Kombucha Scobies made from Waste Streams for paper/plastic substitutes

Suzanne Lee in her Biocouture and KombuchaCouture exploration pioneered the idea of using Kombucha Scobies for a bio leather. Since her pioneering TED talk in 2014, using Kombucha scobies in various fashion applications has exploded as a circular solution to fast fashion. In her original talk, Suzanne Lee had suggested that waste streams may be used for making these organic materials. Most of the designers exploring kombucha scoby based materials have published recipes involving pristine ingredients (i.e new tea, refined sugar). In another post, I look more holistically at attempts to make plant-based leather alternatives.

My aim has been to see if you can produce a reproducible product from a Kombucha culture that feeds on a true waste stream.

I was aiming to try and make products like a plastic bag, gift card, wrapping paper, sweet box instead of more durable items like leather or jewelry. My rational for this was in these applications any decomposition of the product is a benefit rather than a hinderance, so long as the decomposition occurs after the desired shelf life/duration of the product. Januz at the School of Form in Poland has explored the use of Kombucha Scobies for plastic packaging. She found that the primary block to using this material for large industrial packaging is scale up of the processing.

Items like gift wrap, small bags, wedding sweet boxes, and party decorations are items where some amount of artistry may warrant a price for a process that isn't easy to scale into large industrial scale processes as well as be suitable for a product that begins to degrade after a year.

I found two recipes that seemed interesting for some of these applications that used true waste streams.

One recipe produces a plastic like material from waste tea(i.e tea that has already been boiled once for use as a drink) and some waste banana and banana peal as the sugar source(i.e mixture of all collected peals and bits of banana). This material on a cursory inspection appears to have good tensile strength, but may not have the shear strength required for a packaging that carries heavy objects.

The second recipe uses waste tea and apple cores to produce a more thick rubbery paper material that might be suitable for more heavy duty packaging as well as wrapping paper.

Below are two pictures of 1) a scoby produced from the apple core recipe[top left], and 2)an attempt at dyeing the scoby with food coloring to make decorative elements to put on gift boxes and such[top right], 3) plastic like material from banana waste stream as sugar source[bottom left], and 4) a wrapping paper made from the apple recipe where the material mildly self-adheres(it isnt sticky) but you can press hard to get a gift wrap with no outward adhesives[bottom right]. Pictures, 1,3, and 4 are from over 4 months after fabrication. These three products lasted well for over 4 months.