Tag Archives: bio-materials

This 100% biodegradable packaging material is made from brewers’ spent grain!

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I am still learning about sustainable materials and how that ties in with creating a circular economy. A circular economy is a system of closed loops in which raw materials, components, and products lose as little of their value as possible while renewable energy sources are used and the product’s lifecycle ends naturally. One such innovative material is ‘Trebodur’ – an organic material made entirely from brewers’ spent grain!

Brewers’ spent grains are the residues that accumulate from barley malt during the process of lautering while making beer. So what binds the material to give it strength? The contained proteins in the spent grains act as a natural binder, now that’s a self-sufficient material! Creators Niko and Tillmann did extensive research and several experiments with natural fibers and binders. At the end of that process, they found the capabilities of brewers’ spent grain and used the self-binding fiber material to develop the ‘mabeerial’ which doesn’t need any additional binders. “In the future, we will increasingly need to substitute petrochemical materials. 100% natural? You won’t make it!” but the creators of Trebodur made it happen by developing an entirely natural material.

Being a 100% biodegradable, Trebodur is a perfect choice for creating products that are used and thrown at large events or even in PR packages. It can be used for all kinds of packaging products and become a substitute material for paper and plastic packaging. At the end of the lifecycle, products made from Trebodur can be easily composted without any residue or harmful waste. This has immense potential to reduce single-use waste. “Due to its utterly natural origin, the material decays quickly, even on garden compost heaps. Furthermore, it is possible to add substances like minerals, ashes, or even plant seeds to the material to supply the soil,” says the team. They give drinking responsibly a whole new meaning!

Designers: Niko Stoll and Tillmann Schrempf

The materials for this pair of ‘bio-headphones’ are entirely grown in a laboratory

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You’re bound to feel slightly bewildered when you hear the term “bio-headphones”. I was too, initially, when I read about the Korvaa. You see, the Korvaa isn’t your regular pair of cans. It isn’t made from plastic, memory foam, metal, leather, or wood (like some premium headphones). Korvaa, on the other hand, uses a more unusual genre of materials including stuff like fungi, bacteria (the good kind), and biosynthetic spider silk.

Created as an “experimental science collaboration that explores the design and functionalities of novel, bio-based, microbially grown materials”, Korvaa uses a fungal mycelia for the foam cups, fungi film as a leather substitute to cover the foam-cups, and microbial bio plastics for the outer body. Designed to explore the possibility of using new, bio-based materials to create regular consumer products, the headphones were perhaps the perfect playground. They have size, weight, and ergonomic constraints… plus they require parts that are both hard as well as soft. Korvaa required multiple iterations to arrive at the materials that were finally used in its construction. Some parts needed to be cultured and grown in a mold, while others needed to be freeze-dried to be worked with. At the end, Korvaa’s build was achieved using a combination of 3D printed yeast, while the foam in the cups was formulated using a combination of a foaming fungus-based protein known as Hydrophobin and a stabilizing plant cellulose. The leather-esque cover on the foam cups is, in fact, fungal mycelium, which lends a rich brown color to the off-white pair of headphones, and right on the inside, covering the audio driver, is a mesh-cloth created by spinning biosynthetic spider silk into a fabric.

An incredibly unusual experiment to begin with, Korvaa hopes to be a testing-zone for more bio-materials in the future. While this isn’t a pair of headphones you could pick up from your local electronics store (or laboratory, perhaps?!), it’s a great initiative to work towards developing and democratizing materials that contribute to a much more circular economy!

Designers: Aivan and Synbio