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the shell works is a team of Master
students at the Royal College of Art and
Imperial College London the shell work
is all about taking unknown biomaterial
and trying to bring it into the
mainstream together they make bio
plastics from lobster shells the team is
comprised of architects and mechanical
engineers and product design engineers
and we all had this fascination with
food waste and specifically crustacean
waste and fish waste which is not often
looked up from a design and engineering
point of view the shells of these crabs
and lobsters will sometimes just go to a
landfill where they can start emitting
methane and we were interested in
whether there was a way to valorize that
waste stream over 250,000 tonnes of
crustacean waste are produced every year
in the EU alone that waste is equal to
about 1,600 blue whales but what's so
valuable about that waste and we found
this biopolymer inside crustacean shells
called chitin that you can treat in a
certain way to extract and actually make
a bioplastic from those shells
chitin is the second most abundant
organic material on earth it's found in
insects fungi and crustaceans we started
working with lobsters because there are
really interesting waste sauce by
weights of chitin accounts for about 30%
of the shell and it's also the case that
with lobsters they're eaten at the
restaurant so as opposed to shellfish or
shrimp where they get industrially
detailed these lobster shells are just
going to waste at the restaurant source
through chemical processes all that
chitin can be turned into kato-san which
is where the shell works comes in what
you need to do is to extract the chitin
before you can use it as a bioplastic
so the first stage is an extraction
which is this machine behind me
so we have design for machines Shelley
GT backe and dippy the first machine is
an extraction unit we basically put in
ground-up lobster shells it runs through
a set of processes and outcomes the
powder which is the toy design we will
start with the shells
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we will extract the coats and powder and
then to that we will add vinegar in
varying ratios that will form a kind of
tight design and bioplastic goop which
we will put into the dip one machine
each machine is kind of good for making
a different thing so sheet form
obviously only make sheets the vacuum
form is good for making Kony less
three-dimensional relief so things like
blister packaging and then the dip
Mulder is excellent for making really
extruded shapes of very
three-dimensional objects we can also
make plastic bags from these sheets by
gluing them together with more of a
bioplastic which means that the bag is
100% lysosome and so is much more easily
recycled we used our project to
illustrate that the material can
actually be formed into lots of
applications that could be a really
compelling replacement for some
single-use plastic items so we have
designed plant pots that self-fertilize
so they actually get planted with the
plant in the ground and as they
biodegrade they become a fertilizer for
the plant the bioplastic is water
soluble which is
it makes it very easy to recycle but
obviously limits the applications that
we can do with it so we're looking at
ways of waterproofing the material with
kind of the natural wax coatings that
would make it more capable for a wider
range of things I describe the machines
as quite accessible we've kind of
designed them from scratch in workshops
so potentially other people could also
build these machines the project is all
about bridging the gap between science
and industry we find that there's so
much stuff out there and scientific
papers which never actually makes it
into it into the industry which is a
real shame
so we've kind of taken inspiration from
certain things that we found in
scientific papers and developed those
into processes that might be scalable at
an industry to kind of really make this
bio plastic something that could be
feasible in real world
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