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2. Week 02

This week I worked on making bioplastics to explore Sustainability in the Fab Lab.

Making Bioplastics

Students from my afterschool club (Gig City Girls), helped me make bioplastic this week. We found a recipe that uses Agar, glycerine, essential oil, and water. We added spiralina as a natural coloring. The product is still drying, but we plan to experiment with laser cutting it next week. Not sure what we will make or do the pieces yet though. One of the most interesting parts was the thin strip we peeled off the pan.

recipe1

cooking

in mold

drying

Reflection

1. Have you considered sustainable practices in your teaching in the pasts? How? What aspects do you think should be improved in your own teaching environment?

Sustainable practices are always on my mind. I have started and facilitated a recycling club in the past. The difficulty with recycling is contamination and the limited variety of recyclable materials in our community. We always use cardoard, wood, and acrylic until only tiny pieces/spaces are left. I wish there were more options for recycling/reusing 3D supports and failed prints. I’ve seen folks melt down the pieces and turn it into a laserable material, however, I don’t have a way to chop our scraps into little pieces that could do this easily. I would love ideas for that…

2. How Digital Fabrication might support sustainable practices? When using Digital Fabrication what actions you can take to support sustainable practices.

We try very hard to reuse or use up all the materials in lab we can. Cardboard scraps are recycled. We have chosen filaments with cardboard spools as often as possible. We have looked into sending our PLA scraps to an industrial composting facility, however the problem is there are none in our region. I am hoping to forge a community partnership with a local start-up who is making their own filament. Currently they use purchased pellets, however, we have been discussing a plan for them to purchase a grinder and use our scraps. I hope this can be a sustainable future project.

3. Do you think your school is ready to a change in mindset? Why? How can you get support from other stakeholders? How would you structure a training for teachers?

I don’t think we have a mindset problem as much as a resource problem. We do teacher training all the time so the structure isn’t a problem. We need to create a pipeline for sustainablility in our community before teacher training is necessary.