laser cutting bioplastics

February 4, 2010

This video is awesome. You can make your own bioplastic. Starch, glycerine, vinegar and water. 7 parts water, 1 vinegar, .5 glycerine and 1.5 parts starch. You heat the mixture up while stirring. You can then flatten it and it will turn into a sheet of bioplastic. You can even add your own colors to it. The sheet can then be laser cut. You can make plastic and then laser cut it. Wow? I’ve been watching this video for 20 minutes now over and over again. Guess what I’ll be doing this weekend? More than a little fascinated. Thank you Lasern!

Comments

• Mendel
  February 5, 2010 at 5:23 pm
  yeah, this was a lot of fun to do. Today and yesterday was like an improvised fablab. maybe a mobile fablab!? @jaycousins , chris & @m3nd3l

• jeff bare
  February 5, 2010 at 6:34 pm
  very cool- thanks for sharing. I wonder how fast this stuff would biodegrade in compost.

• Erica Schwartz
  February 5, 2010 at 10:31 pm
  wow i really want to try this, though i have no laser cutter, i’ll have to cut by hand. what kind of starch? what kind of vinegar? Can i use corn starch and white vinegar from the supermarket?

• Jay Cousins
  February 6, 2010 at 2:31 am
  @jeff bare don’t know if you could run it through the printer but you could try. @erica normal vinegar and corn starch are fine, we used a variation on this recipe – starch is starch.

• Joris
  February 6, 2010 at 8:32 am
  Please keep us updated. I think this could be huge!

• Sandeepa
  February 7, 2010 at 4:42 am
  This looks really interesting. Can this be used to make moulds ?

• Brian Degger
  February 8, 2010 at 10:17 am
  Yah, this is great Jay, another experiment for me to do, after the glowing squid bacteria protocol! (or during)

• Brian Degger
  February 8, 2010 at 12:44 pm
  Cheers for that! One of the two amazing things before breakfast…..the other one was Tm.10s Bruce Stirlings talk on Futurity Now. Synopsis “Pretend like its the future, and it will be!”

• Jay Cousins
  February 8, 2010 at 2:45 pm
  Glad to be of service, we should catch up soon – I want to hear about this luminescence project.

• Matt
  February 10, 2010 at 2:46 am
  I tried it out, it’s pretty cool.

• Joris
  February 10, 2010 at 4:19 am
  Matt, Looks great. Mine all look milky white, how did you get it so transparent?

• Mendel Heit
  February 10, 2010 at 7:13 am
  Nice result Matt!

• louz
  April 20, 2014 at 10:34 pm
  I was wondering how you made the plastic that flat, mine stays bubbly. 🙂

Inspired by Mendel Heit, Martin Bauer and Jay Cousins we’ve been doing a lot of playing around with bioplastics. Here you can see the original post with a video that shows you how they made bioplastic.