Context

How to color your bioplastic by only using natural ingredients which are easily accessible?

This project is all about creating the seven basic colors to be used in gelatin-based bioplastics. The iterations were always based on the same recipe, with natural products that are easily accessible, like products you can find in a supermarket and are not all too expensive. To name a few, with red cabbage you can make purple and with beetroot you can make red. Different ways and products have been looked at to get these colors, to see what works best and to see what it does to the bioplastic. In addition, tests have also been carried out to see what affects the bioplastic and what does not. This resulted in about 40 different kinds of bioplastic with all kinds of colors, that will help designers getting more freedom in their work and give others more inspiration and variety for applications.

Right now, there are more and more people who start caring about the environment, like designers, artists and scientists, to make art, clothes and accessories. They are looking into alternatives for petroleum-based plastics. Preferably alternatives that don’t deplete natural resources, and that can easily be recycled and/or composted, like bioplastic. Not all alternatives are considered acceptable as a design material. That’s why this project focusses on increasing the likelihood of acceptance and uptake for gelatin-based bioplastic, by proposing natural and accessible colorants to dye them.

Plastic as we know it is difficult to degrade, but this is counteracted by the use of bioplastic. Bioplastic is made of compostable material, biobased material or both. Biobased materials are made from renewable raw materials such as starch, sugar or cellulose (Holland Bioplastics, n.d.). They can be recyclable or compostable, but that differs. Compostable and biodegradable materials can completely break themselves down within a year or less and decompose into natural elements (Heritage Paper, 2016). But in addition to that, compostable materials also provide the earth with nutrients once the material has completely been broken down. The recipe that is used for this project contains of gelatine (later also agar), glycerine, dishwashing soap, water and of course natural pigments. This means that the bioplastic is biobased and biodegradable. The time it takes for the bioplastic to fully compost is too long, so it would leave pieces of plastic in the organic waste (Milieu Centraal, n.d). For this reason, the bioplastic belongs in the container for residual waste.