Part 3: Results and conclusion by SillyCilly

What this work has brought to us

SillyCilly — 2015-01-21 16:08:51 UTC

It was, of course, a great moment of apprenticeship, always in a good mood to work with our friends. We learned to know each other even better, and we also learned "darker" sides of our personnalities, which came in the difficult moments, but jokes and laughs always arranged things!

There was a fair distribution of the work and we could count on each others and that's why we arrived to do all that. We learned to work by groups and we learnt to get organized. We also learned a large amount of things about the subject, and now we can say that we are plastic-making experts, for having repeated the experiments lots of times! We all think that plastic wastes are major issues, and we hope that our work slightly helped, at our scale, to prove that we can make more nature-friendly materials.

Assessment

2015-01-21 16:45:20 UTC

So we wanted to do plastic disposabe tableware which was biodegradable, but also that could be usable and handy.

We believe that we have succeeded in finding the right recipe, but we failed to give the plastic a proper shape. We made a plastic which was biodegradable, but also waterproof: to do that we added oil in the plastic. We succeeded at making a rigid plastic; indeed, the last experiments proved that this plastic was hard enough to be used to eat.

But we had lots of problem with the shape. We had plastics which were crinkling, or which were retracting into the mold. We failed to make proper knives and forks. However, at the end of our TPE, we managed doing a good spoon tip. The shape and the texture were really good, the only bad thing with it is that the handle of the spoon broke so it's now separated and can't be used to eat -except if you have very delicate hands.

Nevertheless, what we did for sure was improving our recipes with each experiments: starting from a thin and flexible plastic, we acheived to make a hard and solid one. Now what can we answer to our problematique (how can we make biodegradable plastic tableware?) ? It is that you have to try and try again in order to obtain exactly the consistence that you need. Of course, the data we gathered will be useful for further experiments. So it's absolutely not true to say that our work was a complete failure !

Acknowledgment

2015-01-21 16:50:27 UTC

We want to acknowledge a few persons who particularly helped us during the work.

We want to thank Mr.Martin and Mrs. Campagne for their help, their advice and their support as referent teachers.

We also want to acknowledge our parents who supported us and who allowed us to do some (dirty) experiments in their kitchen, without (too many) complaints.

We want to thank, as well, a few friends (they will recognize each others) our friends who gave us some advice, and who keeped up when we panicked because of our failures.

And last but not least, we also want to thank YOU, our reader, for carefully and kindly reading all of our work. We hope that you enjoyed it and that you learned something too!

Finished your reading?

SillyCilly — 2015-01-21 19:04:29 UTC

We're almost done! Check out the next and last (but not least) page!

http://padlet.com/CillyKarma/prodfin1S2part4

SillyCilly — 2015-01-21 19:17:47 UTC

Else, go back to the table of contents.

http://padlet.com/CillyKarma/prodfin1S2

Plastic best of

SillyCilly — 2015-01-22 18:08:51 UTC

The most successfull products.

SillyCilly — 2015-01-22 21:49:30 UTC

Plastic mix, looking like weird seaweeds.

SillyCilly — 2015-01-22 21:49:31 UTC

The "seaweed" plastic, strange-looking but a perfect texture.

SillyCilly — 2015-01-22 21:52:37 UTC

The orange stick, not very straight but strong and resistant.

SillyCilly — 2015-01-22 21:52:40 UTC

A bended hard fork.

SillyCilly — 2015-01-22 21:53:34 UTC

The last plastic made, perfectly looking spoon tips... but without sticks.