When I saw this over on Inhabitat (Link), I thought it was a joke. Then I seemed to recall something about this or something similar elsewhere. Now I don’t know. But it does get me thinking. That’s a good thing on a stormy weekend.
This is from “The Hand Up Project” description on the website of Elizabeth Demaray (Link), the person behind this neat little project:
I am currently designing these structures to better fit the animal’s needs and the architecture of its form. It is the aim of this project to make die injection molds so that the houses are mass producible, in large quantities, in plastic. It is our desire to secure corporate funding for this process which would also allow us to put a small corporate logo on each house before it is placed in the wild.
I wonder if she could use some help. I can make forms much more like shells than what’s being shown. And I know manufacturing processes. Think I’ll squeeze some time in for something.
{Image Copyright © Elizabeth Demaray}
Great! So when Hermit crabs and shelled mollusks go extinct from all the pollution all this plastic adds to the environment, we’ll have billions of these lying around *just in case* we can mass-genetically reproduce them and reintroduce them to the wild! Way to forsee a future problem!
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You got to hand it to the spin-doctors for trying to make a mass littering / spamming campaign sound environmentally. :D
Only there are new materials showing up that may be environmentaly sound; more like the material of a shell actually. It’s the first thing that I considered as well and have emailed the artist to learn more.
I’m thinking a post-processed cellulose would work. There are some new ceramics being developed that might find an application as well. And now that scientists have made headway into how nacre forms bonds, there might be more to come (see earlier post – https://blog.rebang.com/?p=765 ).
Just wanted to add this pointer: Core thread on HP biodegradeable printer housing. Unfortunately, I never got any answers.