_edited_edited.jpg)
Corn Starch Plastic
What do you need🧪:
-
10ml of water
-
1.5ml of glycerol
-
1.5g of cornstarch
-
1ml of vinegar
Procedure:
Put all of the ingredients in a beaker and heat up until it starts to be sticky and dense, the reaction takes around six minutes and should be stirred constantly to avoid burning and to keep the ingredients mixed. If we wanted to have coloured plastic, we would add food colouring, as we did.
​
Now to explain the reaction:
Starch is broken by the temperature and the vinegar. The broken starch is then reassembled as a polymer, through a polymerization reaction, the broken starch can then be labelled as a monomer. The glycerol makes our plastic more flexible and less brittle. This also happens in most other bioplastic recipes, like the plastic we made out of milk.
​
To get to this recipe, we had to make multiple tests in which we changed the quantities of each component. We even tried to make it without the glycerin, it ended up looking like glass. If we had more time, probably we would get to a stronger and more resistant plastic.
Since we wanted to test this new product, we thought about applying it more creatively doing so we discovered that this type of bioplastic is already growing in the plastics industry.
