Plastazote® and Polyethylene foams are used by museums around the world for the safe exhibition, storage and packing of collections. These foams are chemically inert and are easy to work into custom shapes. Although these materials have many uses the biggest disadvantage stems from their eternal nature. Many museums end up stock-piling small, or unusually shaped off-cuts of these foams because they are not recyclable or biodegradable. The Conservation Laboratory at the Museum of Anthropology has been collaborating with mechanical engineering students at UBC to design a system to shred and repurpose these high-quality foams into new collection supports.
With a grant from UBC’s Green Labs Fund, Mauray Toutloff, MOA Conservator, was able to provide a proposal and a budget for a UBC Mechanical Engineering 45X project – the 4th year mechanical engineering capstone course. A team of engineering students including, Sharon Au-Yeung (Manager), Rymon Zhoa (Project Liaison), Yasin Ranjbar (Finance manager) Minh Nguyen (Technical Lead) and Chris Sharma (Document Supervisor) accepted the challenge to build a bespoke shredding machine for MOA.
The museum’s must-haves for an in-house foam shredding device include, operator and environmental safety, the ability to capture all shreds cleanly and effectively as well as the ability to share the design within the local and international museum community. The size of the shred was also considered because the re-purposed foam will be used as stuffing or fill for pillow like object supports. These supports are already used at MOA for in-house transportation and storage, but the museum is researching new ways to use the filled pillows in packing and shipping. This strategy would reduce the amount of custom cut foam inserts and further waste generation.
We would like to thank Mauray Toutloff, Sharon Au-Yeung, Yasin Ranjbar, Rymon Zhoa, Minh Nguyen and Chris Sharma for their incredible work. You can learn more about this project – along with a handful of the other numerous projects supported by the Green Labs Fund since its inception in 2009 – by watching the recorded event The Laboratories of Tomorrow: A Sustainability Showcase. More information about the Green Labs Fund can be found on our webpage: Green Labs Fund.