Plastic from Fish Scales

Science
Plastic from Fish Scales

Erik de Laurens recently graduated from the Royal College of Art. As part of his graduate exhibition, Erik presented his project The Fish Feast. He was experimenting with uses for fish scales (of which the commercial fishing industry discards tons annually) and discovered he could create a useful plasticby forming the cleaned scales under heat and pressure.

Unless I miss my guess, those are haddock skins he’s shown manipulating in the photo. Haddock scales are mostly collagen, which is what hide glue and gelatin come from. [via Boing Boing]

12 thoughts on “Plastic from Fish Scales

  1. TotalMonkey says:

    Step 2: Fish guts!

  2. Anonymous says:

    man, this was going to be a “news from the future” – everything is made outa fish

  3. Eccentric scientist says:

    This is what we can do with the invasive carp and snakehead species!  Hell, we could hunt them to extinction and it would be great! (in their invasive ranges I mean) Especially the European carps which are all but completely inedible.  I see a growing market for this sort of commercial fishing!  Now if we can can get the alewife fishermen to stop fishing in Maine and New York coastal waters where they are native and endangered and instead have them fish the alewife that are invasive and detrimental to the great lakes we could solve nearly all the invasive and endangered fish problems in America! (Well golby and sea lamprey, but we might be stuck with those forever).

  4. Eccentric scientist says:

    This is what we can do with the invasive carp and snakehead species!  Hell, we could hunt them to extinction and it would be great! (in their invasive ranges I mean) Especially the European carps which are all but completely inedible.  I see a growing market for this sort of commercial fishing!  Now if we can can get the alewife fishermen to stop fishing in Maine and New York coastal waters where they are native and endangered and instead have them fish the alewife that are invasive and detrimental to the great lakes we could solve nearly all the invasive and endangered fish problems in America! (Well golby and sea lamprey, but we might be stuck with those forever).

  5. Anonymous says:

    Connecting the forebrain to the midbrain is the diencephalon
    (in the diagram, this structure is below the optic lobes and
    consequently not visible). The diencephalon performs functions
    associated with hormones and homeostasis.[17] The pineal body lies just above the diencephalon. This structure detects light, maintains circadian rhythms, and controls color changes.

  6. sam says:

    I am very interested in this work and would really like to get in contact with Erik or Shawn. Can someone perhaps email any contacts to thinkfishtomorrow@gmail.com . Hope to hear from Erik or Shawn soon. ..

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I am descended from 5,000 generations of tool-using primates. Also, I went to college and stuff. I am a long-time contributor to MAKE magazine and makezine.com. My work has also appeared in ReadyMade, c't – Magazin für Computertechnik, and The Wall Street Journal.

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