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]