Biobased designers needn’t just wait for inspiration to strike. Online libraries for biomaterial materials are growing and flicking through them can be all it takes to spark new ideas.
Online libraries and archives are the next best thing to seeing and feeling samples of innovative renewable materials in person. We selected five intriguing materials we found at three major biobased and circular libraries with free online collections.
Future Materials Bank
Online material libraries often showcase innovations that are not available in commercial quantities. Future Materials Bank is one of the best examples, guided by the mission to collect material information and samples from makers around the world while disseminating knowledge about sustainable materials both new and old.
It is a not-for-profit organisation located at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht (The Netherlands) and currently has 436 pieces in its online collection. They are still open-calling for more submissions.
The website is easy to use for a designer searching for solutions. Users can easily filter by qualities (biodegradable? recycled?) or simply pluck one out using the random material generator function.
- Hairy chairs
The most exciting thing about exploring biomaterials is how much you can do with materials that lie unused right under our noses – even materials that grow on our heads. Biodegradable and renewable, the human hair-based composite created by Oksana Bondar is strong enough to make furniture. The manufacturing process felted wet hair into matted forms and laminates this with PLA bioplastics. The prototype stool that Bondar used to showcase her material’s structural capabilities is a curved, efficient shape that minimises the offcuts needed to achieve it. - An ancient fungus leather
A fungus composite, an alternative to animal leather, brings together ancient knowledge with modern practices. Designer Koppanen went in search of fast-disappearing craft knowledge about how to turn wild tinder fungus into functional materials, travelling to Transylvania in Romania where the craft was once a common skill among locals. The composite she has developed takes small amadou scarps by pressing them, using a compostable cellulose derivative as a binder. - Insect-origin blown-glass
Lac is a material naturally produced by certain insects to make their cocoons. Inspired by producers in Thailand, Ori Orisun Merhav set up the ‘Lac Lab’ in the Netherlands to imitate the practice he saw in Asia of harvesting and processing cocoons once hatched. Amazingly, the material, which is a natural polymer, has some of the same properties of glass, allowing it to be melted and then blown into delicately rounded forms. - Gelatine packaging
Better known as an ingredient in desserts, gelatine can also offer a formidable alternative to plastic packaging since it has all of oil plastic’s versatility when it comes to taking on colour and form. Bio’C’s submission to the Future Materials Bank is a process for cooking together gelatine, glycerine, water, and beetroot, a mix then poured into a mould and taken out again once set. Food packaging is the immediately obvious application for this edible biomaterial. The result is quite beautiful, achieving a translucent blown glass effect with very few inputs and a low-tech recipe. - Celery couture
Celery and chard are better known for their nutritional than their sartorial benefits but a material by a group of design graduates could change that. Clothing made of dissected, cooked, blended and arranged vegetable fibres shows off the functional possibilities of discarded vegetables, particularly the tough, fibrous stalks, stems, and outer skins that generally get lost from our material systems.
Koynē
The Koynē program based in Finland brings together artists with innovative ideas on renewable materials. To showcase their R&D, it has set up a small online library of sustainable materials made entirely with biological feedstock.
Though the focus here is on creating non-synthetic alternatives for creatives and artists to work with, many of the ideas could inspire scalable variations for industrial and consumer applications with a little bit of tinkering.
Koynē also runs a physical library called Habitare Materials at the Habitare design show in Helsinki, an annual event, offering an experimental space where visitors can explore surfaces and combine different materials together.
- Squeezing eggshells
Polymers and concrete are typical materials used in extrusion, a process used to create objects by pushing a material through an open shape. A circular alternative to these can easily be found in the kitchen, as Koyne shows in its eggshell biomaterials paste for extrusion or 3-D printing. Betiana Pavon was the artist and biotech designer that came up with the recipe. - Kombucha colonies
Kombucha tea is not just good for your gut – the biofilm that forms naturally on the drink during its fermentation can be used as a biodegradable material. Also known as scoby, it can be turned into a biofilm that can replace plastic covers and wraps. The properties of this bacterial cellulose can be altered by changing what kind of microbe populations are involved in the fermentation process. - Lichen wool
Koynē is big on all-natural, foragable raw materials and simple recipes that can be performed at any scale. Its entry in the materials library describes how Artist Paola Torres Núñez del Prado created a weavable material from species she collected herself from woodland trees in Finland. - Wild cotton yarn
Deep in the highlands of South and Central America, trees are adorned with bundles of cotton. The wild gossypium hirsutum looks just like typical cotton and it is a species that has been cultivated since at least 3,500 BC. Artist Dunja Krcek handspun and dyed the material in plant-based dyes, generating a local material ideally suited for an artisanal economy in the Peruvian highlights. - Wood paste
Another biobased extrusion material highlighted by the Koynē collection is wood waste. The process is simple: wood pulp material is mixed and ‘creamed’, gelled and thickened with various plant-based polymers, then piped into shape, and set to dry.
Biomaterials library Lithuania
The first biomaterials library in Lithuania is a physical space located in the capital Vilnius, but it is also open to the online public.
Its curators are still calling for new display submissions but their collection is already pretty substantial. There is an emphasis here on patented materials developed by Lithuanian biobased startups
- Root textiles
Beneath their quiet surface, grass roots can quickly form matted knots that merge into a continuous sheet. One biobased company Rootful is taking advantage of fast-growing grass roots to form a new kind of textile – one cultivated, not manufactured. The process allows wheatgrass seed to germinate, their tiny roots winding their way into a biodegradable fabric beneath to form a new material. - Piss Soap
Unbelievable as it may seem, this product does what it says on the tin: a soap made entirely from human waste, including urine, cooking oil, and wood ashes. - Amber dust
Amber is a beautiful biobased ‘jewel’, not a crystal like the mined stones it resembles but still a mesmerising natural material that has been crafted into decorative forms for thousands of years. Amber today is still used to manufacture products but the process creates large amounts of dust byproduct. Studio Agne has developed a biocomposite from this industry waste, finding a way to temper the softness and brittleness of the material with other plant and waste-based ingredients. - Newspaper-based wood finish
Quite literally, NewspaperWood turns newspaper into wood. Wood veneer to be precise. By using layered waste paper to mimic the growth rings of a tree, designer Mieke Meijer has managed to form a sturdy biomaterial that does the work of veneer made from plastic or from real trees. Since it does not rely on any fresh feedstock but rather uses up what is already abundant, it is an eminently sustainable way of bringing a natural aesthetic into interiors. - Giant hogweed packaging
Invasive, poisonous, and blessed with an intimidating name. There seems little to recommend the giant hogweed, except its sheer abundance and physical properties make it an ideal material to replace a whole host of less sustainable packaging materials, including plastic foam and cardboard. Atelie Schaft is behind this submission.
Finally, an honourable mention for Materiom, which offers another database that promotes the ‘next generation’ of waste-free materials. The company has an open-access database and community platform where users can search for materials by basic feedstock. There are more obvious contenders like agar alongside more unusual ones like apple pectin or sunflower seeds. The company’s revenue-generator are generative AI technologies that help producers and designers identify biobased materials that meet their needs.