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Feb 20, 2019

Why The World Needs Biodegradable Materials

V4 Beyond Plastic is an experimental research test area to develop open-source alternative materials to build a future with less plastic.

Hands holding Beyond Plastic wheat bran bowl with salad
Beyond Plastic wheat bran bowl
This article is part of Precious Plastic, a One Army project tackling the plastic waste problem. You can learn more
here
.

Hello! I’m Jannis and I joined the crew of Version 4 in October as a designer for the Beyond Plastic project along with @marinab. While we usually focus on recycling to reduce the amount of new plastic being produced, V4 Beyond Plastic is an experimental research test area to develop open-source alternative materials to build a future with less plastic 💪👏

The short journey of making a Biodegradable Beyond Plastic bowl.

Biodegradable not BioPlastic

In a fast changing world filled with short living objects, we think one of the most important material properties should be biodegradability. And when we say biodegradable, we mean degradable in nature, not in specific industrial settings where most of the stuff rarely ends up. If you want to learn more about industrial bioplastics and why they don’t biodegrade, we collected some information here.


V4 Beyond Plastic

That’s why we decided to make V4 Beyond Plastic all about 100% natural Biodegradables.
Our aim is to create materials and short living products that disappear after they are disposed, and don’t harm the environment they might end up in (but instead add nutrients 🌏).

We simply realized that people won’t stop throwing away stuff, so it’s worth to create products that can safely decompose.

We chose to start tackling single-use plastic by making bowls and containers from potato peels and wheat bran. It’s a pretty straightforward process that only takes a few minutes of pressing and no more ingredients than peels/bran and water.

Wheat Bran Bowls with salad.

And since we see beauty and value in waste materials, we are going to continue working with other left overs and by-products of the food industry, following our vision that you can make almost everything from anything.

Wheat Bran cups.

By the release of version 4, we hope to provide you with a machine and process for creating your own little biodegradable products factory. If you would like to follow our process, check out our ongoing forum thread.

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Written by
Jannis
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