Narrator: The Shellworks is a team
of master's students at the Royal College of Art
and Imperial College London.
The Shellworks is all
about taking unknown biomaterial
and trying to bring it into the mainstream.
Narrator: Together they make bioplastics
from lobster shells.
The team is comprised of architects
and mechanical engineers and product design engineers,
and we all had this fascination with food waste
and specifically crustacean waste
and fish waste, which is not often looked at
from a design-and-engineering point of view.
The shells of these crabs and lobsters
will sometimes just go to a landfill
where they can start emitting methane,
and we were interested in whether there
was a way to valorize that waste stream.
Narrator: Over 250,000 tons of crustacean waste
are produced every year in the EU alone.
That waste is equal to about 1,600 blue whales.
But what's so valuable about that waste?
We found this biopolymer
inside crustacean shells called chitin
that you can treat in a certain way to extract
and actually make a bioplastic from those shells.
Narrator: Chitin is the second-most abundant
organic material on earth.
It's found in insects,
fungi, and crustaceans.
We started working with lobsters
because they're a really interesting waste source.
By weight, chitin accounts for about 30% of the shell,
and it's also the case that with lobsters,
they're eaten out the restaurant.
So as opposed to shellfish or shrimp
where they get industrially deshelled,
these lobster shells are just going to waste
at the restaurant source.
Narrator: Through chemical processes,
all that chitin can be turned into chitosan,
which is where The Shellworks comes in.
What you need to do is to extract the chitosan
before you can use it as a bioplastic.
So the first stage is an extraction,
which is this machine behind me.
So we've designed four machines,
Shelly,
Sheety,
Vaccy,
and Dippy.
The first machine is an extraction unit.
We basically put in ground-up lobster shells.
It runs through a set of processes,
and out comes the powder, which is the chitosan.
We will start with the shells.
We will extract the chitosan powder
and then to that we will add vinegar
in varying ratios.
That will form a kind of chitosan
and bioplastic goop,
which we will put into the dip-forming machine.
Each machine is kind of good
for making a different thing.
The sheet-former obviously only makes sheets.
The vacuum-former is good for making
kind of less three-dimensional reliefs,
so things like blister packaging.
And then the dip-molder is excellent
for making really extruded shapes,
so very three-dimensional objects.
We can also make plastic bags from these sheets
by gluing them together with more of the bioplastic,
which means that the bag is 100% chitosan
and so it's much more easily recycled.
We used our projects to illustrate
that the material can actually be formed
into lots of applications that could be
a really compelling replacement
for some single-use plastic items.
So we have designed plant pots that self-fertilize.
So they actually get planted with the plant
in the ground, and as they biodegrade,
they become a fertilizer for the plant.
The bioplastic is water soluble,
which is both a blessing and a curse.
It makes it very easy to recycle
but obviously limits the applications
that we can do with it.
So we're looking at ways of waterproofing material
with kind of natural wax coatings
that would make it more applicable
for a wider range of things.
I describe the machines as quite accessible.
We kind of designed them from scratch in workshops,
so potentially other people
could also build these machines.
The project is all about bridging the gap
between science and industry.
We find that there's so much stuff out there
in scientific papers which never actually makes
it into industry,
which is a real shame.
So we've kind of taken inspiration
from certain things that we've found
in scientific papers and developed those
into processes that might be scalable
in industry to kind of
really make this bioplastic something
that could be feasible in the real world.