Bioplastics, Kombucha and Banana Peals

I did some experiments to see if I could make materials from waste tea and sugar streams. I explored waste sugar sources such as rotten fruits, fruit peals, wasted food, etc. The following unoptimized process produced a plastic material that qualitatively appears to have good tensile strength, but has poor shear strength. These properties have not been explored systematically. Here are the steps used for the process:

Process:

1) wash a plastic bin with soap, water, a few water rinses and then boiling hot water to remove all bacteria and residues.

2) one banana peal and an inch of banana were with 4 table spoons of used tea leaves(these tea leaves had been used to make a brew and had some bits of flavoring such as ginger and fennel) added to a composter ( Food Cycle) to remove any germs. I would like to try other more accessible sterilization methods such as only boiling, or using UV light. The composter also grinds the sugar stream to a powder. A simple grinder should be able to achieve a similar consistency.

3) the powder from the composter was added to 3.5 cup boiling water (filtered tap water was used. I have not analysed the trace elements in the water. I live in Bangalore where you get high quality Kaveri water.). This mixture was steeped for around 10 min and left to sit for half an hour to cool.

4) To this cooled mixture 1.5 cups of water were added to further cool the liquid. This liquid was strained and to remove all solid particles and when the liquid was cooled to around 80F a single cup of kombucha from Dad's hack's darjeeling kombucha was added to the liquid.

5) This liquid was left to sit in my attic with the plastic lid lightly on(not snapped on just covering to prevent anything falling in).

6)After waiting for 2 days a layer of SCOBY had formed on top of the plastic bin

7) This layer was then dried to form this plastic layer:

8) After 4 months the material looked the same: