Hello everyone!
Long time fan of this community and After seeing the last post on Turning Ocean Plastic into Precious Plastic with Parley and this topic on working with ocean plastic I wanted to share the master thesis that my wife, Emily-Claire, and I completed in 2017. The thesis was about using ocean plastic within architecture and design and how to change the perception of ocean plastic as waste into something with value.
As we started the project we Precious Plastic was still in version 1 I think and we got a lot of inspiration from this forum, but we never came around to share our results with you (Sorry!) so I hope our work now can contribute and maybe inspire in this forum
Our thesis in short:
In our thesis we are exploring ways to use what is typicaly difficulties associated with ocean plastic (hard to sort, dirty, etc) and see it as an element of design. We sorted the plastic by color rather than by type (first discarding PET, Styrofoam, Rubber and other easily identifiable objects, which left us with a majority of PP and PE objects) By using heat and compression we could then keep the identity of some object that are associated with ocean plastic as well as design the outcome of the experiments and it still resulted in solid tiles.
We then conceptualized our findings into 3 small huts made from ocean plastic where the plastic was transformed in different ways to showcase different possibilities within ocean plastic.
A short article on our thesis can be found here: https://www.archdaily.com/904749/plastic-island-imagines-the-possibilities-of-reusing-oceanic-waste-in-architecture
And the thesis in full can be read here (in English):
http://publications.lib.chalmers.se/records/fulltext/254818/254818.pdf
We are currently further developing the results from our thesis at https://www.outofocean.com/ and @outofoceanplastic and would love to collaborate more with you guys!
I (Erik) am also working with starting up the first Marine Recycling Center in here in Sweden in a small coastal municipality called Sotenäs where we gather ocean plastic (in collaboration with the coastal beach cleaning), ghost nets and discarded fishing gear and prepare them(dissasemble, sorting, and we have a massive mill that is soon up and running) for reuse and recycle. This project is still in an early phase but hopefully we will be able to set up a Preciuos Plastic station in collaboration with this in the future. We have a small test-section already with a version of the sheet-press and an pizza oven, but I think I will start another thread on this topic later.
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