I started off Monday morning with my meeting with Polly. We started our meeting with me explaining my overall topic and the whole process I had gone through to get to the stage that I was at. We concluded that I had two options of how to continue my project: Either continue using pre-made recycled plastic sheets, but then have a very well thought-through design (e.g. multifunctional furniture). Or I could focus on making the material myself, designing the manufacturing process and then keeping the design of the furniture simpler.
After some deliberation, I decided to make my own material. Last semester I had started off this project wanting to focus on the material and its manufacturing process. However, along the way I think I got lost in all the different aspects and problems that arise while working with plastic. The chat with Polly definitely helped me get back on track to make sure my project’s focus was on demonstrating that plastic can and should be reused instead of thrown away. I felt like creating a multifunctional table would focus too much on the design itself and would take away from the message I’m trying to send.
Once I had decided on that, I went down to the workshop to discuss ways in which I could make my own material. I had researched a few natural binders, or ones with fewer chemicals, that had been recommended to me by Aymeric from Draff. However, we realised that while natural binders would limit the chemicals incorporated into the product, at the same time it would cause huge environmental problems that would be worse than simply dumped plastic. The plastic pieces would still be encapsulated by another material and therefore make recycling impossible. Since I intend to create a more commercial product rather than a one-off educational table, we decided that the environmental damage would be too great to make the table top using this method.
At the end I decided that melting plastic into a table top would be my best manufacturing option that would cause the lease environmental damage. I would only heat the plastic to a low temperature, which does not actually release too many toxins. Additionally, since I will only be using HDPE, the table top could easily be recycled in the future. Henceforth, I started exploring the melting of plastic.
For the first sample, I made a mould to make simple rectangular trial pieces.
There was a lot of exploring temperature trying to not heat it up too much but still melt the plastic. In this first sample, you can see that the method of melting was not very effective, since a lot of whole plastic bits are still visible.
For the second sample I changed the temperature a little and my melting process. This worked so much better and took a lot less time.
Once I sort of figured out the best way to melt the plastic, I used the next sample to try and mix colours. I changed the temperature again because I was not happy with the consistency of the last trial. I also fiddled with the method of combining the individual plastic pieces into one whole mass.
Next weeks work will depend on how well the last trial turned out, but I will definitely continue working on combining colours and possibly starting to explore with different ones to figure out want colour combination I want my final piece to have.