Turning Milk, Potatoes and Sugar into Plastics | HTME

this episode is sponsored by Squarespace it's linked to their support that our videos like this and more impossible we've recreated our website using Squarespace and love using it you can check out the link of the description if you need a website yourself get 10% off by going to Squarespace comm slash make everything one of my early and more abstract projects that I've done was exploring the variety materials that could be used to solve a basic need the storing and transport of water it's something that's easily overlooked but crucially important in the previous projects I've looked at primitive found methods of storage ceramics and even glassblowing but there's always been one more elusive material that's always seemed outta reach it is likely the most common material of all containers today plastic well for now I hope to revisit it and cover this material next first with some very basic plastic and polymers can be produced from previous items I've collected and made before and then by teaming up with the Center for Sustainable polymers at the University of Minnesota to make a common usable bioplastic plastics are an everyday part of life for packaging to the billions of products they contain toys tools and even artificial human organs almost everyone in the modern world has used plastics since the day they were born what exactly are plastics and how are they made plastic as a name implies are materials that are malleable to be molded into solid forms plastics are made of large molecules called polymers these large molecules have strong interactions with each other which results in material that could be tough stretchy and chemically resistant polymers exist naturally in the world in many forms such as latex and rubber wood and even in our DNA the first man-made plastic is considered to be partisan in 1855 and since that many forms of plastics have been made largely using petroleum sources when unfortunate downside with synthetic plastics however is it since they are so durable they degrade incredibly slowly many industries are looking to make the switch to bio plastics in an attempt to lessen their ecological impact in both the creation and discarding of their products many polymers are being developed out of renewable sources one with the express purpose of being biodegradable an important distinction to make is the bio plastics or plastics made from renewable resources instead of petroleum but does not necessarily mean they are biodegradable all the ones I'll be focusing on are biodegradable from information on the history and impact a plastic bioplastic we sure to check out next week's companion episode of our podcast simply complex or we'll be doing some additional interviews and deeper exploring on the topic but for now let's make some bioplastic myself one of the earliest plastics was made from the proteins of cow's milk so I'm gonna do how I've made cheese or tofu beef or milk proteins are kurta and separated using an acid such as vinegar in retrospect the cheese I made from my original sandwich use a similar method did seem a bit more like plastic than an actual cheese when separated the protein polymer can then be molded into the desired shape left to cure and harden the end product isn't the most stable and was often treated with formaldehyde to produce plastics like Gala leaf it was a common cheap material for items like buttons in the early 1900's another relatively simple polymer bioplastic to make is one based on starch extracted from things like potatoes in the past I've depolymerize this compound into simpler sugars through natural enzymes by moulting wheat to make beer and also by adding amylase enzymes to break down corn starch into corn syrup to extract the starch from potatoes I just need to chop them up then let the starch soak out and remove the solids then let the starch settle out at the bottom you can't the water solution rinse a few times so just a white starch powder remains to help make the starch more pliable another compound glycerin can be added glycerin is actually a byproduct of soap making and is produced during the soap application process oops here me a paper towel back when I made soap earlier this year actually went through and separates and glycerin for future uses like this separating the glycerin from the soap is pretty easy you just need to rinse the soap solution in water and let it separate the soap will float to the top well the glycerin will remain dissolved in water what could that be boiled off to leave the glycerin behind now to make the plastic combine water starch vinegar and glycerin into a solution and heat it as it heats up and the water boils off the plastic will start to form it can be molded and left to dry another bioplastic there's widely used is PLA or poly lactic acid it could also be called poly lactic PLA starts with a sugar often either from sugar cane or processed from corn which then fermented to produce lactic acid lactic acid is something I've messed with before previously when I was covering methods of preserving food it's produced by various forms of lactic bacteria which are crucial and the fermentation of many foods like pickles or kimchi I've had some issues with bad fermenting in the past oh my god this has been sitting on the top of my refrigerator six months yeah oh god there's flies no so to speed things along I started with an already isolated culture of lactic bacteria they then cultivated and fed sugar water eventually resulting in an acidic solution of lactic acid supposed to avoid air bubbles to transform the lactic acid into a useable plastic several chemical processes will need to be performed to combine these molecules into a larger polymer last couple weeks I've been fermenting some lacto bacteria in a sugar water solution here test it pH of three fairly acidic so the proofs it's been working we have some lactic acid so next I'm going to do a little distillation here just to concentrate it and then I'll have a monomer for making an actual polymer and we can begin to see some of the characteristics of plastic where becomes thicker it's not what can be a usable plastic let's see how close I can get right now so now it's mostly water but it has somewhat of a syrupy texture I would say see what we get once we move more of the water all right so now after letting it cool to room temperature I'm left with a very thick gooey syrup unfortunately lactic acid is transparent and this isn't which means there's a fair amount of impurities in here likely leftover sugar that's now caramelized and any other potential bacteria that may have been fermenting as well I bet this would make a decent glue except for the fact that's obviously water soluble but it's very sticky and many polymers are actually used for making glues a little bit of sweetness left from the sugar I imagine I'm surprised it's not sour since lactic acid is always what makes things kind of sour that's basically what makes pickles pickled it's weird to think that this isn't pickles so at this point I believe I have technically made a Paul but to make it a more usable plastic that's actually solid it needs to be beta into even longer chains which will change its chemical properties and for that is gonna take a bit of help from the University of Minnesota and they're gonna help me if you construct this and reconstruct it into even longer chain to form PLA which is poly lactic acid so let's leave it up to the professionals I'm at the University of Minnesota with the Center for Sustainable polymers they're gonna help me turn lactic acid into the bioplastic PLA the Center for Sustainable polymers is funded by the National Science Foundation through the division of chemistry when you take a small molecule and you make long chains out of it you get a plastic you get a material that has tough properties most of the plastics that we get that we're used to are made from oil but in the Center for Sustainable polymers we make them from renewable feedstocks such as corn or sugars in this case we're going to be making Paulie lacked ID but it's really difficult to make a long chain of poly life type and so we have to go through three distinct steps the first step is a dehydration and oligomerization we're gonna take lactic acid you take this molecule and you make short chains out of it by doing a dehydration by removing water so you'll connect that one to the bottom one and this one goes in the top so what we're doing here is we're gonna use this heating mantle we're gonna heat the lactic acid which is in solution and we're gonna remove all the water from it and then we're also going to make it into these short chains by dehydrating it so more water is gonna come off and so the water vapor is going to come out it's gonna condense and it's gonna go down in here it's under a vacuum because we are trying to push this reaction to go faster and to go farther I also just realized we need to stir bar I was exciting great job Andy okay now we need to insulate and heat it up it's about six hours later as you can see a bunch of water has collected and the receiving flask and now we're going to unwrap this and take a look and cool it down and as it cools down it's going to solidify it's going to become really thick and viscous still a little warm but you can see it's pretty thick much thicker than the water we've taken lactic acid and made short chains which are polymers but they're very very small polymers that's why we get this thick behavior is because it is a polymer but they're not very long changed they're not suitable for making anything useful it's just very very thick you can see on the outside it's barely moving at all on the inside it's moving isn't overhand grip right switch to underhand flip back over hand today we're gonna take the short chains of poly lactic acid and make a ring out of it another small molecule and that's actually gonna require something else a catalyst so you can actually take a look at it it's about 1 and 1/2 grams in there we won't need that much then tomorrow we'll be able to take this monomer or this molecule and make long chains of poly lactic we're gonna operate at really high vacuums today you have to fill up some doers fill with liquid nitrogen as traps so stuff doesn't go all the way through this apparatus and into the pump that's pulling a vacuum we have to protect the pump now we're gonna put the traps up it's not the most graceful process that's okay the good thing is the massive apperance so today we're gonna use this a receiving flask will cool this to make sure everything condenses before it gets to the vacuum and we'll insulate this to make sure this stays relatively hot so that the Loctite actually gets over so the catalysts it's called tin octo 8 or stannis octo 8 which is a liquid tin catalyst so we took the short chain poly lactic acid we've add some catalyst and then we heated it under a high vacuum to pull off lactide which is formed by the deep polymerization of the polymer which is here and the lactide is this nice white crystalline solid which collects in the receiving flask here this this is Lac tied to the first step you make just very short poly lactic acid chains in this step you break them down into a monomer or a molecule that can be polymerized much better ultimately a good plastic has very long chains you'll see there's some stalagmite type crystal formation and then also this beautiful stuff on the side here this worked really well pretty stoked about it this is like where hard is in science yes the crude lactide needs to be further purified to do that they added a solvent and heated it and moved it into a new flask to slowly cool recrystallize Finley now purified solid lactide can be separated using a vacuum filtration system today we're taking crystals they are lactide crystals and we are polymerizing them into very long chains to do so we have a bunch of lactide in this pressure vessel which can hold high pressures we're gonna add a few things one of them you're familiar with is a catalyst the other thing we're gonna put in there is also a white solid we call it an initiator it actually starts every polymer chain these molecules will help the lac type polymerize in a more controlled fashion so we're taking the air out because the air can influence the reaction and so we're going to do is we're going to put a very heavy gas just going to quickly introduce the heavy gas and then cap it really fast and it should have a decent inert atmosphere not perfect but good enough there's the oil bath preheated the solid that I put in there is the initiator and this big amount of lactide should melt pretty quickly and you'll see it start to stir alright here it is is the product I can't even crack it so there's no way to get it out really except for dissolving it who's that glowing that thing is some solvent who's gonna put it in here the solvent is gonna dissolve the polymer over time so when we come back tomorrow this should all be one homogeneous mixture are we really already there's no light on this one yes the lights out too today we're going to isolate the polymer through a process called precipitation so we're gonna call this step three point five well we did last time was we took this lactide and made poly lactide which I can label here so now we have these long chains of poly lacked ID they were stuck in the reaction vessel so we had to dissolve them up so we put them in a what we call good solvent something that it likes and we're gonna drip this in to a bad solvent the bad solvent is not good for the polymer so the polymer is going to come out as a solid but the catalyst is going to stay in the in the solvent so in this step we're separating out either residual catalysts or residual and black tied from the polymer there's so much polymer and there's a stir bar that needs to keep moving so we're gonna do it pretty quick we're gonna have just this stream flow in then we're gonna try and flow it in right into that vortex so that the fresh stuff coming from the top is always continuously meeting fresh solvent as predicted we already have a big ball of polymer we'll call it a polymer there it is boom beautiful that's nice so this is all really fluffy and contains a lot of methanol so we're gonna have to get rid of the methanol later it's pretty nuts a lot of polymer we film in landscape so here yeah with the dried polymer kind of rip it open very fibrous from all those little strands kind of like a cocoon this melts at about 170 so now we're gonna melt it all in this oven which has nitrogen in it boom now we should have a nice sawing slab of it that melts it became that this right here what you're holding is the stuff right after precipitation except right after precipitation it was very wet a lot of methanol in it so we just dried it so now you can feel and you can kind of squish it it's actually pretty dry and then we take that and just melt it there's a lot of air in it it's very light and fluffy and we melt it down into this I mean it was a pancake that we broke into multiple pieces and so it gets much harder and much more dense chemically the same yeah nothing is different one's just been heated and you can see like where the bubbles were leaving you want to get in tight on that [Music] this is the final product ready yeah basically this is poly lacked I'd which people turn into most commonly you'll see it in these cutlery packets so they'll make forks and knives and stuff so these types of things are formed from this type of pellets or powder it's pretty close and so you just need to mold them into something like this thanks to the University of Minnesota and the Center for sustainable polymers I now have some PLA so this is a actually the same stuff they used in 3d printers so potentially this could be melted into a filament and used to a 3d print a container but I'm gonna say that for a different video so I'm gonna do a kind of simpler method I'm just gonna melt it on a pan at low temperature and it'll soften up and I can reform it and shape it and mold it to form a cup a little bit of a struggle to get that last one off but I have the cup so I did several attempts at all the different types some of the potato starch didn't quite dry out well enough probably and boil off and off yes too wet mashed potatoes this might actually hold something kayson's alright it cracks a lot when it dries get it out in one piece can I get it out in two pieces can I get it out in three pieces no drink of it smells a little like cheese sure not too bad I broke it I noticed the lactic acid was actually starting to harden a little bit so I heated it up again and tried to pour it into a mold but enough versity through it just leaving a big puddle but then as it dried they take the top layer solidified so I try pulling it out and see if I can kind of mold it it didn't really work it's kind of turned into like a fruit leather like a fruit roll-up definitely has plastic characteristics but it's also super sticky kind of girls it's not bad then the PLA was a bit of a pain to actually try a mold I talked to guys at the year they just said like I just melt it and then kind of probably melted over for long and be super easy it was not that I kind of kind of stuck to everything did not manage to find anything to be a good release shatter it basically get off with the muffin pan and got lots of burns in the process that was not fun yeah I got most of the plastic off so hopefully my mom's not too mad about this muffin man but my second attempt using the tin foil was actually worked out pretty good let's try some chemistry I can chemically remove it and dissolve it in hydrochloric acid it works so there you can actually see some of the properties of plastic coming in with its nonreactive nnessee there's still tinfoil in here and that's because it's coated in plastic which is a little protection so thanks to the Center for Sustainable polymers at the University of Minnesota it doesn't make some PLA which is still a pain to mold and ultimately that was kind of the biggest challenge and all this was it I could make plastics but actually molding them and shaping them it's pretty difficult to fix something I will continue to work with also peel like a muse for 3d printing will make it a lot easier to actually form shapes so it might be trying that in the future this will just be the beginning of getting into plastics and polymers and I hope to continue to produce some other better results both on my own and with additional assistance I've already collected some potential sources from make my own rubber soon and while gaining access to a natural source of petroleum has remained a bit out of reach I have managed to get some samples of crude oil to potentially start making my own synthetic polymers as well thanks again to Squarespace for making this episode possible 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Channel: How To Make Everything

Views: 432,223

Rating: 4.8788624 out of 5

Keywords: HTME, DIY, Fun, Smart, Learn, Teach, Maker, History, Science, Innovator, Education, Educational, School, Invention, Agriculture, Textiles, Industry, Technology, bioplastic, plastic, garbage, oil, plant, sustainable, environmental, chemistry, engineering, material, material science, chemical engineering, sustainable polymers, polymers, monomers, pla, 3d printing, molding, polylactide, poly lactic acid, starch, potato starch, thermoplastic, biological, fermenting, lactic acid, fermentation, university of minnesota, u of m

Id: kjvQMMQWNGE

Length: 20min 56sec (1256 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 11 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/colorblood]

Pretty interesting thanks for sharing