Two colored plastic films are loosely tied over the entrances to two plastic containers.

Cooking Up Plastics In The Kitchen

October 28, 2025 by Aaron Beckendorf 3 Comments

The earliest useful plastics were made out of natural materials like cellulose and casein, but since the Bakelite revolution, their use has dwindled away and left them mostly as curiosities and children’s science experiments. Fortunately, though, the raw materials for bioplastics are readily available in most grocery stores, and as [Ben] from NightHawkInLight demonstrates, it’s still possible to find new uses for them.

His first recipe was for a clear gelatine thermoplastic, using honey as a plasticizer, which he formed into the clear packet around some instant noodles: simply throw the whole packet into hot water, and the plastic dissolves away. With some help from the home bioplastics investigator [Giestas], [Ben] next created a starch-based plastic out of starch, vinegar, and glycerine. Starch is a good infrared emitter in the atmospheric window, and researchers have made a starch-plastic aerogel that radiates enough heat to become cooler than its surroundings. Unfortunately, this requires freeze-drying, and while encouraging freezer burn in a normal freezer can have the same effect, it’ll take a few months to get a usable quantity of the material.

The other problem with starch-based plastics is their tendency to absorb water, at least when paired with plasticizers like glycerine or honey. Bioplastics based on alginate, however, are easy to make waterproof. A solution of sodium alginate, derived from seaweed, reacts with calcium ions to make a cross-linked waterproof film. Unfortunately, the film forms so quickly that it separates the solutions of calcium ions from the alginate, and the reaction stops. To get around this, [Ben] mixed a sodium alginate solution with powdered calcium carbonate, which is insoluble and therefore won’t react. To make the plastic set, he added glucono delta lactone, which slowly breaks down in water to release gluconic acid, which dissolves the calcium carbonate and lets the reaction proceed.

The soluble noodle package reminded us of a similar edible package, which included flavoring in the plastic. We’ve also seen alginate used to make conductive string, and rice used to make 3D printer filament. It’s worth some caution, though – not all biologically-derived plastics are healthier than synthetic materials.

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Mouse Model Suggests Starch-Based Plastics Are Still Bad For You

May 26, 2025 by Maya Posch 48 Comments

To paraphrase The Simpsons: plastics are the solution to – and cause of – all of mankind’s problems. Nowhere is this more clear in the phenomenon of microplastics. Some have suggested that alternative bioplastics made out of starch could be the solution here, as the body might be able to digest and disassemble these plastic fragments better. Unfortunately, a team of Chinese researchers put this to the test using mice, with the results suggesting that starch-based plastics do not change the harm to tissues and organs.

We previously looked at this harm from micro- and nanoplastics (MNP), with humans and their brains at autopsy showing a strong correlation between disease and presence of MNPs. In this recent study mice were split up into three groups, for either no, low or high levels of these bioplastics in their food. At autopsy, the mice exposed to the bioplastics all showed damage to organs, including the same gene-regulation issues and inflammation markers as seen with other plastics.

Despite these results, researchers question how useful these results are, as they pertain to modified starches with known biodegradability issues, while starch by itself is absolutely digestible when it’s in the form of potato chips, for instance. Perhaps the trick here is to make bioplastics that are still useful as plastics, and yet as harmless to ingest as said potato chips.

Not that we recommend eating bioplastics, mind you; potato chips are definitely tastier.

A black plastic trim piece from a vehicle interior. It has slight flecking in its texture. It is sitting on an off-white bench overlooking a workshop.

Can Car Parts Grow On Trees?

January 19, 2024 by Navarre Bartz 27 Comments

Cars don’t grow on trees, but Ford is designing car parts from olive tree cuttings. [via Electrek]

Ford is no stranger to designing parts from plants for their vehicles. Henry famously liked to beat on the Soy Bean Car with a blunted axe to tout the benefits of bioplastic panels. Researchers at Ford’s Cologne, Germany facility have detailed their work to use waste from olive orchards as part of a new biocomposite from the LIVE COMPOLIVE program.

Fibers from the olive tree cuttings are mixed with recycled plastic and injection molded to form panels. The video below features interior panels that are currently made with traditional plastics that could be swapped over to the new composite. Since these cuttings are a waste product from food production, there isn’t the tension akin to that presented via biofuels vs food. We’re curious what Precious Plastics could do with this, especially if the fibers are able to reinforce the matrix.

If you want to see some other unusual uses for waste wood, why not checkout a “paper” bottle or 3D printing with sawdust?

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3D Printing With Rice Might Be Nice

February 17, 2023 by Al Williams 36 Comments

The United Nations Industrial Development Organization recently pointed out a possible replacement for petrochemical-based polymers: rice resin. A Japanese company makes the material from inedible rice and also makes a biodegradable polymer known as Neoryza, which seems to contain some amount of rice as well. The rice resin contains 10 to 70% rice waste. You can see a video with English subtitles about the material below.

According to the video, there is plenty of waste rice. The resulting resin isn’t as toxic as petrochemical-based plastics and doesn’t consume food crops like other plant-based polymers. The video shows the rice resin being extruded like a normal polymer, so it should work like any other thermoplastic.

The video says the properties are similar to petrochemical-based plastics and no special equipment is required to handle it. They also claim that production is easier because, unlike other bioplastics, they don’t generate ethanol as the first part of the process. Waste rice should be cheap to obtain since it is essentially trash today. We aren’t sure what polymers are used in the 90 to 30% of the plastic that isn’t rice, but presumably, that is being brought in as a raw material.

We’ll be interested to see if anyone tries to make 3D printing filament from the stuff. We know that it is being used to replace polyethylene in furniture. We couldn’t help but think about using waste coffee grounds in 3D printing. If you want to compare this to PLA, we’ve talked quite a bit about the corny polymer.

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PLA: The Plastic That Grows

September 12, 2018 by Dan Maloney 67 Comments

If you’ve ever taken a coast-to-coast car trip across the United States, the one thing that’s sure to impress you is the mind-bogglingly immense amount of corn that we grow here. If you take the northern route — I’ve done it seven times, so I know it by heart — you’ll see almost nothing but corn from Ohio to Montana. The size of the fields is simply staggering, and you’re left wondering, “Do we really eat all this corn?”

The simple answer is no, we don’t. We grow way more corn than we can eat or, once turned into alcohol, drink. We do feed a lot to animals, many of which subsequently end up as burgers or pork chops. But even after all that, and after accounting for exports, we still have a heck of a lot of corn to put to work. There are lots of industrial uses for this surplus corn, though, and chances are pretty good you’ve got an ear or two worth coiled up next to your 3D-printer, in the form of polylactic acid, or PLA.

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They’re Putting Soy In Your Wires, Man

January 15, 2018 by Tom Nardi 111 Comments

I’ve got a friend who tells me at every opportunity that soy is the downfall of humanity. Whatever ails us as a society, it’s the soy beans that did it. They increase violent tendencies, they make us fat and lazy, they run farmers out of business, and so on. He laments at how hard it is to find food that doesn’t include soy in some capacity, and for a while was resigned to eating nothing but chicken hot dogs and bags of frozen peas; anything else had unacceptable levels of the “Devil’s Bean”. Overall he’s a really great guy, kind of person who could fix anything with a roll of duct tape and a trip to the scrap pile, but you might think twice if he invites you over for dinner.

A column of soy soldiers stand at the ready.

So when he recently told me about all the trouble people are having with soy-based electrical wiring, I thought it was just the latest conspiracy theory to join his usual stories. I told him it didn’t make any sense, there’s no way somebody managed to develop a reliable soy-derived conductor. “No, no,” he says, “not the conductor. They are making the insulation out of soy, and animals are chewing through it.”

Now that’s a bit different. I was already well aware of the growing popularity of bioplastics: the PLA used in desktop 3D printers is one such example, generally derived from corn. It certainly wasn’t unreasonable to think somebody had tried to make “green” electrical wiring by using a bioplastic insulation. While I wasn’t about to sit down to a hot bag of peas for dinner, I had to admit that maybe in this case his claims deserved a look.

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