Now, I’m very comfortable with my recipe for creating my biomaterials. Still, I’m not sure I completely understand the science and reason behind my recipes’ ingredients. The mindmap below shows a lot of content I researched relating to plastic components and properties and reconnecting the components relevant to biomimicry. Plastics are made from polymers, including plasticizers, filler, stiffening, and expanding ingredients. Each of these polymers has a unique role in coding the material relating to flexibility and shrinkage. I was looking into natural polymers to see where I could further expand my recipe and focus on creating the most sustainable product. My recipe is made from agar, which is made from seaweed. Unethically sourcing the seaweed can defer the whole concept of my brand and biomaterials. It’s really important for me that all my ingredients are sourced from ethical and regenerative materials. Studies have shown the viability of producing a range of bioplastics and biocomposites from red (Rhodophyta) and brown (Phaeophyta) seaweed through the extraction of agar, carrageenan, alginate, long-chain hydrophilic polysaccharides that form gels when dispersed in water.
I looked into various recipes with the same ingredients as my biomaterial recipe, and I want to compare and contrast the qualities and ratios of other agar-focused biomaterials. Searching through these recipes, I found sources focusing on alginate to replace agar for biomaterials; agar is made from red seaweed (Rhodophyta), and alginate is extracted from brown seaweed (Phaeophyta). I have been buying my agar agar, but understanding how to extract it is very interesting and critical to understanding my process.
For my sustainability statement, it is really important to understand what I am creating and doing to add to my final outcome. I will continue my research to understand why my material behaves the way it does and how it biodegrades. Before this element of research, I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the elements of plastic, but after decoding this information and understanding the role of polymers in relation to this, Understanding the different structures of polymers can reveal how the material breaks down and combines what I discovered is all the natural polymers I was researching have a linear or branched structure and more synthetic materials are crosslinked and networked. It’s more common for linear polymers to dissolve in water, and branch structures have a lower density. 