How to make and mold bio-plastic

Let’s face it.  Ninety-nine percent of everything is made of plastic these days.   I’ve seen multi-million dollar companies come grinding to a halt over a piece of craptastic plastic no bigger than my finger.   Plastic parts are not always synonymous with quality.  And complaining about it ain’t gonna change a thing.  I know.  I’ve tried.  (I’m good at complaining.  After all, I’m a guy.)

To make a long story short, plastic parts break.  Don’t believe me?  Look around your house.  I’d be willing to bet you can find something that is: a) plastic; and b) broken.  If not, I can only conjure two possibilities for this.  You’re either in a prison made before the 1950s and everything around you is steel and concrete, or you’re living in a primitive brush hut somewhere.  Either way, how are you reading this?

So, you have this broken plastic part.  Now you have three options.  You can throw the entire thing away and buy another.  You can search stores and the internet searching for a replacement part.  Or, if you want to save time and money, you can make a replacement part.

 

Bio-plastic from potatoes

You can use potato starch, or corn starch if you’d rather eat your potatoes (I know I would). If you go with corn starch, just skip the blending and straining.

 Take some potatoes.  Wash them.  Peel them.  Then cut them up in cubes the size of a …. well, I don’t guess it matters, so cut them however you feel like.

Throw them in a blender with about a cup of water.  Now, blend the crap out of them, about two minutes on the highest setting should do.  I used a Jim Croce song for my timer.  Yeah, I’m that out of touch with pop culture.

Strain off the cloudy water with a coffee filter, tea strainer, or just dump the mix onto a pair of pantyhose and let it drain. (That’s why I own pantyhose.  They are awesome for projects like this.  The fact that they would actually fit me is purely coincidence, I swear.)

Now, to make your plastic.  Pour about four ounces of cold water into a pot.  Add one tablespoon of the potato that you blended, two teaspoons of white vinegar and two teaspoons of glycerin. This is the time to add food coloring, if you want to color your plastic.

Put the pot on the stove and turn it to a low heat.  Start stirring it with a spatula, raking what mixture gets onto the sides back down into the pot.  Let the mix thicken a bit, then turn the heat up to medium.  Add a half teaspoon of baking soda and keep stirring.  Let the mix boil softly for about 10 minutes until the mix is, for lack of better word, goo.

Pour the goo into the mold of your choice (be sure to oil your mold first or you will never get it out….. ever), or spread it out on wax paper to make a sheet of plastic.  I made a mold of a green toy army man out of play dough.  (Soon as I get a camera, you’ll get to see it.  Sadly though, that’s one of the few things I don’t know how to make.)  Let your mold or sheet dry in the sun for a day or bake it in the oven at 150 degrees for two hours to dry it.

 

Making casein plastic from milk

Believe it or not, this technique for making plastic was developed by Leonardo Da Vinci. (Between the painting, inventing, and fixing all of Ezio’s broken crap, I wonder when he had tome to sleep.)

Heat up a cup of milk until it’s hot, but NOT boiling.  (I nuked mine in the microwave for a minute and a half.)

 Take it off the heat, or out of the microwave.  Stir in four teaspoons of white vinegar and keep stirring for a minute.

Now, pour the milk through a strainer.  Be not alarmed, grasshopper.  The lumpy blobs are not an accident.  It’s what we want.  (I’m torn.  The helpful part of me wants to tell you to do this step over the sink.  The sensitive part of me thinks that is so obvious that it would imply that I think you are a moron, thus insulting you.  The logical part of me feels that by not telling you to do it over a sink, those too stupid to do it over a sink will be unlikely to find a mate with curdled vinegary milk all over their floor, thus bettering the species thru natural selection.  The rest of me wants ice cream…. Cookie dough ice cream.)

Rinse off the blobs and mold them together with your hands.  This is the time to color them, if you so desire.  Mold it into the desired shape and let dry.

Making molds

If the item being molded being mostly two- dimensional, you can simply press the item into Play Dough, if you can stop playing with it long enough, then gently removing it.

Three- dimensional molds get more complex.  The best mold I have found thus far is made from caulk.  Take a box just larger than the item you want to mold, or make one out of a cereal box and tape.  Fill the box with silicone caulk. Take the item you wish to mold and liberally spray it with cooking spray, shaking it to remove the excess.  Suspend the item in the caulk and allow several days to dry.  Once the caulk is dry, cut the box in half with a sharp knife to remove the item. Then tape the box back together and fill with your chosen plastic mix.

 

I think it’s important to realize that although my main focus in this has been to replace broken plastic parts, you can make anything you want - forks, spoons, knives, sculptures, or even pink flamingos for your yard.  The only thing that limits you is your imagination.  Believe it or not, molding plastics is kind of fun.  Give it a try, and let me know what you create.