"The Future is Biodegradable"

Plastic is durable, flexible, and most importantly, a ubiquitous part of our daily lives. The plastic items we use for one hour will live on for hundreds and sometimes thousands of years; a design flaw that could be solved by switching to biodegradable materials. The Biosphere Cellulose Kitchen project explores how the production of bacterial cellulose, as a replacement for single-use plastic, could be integrated into our everyday routines. In between doing your laundry and taking out the trash, you could be fermenting, washing, and drying cellulose right at home. This cellulose kitchen is a kitchen island furniture piece that creates storage bags and film cover.

While this design piece shows how individuals can replace their single-use plastic waste with cellulose, the ultimate goal of the Biosphere Cellulose Kitchen is to develop new methods and tools that empower manufacturers to produce biomaterials at scale.

The Biosphere Cellulose Kitchen was launched in Atlanta, Georgia in June 2022 at O MediaLab. The launch included the physical furniture piece, a cellulose making demonstration, an exhibition of over one hundred dried bacterial cellulose pieces, a research report on the bacterial cellulose industry, and a lecture on the bacterial cellulose industry. The lecture was held again virtually through Speculative Futures.

"The future is plastic." That is what designers believed over one hundred years ago when the first synthetic plastic was created in 1907. This new durable, flexible, and lightweight material promised an easier life and cheaper products. Much to our dismay, the future has been indeed plastic as it is a ubiquitous part of our daily lives. A material we are constantly disposing of but follows us everywhere we go. Littered across sidewalks, in rivers, in oceans, and now as microplastics in our bodies. The ultimate design flaw of plastic is that it doesn't degrade. At least not in our lifetimes. Or our children's. Or our grandchildren's. And many, many generations after that. Why would we use a permanent material for things we want to be temporary? Plastic is the ultimate design oversight.

Bacterial cellulose has been in the periphery of scientific research for decades but the popularity of kombucha in the last decade coincides with artists, designers, and scientists experimenting with it as a material and the beginning of businesses developing around cellulose materials. Bacterial cellulose is a byproduct of the acetic acid fermentation process that many are familiar with such as the SCOBY in kombucha or "the mother" in apple cider vinegar. The materials cellulose are most commonly designed to replace are leather, paper, and plastic. In particular, bacterial cellulose has great potential in replacing shrink wrap, plastic bags, and thin film plastic. It's thin, it's flexible, and most importantly it degrades quickly over time unlike plastic which takes centuries and sometimes millennia to degrade.

Bacterial cellulose is not currently available to consumers as a plastic alternative. The Biosphere Cellulose Kitchen bridges that consumer gap by creating a way to make cellulose at home. The Biosphere Cellulose Kitchen takes the place of a kitchen island. The furniture piece has compartments for starting a batch of cellulose with a medium, fermenting the cellulose, and drying and waterproofing the material. With a starter cellulose piece and a medium called Hestrin-Schramm, the bacterial cellulose will grow thick enough in one week. Bacterial cellulose holds about 200 times its weight in water. That means a wet cellulose piece that is about a centimeter thick is ready to be dried to about the thickness of thin film plastic or paper.

The physical design of the Biosphere Cellulose Kitchen is a table with a removable cutting board on top. Underneath the cutting board lies an aluminum bin where the user pours the growth medium in combination with a starter cellulose piece (or what is sometimes called a SCOBY.) This bin is then moved to a rack under the table where four aluminum bins can fit to ferment for about seven days. Once ready, the cellulose can be rinsed off with water in the bin under the cutting board to remove excess stickiness. The cellulose is moved to the drying rack underneath the table where it is either dried as a standalone thin film plastic replacement or as a biodegradable storage bag with two pieces of cellulose that are dried together. When two pieces of cellulose are dried together, they fuse together to create one piece. The table utilizes this biological phenomena by using three wooden frames. Two of the frames hold the two pieces of cellulose together on all four sides. The third smaller wooden frame sits in the middle between the two cellulose pieces so that the cellulose does not fuse together in center of the bag. Once dry, the cellulose bag is cut off one side to create an open end that can be closed with a chip bag clip. With the help of fabrication team Silt Studio, the table was designed with natural and recyclable materials. The Biosphere Cellulose Kitchen was made with solid wood and the bins were made from recyclable aluminum instead of materials like anodized aluminum which cannot be recycled.

This design project came at the request of O Medialab to explore how biomaterials can be incorporated into home design. This Biosphere Cellulose Kitchen is meant to be speculative with only one physical model created but the implications are far reaching. While the Biosphere Cellulose Kitchen exhibition showed how individuals can replace their single-use plastic waste with cellulose, the ultimate goal is to develop new methods and tools that manufacturers can use to produce biomaterials at scale. The kombucha industry grew from $1 million in sales in 2014 to $1.8 billion in sales in 2019. The popularity of kombucha has paved way for artists and tinkerers to explore uses for bacterial cellulose but this has not translated into investment dollars for bacterial cellulose companies such as Polybion in Mexico with only $4 million in Series A funding or MakeGrowLab in Poland with $350k in seed funding. Plastic pollution is urgent but the bacterial cellulose industry is in its nascent stages.

The Biosphere Cellulose Kitchen was launched in Atlanta, Georgia in June 2022 at O MediaLab. The launch included the physical furniture piece, a cellulose making demonstration, an exhibition of over one hundred dried bacterial cellulose pieces, a research report on the bacterial cellulose industry, and a lecture on the bacterial cellulose industry. The lecture was held again virtually through Speculative Futures.