help to close the circle of the circular economy.
Participants: Dihue Miguens Partners: Nomad Coffee, Restaurante Leka Contact: @dihuemiguens
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Squeeze the Orange Orange Bioplastic For Fashion
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Reolivar Transformative products from olive stones We consider creativity and design as a formula to convert waste into quality raw materials. In this new line of circular materials, we use the olive stone, an abundant by-product whose current use is reduced to burning for biomass, as a base for developing a recovery process and to creating a raw material. Our project began with small olive stone samples obtained from our own consumption. Later we went to the olive sector (oil mills) to obtain the waste in bulk with less energy expenditure and took advantage of the olive stone byproduct from the milling process to extract oil. From the beginning of the project, we have applied maker culture principles, combining in parallel the investigation of the material with its application to prototypes to validate its use. We imagine REolivar as a standard that can be applied in various sectors interested in the properties of the material, like furniture, toy, or packaging companies or others. We are interested in strengthening ties of collaboration with social work to produce objects and be able to promote the development of other biomaterials projects through teaching.
Participants: Silvana Catazine y JoseĂĄn Vilar Partners: Micronizadosvegetales, GranerĂa del Poblenou, vecinos Contact: @naifactory_lab
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Squeeze the Orange Orange Bioplastic For Fashion
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LOOK MA’ NO HANDS 3D printed healthy snacks In modern cooking practices, mainly in Western countries, people tend to discard the peels of fruits and vegetables. However, it is well known that these discarded peels may contain more fiber, vitamins, and nutrients than the produce’s flesh, and if properly handled, can generate a wide spectrum of flavors. The appearance of our food is as important as its taste and smell. Sometimes we throw away food because we don't like the way it looks or we don't know how to cook with it. By enhancing the role of individual desires and developing new sensory experiences compared to conventional food production, this project seeks to give discarded food back its values and offer healthy food alternatives. With 'The Look Ma 'No Hands' project, I desire to challenge the question of what waste is. In this project, I explored the territory of Poblenou and found the ecological restaurants and cafes for collecting fruits and vegetable peels. After washing them properly, I combined them with delicious recipes and designed to print in a 3D printer.
Participants: Secil Asfar Partners: Funky Kitchen
Contact: @3d_printed_healthy_snacks
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Squeeze the Orange Orange Bioplastic For Fashion
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Dulce de piel Soaps from used oil Dulce de piel was born from the desire to recycle one of the most contaminating food products in Spain: the oil used in houses and hospitality. Studies reveal that 20 million liters of used domestic oil end up in Barcelona's water every year. The mission of this project is to restore the value of used domestic oil and reduce its negative impact on the environment. Dulce de Piel aims to raise awareness among citizens about the damage caused by cooking oils spilled in water and to mobilize citizens by inviting them to participate in informative and creative sessions. This project was thought up in Remix el barrio, a local circular economy program destined to gather and collaborate with different neighborhood actors to improve the management and the recycling of our food waste. The reuse of household oil is a circular opportunity to create low-cost products like cleaning products, for laundry, cutlery, and floors, as well as body products such as shampoo and hand soap. From different recipes, Dulce de Piel seeks, in addition to used oil, to recycle waste such as fruit skins which contain antioxidant and regenerating properties for all types of skin.
Participante: Clara Davis Partners: Restaurante Leka, Cuinetes #Poblenou, Taca d’Oli Contact: @biotecamaterialarchive 18
Squeeze the Orange Orange Bioplastic For Fashion
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En(des)uso
Exploring materialities from organic waste
Material-based design can give rise to infinite alternatives and the redesign of our garbage can even become a contemporary artistic practice and a new medium for expression. In this project different types of biomaterials have been developed from organic waste, to instruct a present-future where the needs of new materials are reinvented and to come to nourish, comfort, cover, delight, and keep us alive. From two lines of research (Resin and Ceggmica) with different binding biopolymers and their respective applications, a series of lamps inspired by a future without oppression to biodiversity emerge. The reuse of the materials involved is also suggested, as they can be ground down, molded again, and transformed into a new object, before returning to the earth. En(des)uso seeks to continue disseminating and researching alternative materials, creating design pieces, facilitating collective workshops, empowering people to create their own objects, and imagining a future where we empathically coexist with other organisms.
Participants: Lara Campos Partners: Little Fern CafĂŠ Contact: @bio.materiality 20
Squeeze the Orange Orange Bioplastic For Fashion
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Organic Matters
A material platform to connect local producers with material designers and industries Organic Matters is an initiative to rethink the future and value of the regenerative economy, organic matter, and local production. The initiative has different lines of research: a material platform to connect local producers with material designers and industries, a consulting service and space to collaborate, develop, and implement compostable applications that return nutrients back to Earth. The project explores the intersection between design, biology, chemistry, technology, material science, community, and self-sufficiency. And from there, three questions arise: What if we use the organic surplus from local producers and transform it into regenerative applications for climate-resilient economies and societies? Is it possible to program the lifespan of a material based on its use and know what nutrients it brings to the soil when it is composed? The Organic Matters platform promotes a circular production model connecting local producers, material designers, and companies interested in regenerative materials with low environmental impact. Through the platform, it is possible to map the surpluses of organic matter from local producers, collaborate with other material designers to generate compostable applications, and, finally, seek investment to research, produce and disseminate regenerative materials with low environmental impact.
Participants: Laura Freixas Partners: Nomad Coffee, Òria Cosmètica,
Taller Esfèrica y las diseñadoras Judith Gómez, Secil Asfar y Zoe Tzika. Contact: @_orgamicmatters
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Squeeze the Orange Orange Bioplastic For Fashion
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Colores
Empowering natural dyeing Colores - Empowering Natural Dyeing is a project that wants to investigate, transform, and enhance local organic resources, activating a sense for a more responsible environment through creativity, design, and color. The research of this project, in the experience of Remix el Barrio, has focused on the reuse of the avocado stone by creating colors and natural dye for fabrics, with the aim of simulating a circular process of waste management and minimizing waste at each stage of transformation. The avocado stone has been chosen for its availability, not so much because it is local but because it is a residue that indicates a culinary trend. Thanks to our collaboration with Little Fern CafĂŠ, we have been able to obtain this material for the development of tests and experiments. From direct experimentation with the natural dyeing process, we try to understand how to acquire data on its consumption, nature, physical-chemical properties, and the energy needed to achieve the final product. As a final product, kits have been developed containing the directions, ingredients, and basic tools for independent research as well as the organization of educational events and collective workshops. The aim of these workshops is to disseminate techniques and knowledge and to raise awareness about the consumption of resources and respect for the environment.
Participants: Giorgia Filipellini Partners: Little Fern CafĂŠ
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Squeeze the Orange Orange Bioplastic For Fashion
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BIOPANTONE Colour palette with natural dyes
Biopantone is a work that was born within a context of learning dyeing techniques and processes. It combines basic education in chemistry and textile crafts. It represents a palette of colours and the beauty of nature-based on ancestral and artisan techniques using organic materials, food waste, flowers, and roots. Colours exist in everything that surrounds us and starting from the drawings in caves in prehistoric times, natural dyes have been used up until 1856 when synthetic dyes appeared. Today, synthetic dyeing in the textile industry is the second pollutant of the world's waters. The biopantone manifests an environmental act within the community of the Fabricademy, Textile, and Technology Academy.
Participante : Anastasia Pistofidou Partners : Fabricademy Barcelona Alumni 2019 Contact: @fabtextiles
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Squeeze the Orange Orange Bioplastic For Fashion
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FEM CIRCULAR EL BARRI A locally sewn km0 fertilizer bag
Abono Km 0, La Taca d'Oli, and Fab Lab Barcelona have collaborated to show the social potential of connecting urban gardens, social integration associations, and makespaces After participating in some co-creation sessions and collective activities in the neighbourhood, they have joined forces to design some very original bags. This jute bag contains the fertilizer produced in the local Connect Hort garden, by Abono km0. It circulates between: ... the hands of Blanca from la Taca d'Oli, sewing, ...the neighbours and members of Abono Km0 collecting their waste, transforming it into compost with the technology of the vermicomposter. ...the makers who co-design and laser engrave labels. These actors participate in redesigning a new economy, more inclusive and circular...By building solid collaborations to make change more real.
Participants: Blanca, Norma, Monique, Rosie, Doris, Miki, Diego, Marion, Milena, Anastasia, Sally Partners: Taca d'Oli, Coop La Fabrica, Abono km 0, Connect Hort Contacts: @abonokm0 www.latacadoli2020.com/
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Squeeze the Orange Orange Bioplastic For Fashion
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An exhibition designed from resources found in the neighbourhood, 100% transformed in the Fab Lab.
Plan of the Restaurant Leka Bar of resources and colors Biopantone
Co-creation Artefacts Squeeze the Orange Circular Gos
Re-Olivar
Organic Matters En(des)uso
Colore Dulce de la piel
Fem Circular el Barri Look Ma No Hand
Kofi
Entry
Interaction Space
List of materials Project Stands
an egg-cup poster suspended with cotton thread and wooden clips, a QRcode, a lamp, the prototypes, a petri dish with residue 3 screens with 3 USB in total
Bar of resources and colors
6 plates with residues and powders, 10 test tubes and petri dishes, dye extracts, ingredient samples
Biopantone
Suspend the textile on a wall with a wooden stick + egg cup poster
Co-creation Artefacts
Line of threads with clips, map of the neighbourhood, photos of the neighbourhood, cards of ideas, Manifesto for public policies, Visualisation "biomaterials are not neutral")
Input and Output
Registration list with computer, QR Code (Circular Barris, Fab Lab Bcn and Sli.do)
Decoration
Fabrics and wood engraved manifests
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STANDS OF PROJECTS
Posters made with locally collected egg cups, suspended with threads and clips, Variety of prototypes Waste samples QRCode and Instagram of the projects
How can we sustain the development of circular ecosystems crafting and manufacturing with food leftovers? The 7 wishes of the Remixers for new local public policies -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1.
Promote R&D on new materials, distributed and inclusive production models and the eco-design of circular systems.
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Democratize access to innovation: strengthen the connection between local designers, scientific and industrial stakeholders, develop and open the infrastructure necessary to analyze the characteristics of materials (mechanical properties, toxicity, biodegradability) and dimension systems of production.
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Promote artisan-manufacturing sites and designer/craftsman cooperatives in the development of short-loop products, creating direct synergies with neighbourhood actors (neighbours, cooperatives, restaurants): facilitate the access and the rehabilitation of abandoned sites, support logistics and partnerships between local actors.
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To propose a personalized offer of environmental awareness and organic waste management for restaurants and other providers of organic waste.
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Experiment with a local service for the preparation and dehydration of surplus food to avoid waste and facilitate the activities of designers and craftsmen.
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Support "educational" programmes and experiences to transmit knowledge and emotions with biomaterials to different agents of all ages and expertise.
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To support new co-creation processes with a diversity of local actors and international communities by exploring together the challenges of the territory.
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What’s happening now? We are looking for other opportunities and places to exhibit and develop the projects of Remix El Barrio Interested? Contact us:
@circularbarris remix@fablabbcn.org www.foodtureplatform.com/project/remix-el-barrio/ www.fablabbcn.org/projects/siscode-remix-el-barrio www.siscodeproject.eu/ Photo Credits: Fab Lab Barcelona, Poblenou Urban District, Remixers SISCODE project which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 under grant agreement No 788217.
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