ProjectSeafood.com - Comb to scratch the wax of a surfboard
Jennifer Gadient & Fabian Wyss
Jegenstorf (Switzerland)
Material: HDPE bottlecaps collected beachside
ProjectSeafood is an adventurous attempt of Fabian Wyss and Jennifer Gadient from Switzerland to explore the possibilities of mobile digital plastics recycling. Equipped with a plastics shredder, a Noztek extruder and a desktop FFF 3D printer, we drove our mobile recycling fablab along the mediterranean coastline of Spain all the way down to Morocco to collect household plastic waste beachside and transform it into 3D printed objects. We mainly focus on transforming HDPE waste in form of bottlecaps, wash them, shred them, extrude the handmade granule into filament with a slightly modified Noztek extruder and then feed the 100% recycled plasticstring into our Ultimaker 3D printer. Having had an idea of feasibility but no proof of concept the time we left Switzerland, we had to tweak, tune and experiment quite a bit while being on the road to be able to create a more or less reproducible workflow and object quality. Yet we need to put a lot of manual work and aid into the comparably slow processes and thus at the time only produce very small editions of sea and surf related artifacts. With the WAXCOMB, we have our first actually usable Surftool, that goes beyond decorative. Our second product will be sunglasses, produced with the same technique, though they are still under construction. After half a year of living, developing and creating on campsites or remote beaches, we are happy that despite minor scratches all our machines survived the heavy environment astonishingly well.