Tag Archives: plastic

Return of the Jedi See-Through Ships: Clear Wars

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The spaceships and starbases in Star Wars are some of the most iconic and recognizable in the history of moviemaking. There are lots of ways that collectors can enjoy these ships at home, from LEGO Imperial Star Destroyers to drones that look like the X-Wing fighters. Now, you can add to that list these see-through models.

This set of four ships comes from Bandai Spirits and includes tiny transparent models of an X-Wing Fighter (1/144 scale), the under-construction Death Star II (1:2700000 scale), a Y-Wing fighter (1/144 scale), and the Millennium Falcon (1/350 scale). Each one is made from PVC and ABS plastic and comes with a desktop display stand with the ship’s name on it.

The set is available for order from Amazon (affiliate link) for about $34, and would make a great gift for any Star Wars fan.

This plastic hanger lets you carry shopping bags the easier way!

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Designed to free-up your hands, this little plastic contraption acts like a hanger for your bags, transferring the weight of the multiple bags to your shoulder. The Tote-It can carry as many as 6 bags (3 on the front and 3 on the back) to free up your hands, helping you carry your stuff easily and walk faster too. The plastic hanger can carry as much as 50 pounds worth of weight without breaking a sweat… that’s provided your shoulder can carry that weight too! With a relatively flat profile, the Tote-It rests on your shoulders without hurting them, and thanks to its foldable design, it fits right into your bags too when you don’t need it! I’ve got to admit, using the Tote-It may get you a few glances and stares as you strut down the road, but that’s so much more bearable than having to struggle with large bags and aching hands, no?

Designer: Tote-It

Google pledges to ‘maximize’ recycled material in own products

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Google has been making consumer hardware under its "Made by Google" brand -- like its Pixel phones and Google Home Minis -- for three years, and dabbled in other hardware for a few years before that. Now, it's ready to make its products more sustaina...

Americans consume an alarming amount of microplastics

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Americans consume tens of thousands of microplastic particles every year -- and that's just from the food we eat. Microplastics are also found in the air we breathe and the water we drink. Thanks to a study published in the journal Environmental Scie...

PocketMaker is literally a palm-sized, low-cost 3D printer!

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Determined to make 3D printing accessible to all, the PocketMaker was created to be an incredibly competitive, low-cost, value-for-money printer to beat all other printers. Unlike most 3D printers that occupy a good 4-9 sq.ft. of space, the PocketMaker literally occupies the same amount of space as your palm and fingers, and comes with a detachable/replaceable printer head/extruder that you can easily swap when you find the nozzle getting blocked. The PocketMaker comes with plastic rails, not only bringing down the cost, but the weight too, and while plastic-to-plastic movement isn’t as smooth as a metal-on-metal gear/rail system, the PocketMaker’s small size makes up for it, giving you a tiny, low-cost printer that is capable of generating 8*8*8cm prints with no hassle. The PocketMaker works with PLA filament, allowing its baseplate to remain plain (unlike ABS printers that need a heated plate), truly working to create a proper, easy-to-use printer that’s low on space and cost, but high on possibilities!

The PocketMaker is a winner of the A’ Design Award for the year 2019.

Designers: Lang Qiyue and Yang Tian

Evian’s answer to wasteful plastic bottles is a smart water dispenser

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Evian knows that plastic water bottles aren't terribly kind to the environment, and it has a clever solution to that problem: give drinkers a way to kick the bottle habit altogether. Its newly launched Renew water dispenser relies on unique 5L (1.3g...

This colorful, marbled speaker is made from non-recyclable plastic waste

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While plastic waste, to a certain degree, can be recycled, it’s just a small percentage of the total waste out there. Certain polymers grow past their ability to be recycled because of additives, impurities, stickers, prints, etc. and this is the plastic that causes the biggest problem because it just can’t be recycled.

Brighton-based design studio Gomi is trying to be a part of the solution. The Gomi speaker, designed by the studio, uses these unrecyclable plastics as its primary raw material, turning as many as a 100 plastic bags into a blockish speaker that churns out music and looks spectacular while doing so. The speaker’s block comprises three separate parts or modules that can be easily separated and melted down to form new parts when imperfectly formed or when discarded. Its simple blockish shape enables this, and also forms a brilliant canvas for the beautiful marbled effect of the colored plastics that interact with each other. Gomi’s raw materials and hand-crafted marbling ensure that no two speakers look the same, making them bespoke and one-of-a-kind.

Designed to be a great speaker too, Gomi partnered with electronic engineers and audio professionals to hone the sound of the speaker, and even used recycled denim for acoustic insulation! Plus, in a bid to make sure that the Gomi lives up to its purpose of being a speaker that champions a cradle-to-cradle approach, the company is even offering free repairs for their products and devising a system where customers can return products to be recycled.

Designer: Tom Meades (Gomi)

Giant plastic-collecting ‘pool noodle’ breaks apart in the Pacific

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The "giant pool noodle" dispatched into the Pacific Ocean last September to catch and clean up thousands of tonnes of floating plastic has run into trouble. Invented by Boyan Slat when he was 17, the 2,000-foot-long U-shaped floating barrier was desi...