NEW MATERIAL

BEETLES TO MATERIAL

Amazing to see you wanting to transform the world of plastic with us! 👩‍🚀👨‍🚀

⚠️ Since some of these steps require a bit of knowledge and equipment or are even a little dangerous, we don't share all of it online. If you want to do it, write us and we can make sure together that you have all the right precautions in place: hello@plasticula.com ⚠️

#1: EXTRACTION

We use an extraction process of four steps:

First you dry the beetles and grind them into a powder. Then you start to slowly take away every little part of the beetle's shell, until you are only left with it's main polymer called 'chitin'. 

Finally you have to turn the polymer into it's deacetylized form, which called 'chitosan'. 👩‍🔬

#2: MAKING FOILS

Next you can start to produce the new material.
We spent a lot of time on developing ways of making good and consistant foils, so let us know, if it interests you and we'll share all we got with you! 😉

The main step goes like this: You now need to mix the material from the extraction with a light acid solution. Watered-down lemon juice does a pretty good job. Vinegar works as well. Then you will get a pretty glue-like mass, that you can either mix with other materials to make composites or use to create foils.

#3: MAKING PRODUCTS

And since we do know that 💸 makes the 🌍 go around: Here are some products we already made from the material. 100% harmless and compostable.

The material works best for all kinds of dry-packaging, like pasta, lentils or dryed mealworms!

But I guess you get the point. There is so much more to explore. Let's get started! 💪

RESOURCES

This is for all the nerds🤓: An on-going list of resources I found useful during my research so far. Let me know if you think something is missing.