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The photographs above show the process from start to finish.
How to make bio-plastic using orange peel and other ingredients in your kitchen cupboards – a lockdown recipe.
Step by step method:
- Collect a large handful of orange peel
- Boil in a pan of water for 10 mins
- Drain
- Chop/blitz in blender
- Add 15ml of water to a bowl
- Then add 35g of the chopped up orange peel
- Then 50g of corn starch/flour
- Also add 2g of sodium bicarb
- And 5ml of lemon juice
- I added a tea spoon of dried sage as I didn’t have any sage oil but this isn’t necessarily as I realised the oil was just to make the plastic smell better.
- Mix together then stir over heat to create a dough
- Let it cool down then mould into what ever you want (top tip: make sure you don’t roll the dough too thin otherwise it might crack)
- Bake in oven for 45 mins at 160 degrees
- Let cool
If you’ve followed the recipe correctly you should have created a hard/solid, plastic-like material that is durable and could have been moulded into any shape. Although beware that it isn’t fully waterproof (can’t be exposed to liquids for a long amount of time) so a mug may not be the best idea as I found out, so maybe a more decorative object would be better.
