Wormolution | Cheesy Plastikologi

[dusjagr]

After a few days of experimenting with various plastics, re-cycling, dissolving and casting, cooking and buring, i want to share some of the experiments on the Casein Plastic, aka Galalith, aka Milkstone, in this thread.

we started to collect first instrucitons and links in an earlier general topic and on the wiki.

Let's start discussing Hackteria's TAL "Wormolution" 12-15. Sep 2019 - Geneva

I am posting here a topic that @dusjagr came up with and that we discussed in a chat. Making plastic from milk. Denaturing of milk to get Casein. [image] “From the late 19th century until the 1930s casein was the starting material for the plastic Galalith, the u. a. was used for buttons and jewelry, but also for electrical insulation purposes.” “Friedrich Ernst Todtenhaupt (1873-1919) undertook with the Galalith Society at the beginning of the 20th century also attempts to make artificial si…

During the preparation and the workshop we explored different “fat contents” of milk, seems like the lowest fat milk gave the best results. Also adding “plastisizer” such as glycerol seems to make it more malleable. The drying of the casein plastic still needs a lot of time, so it’s not something to do in a short workshop, can take days… also the final cross-linking using e.g. formaldehyde is a bit questionable due it’s carcinogenic properties. There seems to be less dangerous alternatives using Acetaldehyd, tannic acid or natural enymes (transglutaminase), definately something to look further into.

We also explored to by this big pots of extraced “100%” Casein used for muscle dietary uses. but it has loads of other stuff in it for taste and emugators… we see what we can do with it.

Other great resources we explored:

• Galalith in fashion
• Industrial Bible of Galalith from the 1906 “Casein; its preparation and technical utilisation”
• There is a lot of recent interest in using casein in food packaging. just google: “Edible food packaging made from milk proteins”

and another youtube instruction

Making Fake Ivory And Casein Milk Plastics, Glues and Paints

[dusjagr]

We also found a very well described student chemistry lab class on the topic, but it’s in German.

they first make their own molds from agar, like buttons… the day before.

Galalith_Anleitung_studenten.pdf (1.0 MB)

The process is also describing from Milk to the curd, then dissolve it in NaOh, cast it into the agar, and the precipitate it in acidic Sodiumsulfate, and finally cross-link it in some vinegar NaCl solution.