Té; Bioplastics
Colombia Everett, Maria Cristina Huertas, Wang Zi-Yan
BOTANICS NOUN
Beverage, Plant
(teh). Tea.
Worldwide tea is the most commonly consumed beverage. In Taiwan, Bubble tea shops are everywhere. Tea is one of the most popular beverages amongst young people, people consume tons of tea every year. In tea industries, tea leaves are brewed just once to extract its flavour, then are discarded. Therefore, tea produces a large amount of organic waste in this industry.
One of the things that makes tea so fascinating is its smell, it is used to make essential oil, perfume and deodorant products. Naturally, tea contains tannins, this enables it to be used for dyeing purposes, on paper or textiles for instance. We did not use it for either of these functions, however, it did allow the materials to have a rich, somewhat sour tea aroma and an earthy dark brown colour. The tea variety that was used was black tea.
Other important properties of tea leaves are it’s cellulose contents as high as 70%, it’s high strength and stiffness. According to plant-based leather study, fibre is one of the most important elements for making vegan leather (Vijayaraghavan, 2021). The goal for this material was to experiment with leather-like textures using the tea leaves, through exploring which state of tea leaves fibre is best and the percentage of the ingredients.
Two different leather like tea materials were created; té.glycerol and té.starch. Different techniques and ingredients were used resulting in two té bioplatics leather with different properties and appearance. They could be used for accessories, light surface structures or even interior surfaces, as space dividers.