my food site is weber_cam

September 8, 2010

polylactide utensils, day 1

While visiting OMSI (Portland OR Science Center), our utensils were biodegradable polylactide (recycle number 7 I think). So I took the biodegradable one on the left and placed it beside the plastic one on the right in a polyacrylamide hydrogel matrix to watch and see if the polylactide one decomposes. I'll do a shot each day until it decomposes and do a video of the result. Should be fun, it's starting to grow mold after a couple weeks.

4 comments:

Lexiloo said...

You come up with some interesting stuff, I tell ya.

Dave said...

Thanks Lexi. This is kind of a fun one. I thought it'd be there for years, but it's actually starting to grow some mold. I think it might actually degrade.

I like things that give us some new thing to observe every day.

Not Important said...

Any updates on this experiement?

Dave said...

Hey Gdad, I figured you would find this kind of interesting. Well, it's about 5 weeks into this and I think we're in for the long haul.

Here's an image of now:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/d_scarpetti/5063504760/

The pla spoon is on the left and is showing signs of mold and real live decomposition. The plastic is no different than the starting condition. But, the snag here is the glacial speed of the process. It's not going to be any 60 days as the manufacturer said. I think it'll be about a year if my poor sense of kinetics is at all correct. I also have to take the photos in the morning when the clarity for consistent white balance. I'll take periodic images and convert them to a movie when it's finished.