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Ourboros: 

Normative Manufacturing Processes

By - Audrey Hampton
Course: Metabolic Materials Between the Animate and the Inanimate, Spring 2024
Instructor: Michael Wang
    Ourboros is a research based project of a specific material, petroleum-based plastics, from its formation, extraction, processing, and end-of-life cycle.The project was developed in Michael Wang’s course Metabolic Materials Between the Animate and the Inanimate during Spring Semester 2024 at GSAPP. The material choice of petroleum-based plastics was a continuation of multiple previous explorations into finding a circular use for plastics without releasing toxins in the process. An earlier Studio project, Greetings from Trash Island!, developed during Antonio Torres and Michael Loverich’s Summer 2023 Studio Untethered for a floating island initially imagined an island formed from  informal ‘trash islands’ currently present in our oceans, but ultimately proposed an ‘island’ that digested the ‘trash islands’ through various organic transmutative agents, such as bacteria, algae, and fungi. Therefore, Ouroboros was developed as an opportunity to investigate the feasibility and applicability of these digestive processes at a different scale.
    The project began by researching the organic origins of petroleum, the processes required to transform crude oil into consumer plastics, and the final resting place for the products that are incapable of being recycled. Plastics recycling still requires a large amount of energy and resources to be given a second life, and often has a limit to how many times the material can be reconfigured. From there, the research looked into organic processes capable of digesting plastics, and what was left at the end of the metabolization.  One digester, the fungi pleurotus ostreatus, or oyster mushrooms, is a common edible mushroom that is both foraged from forested areas and cultivated commercially. Oyster mushrooms are also used to remediate soils contaminated with diesel oil and are capable of digesting certain categories of plastics (such as PET, identified with the number ‘1’ in a triangle), resulting in a crop that is entirely edible and non-toxic to humans. Researchers, such as Professor Dee Carter at the University of Sydney, have been studying the adaptability of fungi  to consume different substrates through the extraction of enzymes that reduce the substrate molecularly to allow the fungi to digest the material.


    The intent with Ourboros is to showcase an alternative to traditional plastic recycling by  combining the recycling of an old product and the production of a new material that does not need to be recycled. Traditional recycling strives to reform used plastic into ‘new’ plastic for consumer use, the cycle ultimately ends with the material being degraded and discarded to a landfill; Ouroboros aims to give plastic a cyclical future by allowing it to move beyond waste and transform back to an organic material. The research was applied into a physical object that reimagined commercial mushroom farming as both a means of producing food, as well as digesting and reducing plastic waste. The typical mushroom farm is situated in carefully controlled conditions indoors to optimize the growing cycle. Crop rows are replaced with aisles of shelving units that house the individual ‘grow bags’ of mushrooms. Each individual crop is grown from a plastic bag, to maintain humidity and sterility, and contains an inoculated substrate, typically sawdust or wood chips.


    The project proposed a reimagined mushroom grow bag that self-digests; fungi is both the digesting agent and the end-product as it completely transforms, not just repurposes, plastic into a form that can be reintegrated into the carbon cycle. The container and substrate are inseparable, both waste plastic, that over several successive crop cycles leaves no trace behind.
Bibliography
- Rhodes, C. J. (2014). Mycoremediation (bioremediation with fungi) – growing mushrooms to clean the earth. Chemical Speciation & Bioavailability, 26(3), 196–198. https://doi.org/10.3184/095422914X14047407349335
- Samat, A.F., Carter, D. & Abbas, A. Biodeterioration of pre-treated polypropylene by Aspergillus terreus and Engyodontium album. npj Mater Degrad 7, 28 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41529-023-00342-9
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