The Chemarts Cookbook

From the ChemArts webpage, "[t]he CHEMARTS Cookbook offers both simple and more advanced ideas and recipes for hands-on experiments with wood-based materials. The book showcases interesting results, focusing on raw materials that are processed either chemically or mechanically from trees or other plants: cellulose fibres, micro- or nano-structured fibrils, cellulose derivatives, lignin, bark, and wood extractives."

ChemArts is a program at Aalto University in Finland pairing chemical engineering and art and design students to explore innovative uses for Finnish plant life (their words, from the video just below).



The program has published a 'cookbook' of sorts in which they provide recipes for 'cellulosic material exploration'. In other words, they have a bunch of recipes using cellulose derivatives from minimally processed materials like wood pulp to more processed ingredients like nanofibrillar cellulose, carboxymethyl cellulose, and microcrystalline cellulose along with fairly non-toxic materials like baking soda, calcium carbonate, glycerol, and starch.

The 'cookbook' is broken down with some basic science and ingredient background, methods and safety discussion, then the recipes themselves. The recipes are further classified as hard, soft, transparent, flexible, (3d) printed materials, colouring and dyeing, long fibres from nature, papermaking, and growing materials. The book then ends with some 'inspiration' projects that their students have made from the recipes in the book.

Some of the materials are going to require a bit of sourcing to manage, but the fact that they've published a recipe book for material science exploring sustainable, tree-based raw materials is spectacular.

The cookbook itself is available for €30.00 or as a free download pdf. You can check out some of the images from inside the 'cookbook' on this article (or they're all in the pdf.)

And, in case they make the free download disappear, I've uploaded the pdf to my Google Drive.