Plastic bakery: A new taste for plastic waste

This master thesis describes the process of finding a new purpose for plastic waste materials. Due to the great set of possibilities (strength, stiffness, density, heat resistance, electrical conductivity), the material is often used (Lower, 2009). Many plastics are designed to be used only once, being thrown away after the use. However, thrown away is not away. Plastic is the type of waste that will last forever. Currently only five to ten percent is recycled of all the produced plastics (source: http://www.5gyres.org/the-plastic-problem/). As mentioned by Eriksen et al. (2014) there are around five trillion pieces of plastic floating in world’s oceans, out of which eighty percent, originates from the land (Jambeck et al., 2015). The plastic breaks down into smaller pieces by the sunlight (Moore, C., 2014) and releases toxins. All sorts of organisms living in or off the sea mistakenly take in plastic debris and microplastic for food. This results in the often toxic waste to enter our food chain (Plastic Soup Foundation, 2016). The goal of this project is to find an application for plastic waste materials that changes the perception of waste into valuable and looks at motivations for people to do something with waste. The thesis shows the design of a material application and a service around recycling Polyethylene bottle caps. The project assignment is self-formulated, in collaboration with Elvin Karana. The Material Driven Design method (Karana et al., 2015) was applied for the design of the material application in which the unique material qualities come forward. The material focus of Polyethylene was determined through talks with experts about the safety of melting the material. Insights in the material qualities of Polyethylene were generated by several tinkering experiments and user studies. These experiments showed the unique qualities of the arise of wonderful patterns that surprise people, when different colors of caps are mixed, and showed the semi-transpar
Industrial Design Engineering
Industrial Design
Design Aesthetics
Design for Interaction