Project Seafood Plastic recycling project is an innovative venture by Fabian Wyss and Jennifer Gadient. The couple have been exploring the possibilities of mobile digital plastics recycling, amidst an ever-increasing global crisis of plastics pollution. Equipped with a plastics shredder, a Noztek extruder and an ultimaker 3D printer. The creative couple drove their mobile recycling fablab along the Mediterranean coastline of Spain down to Morocco to collect washed up household plastic waste and transform it into 3D printed objects.
Every day, tonnes of consumer plastics are escaped into our oceans. They are subsequently carried by tides and washed up on beaches around the world. Despite being disposable, these plastics are manufactured to last and take up to 700 years to break down naturally. The Seafood Project exists to intervene by collecting these robust plastics and giving them proper permanent use in the form of surf products.
The two mainly focus on transforming HDPE waste in the form of bottle caps. These are washed and shredded, the handmade granules are extruded into filament with a Noztek extruder and then the 100% recycled plastic string feeds into their Ultimiaker 3D printer. After 6 months of living, developing and creating on campsites or remote beaches, the duo is delighted that despite minor scratches, all their machines survived the heavy environment astonishingly well!
The pioneering Project Seafood Plastic Recycling project had an idea of feasibility but of course no proof of concept upon leaving home in Switzerland. Fabian and Jennifer had to tweak and experiment quite a bit while on the road to create a somewhat reproducable workflow and object quality. A lot of manual work was needed in a relatively slow process, and thus they only produced very small yeilds of surf products. Nevertheless, the innovation of this couples venture will undoubtedly inspire great things from themselves and others in the future.
Learn more and follow along at www.projectseafood.com
