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Press Release

Plastic Book

A' Design Award 2021 Silver Winner in Print and Published Media Design

23 April 2021

Plastic Book by Lu Zhao
Plastic Book by Lu Zhao
Plastic Book by Lu Zhao
Plastic Book by Lu Zhao
Plastic Book by Lu Zhao

Lu Zhao

Plastic is a handmade book made from waste plastic instead of paper. Discarded plastic bags and other used plastics are collected and cut by hand into pages. The text and the stickers imitate children's brushstrokes, giving the pages a simple and innocent character. Ordinary glue does not bond plastic, so the pages are fixed with hot-melt plastic. The book measures 225 mm in width, 325 mm in depth and 10 mm in height. The intent is to reuse waste material and to raise awareness of plastic pollution.

Press Kit

Unique Properties
How long will plastics stay with the world in the future and how much influence will it have on the future generations of the earth? This is a question worth pondering. We set out from this, using the waste plastics in our lives as materials, designing and cutting purely by hand, and made a unique "plastic book". In the book, we imitated children's handwriting to trigger a warning of plastic pollution to all mankind.
Dimensions & Packaging
Width 225mm x Depth 325mm x Height 10mm
Tags
plastic,book design,handmade,pollution,environmental protection
Production Technology
In this design, the text and stickers are made by imitating children's brushstrokes, and the manual is fully used to render a kind of innocence. On the other hand, waste plastics of various materials are used for cutting.
Design Challenge
The problem we have to face in design activities is the instability of plastics, because plastics present a soft texture, which is difficult to cut accurately by hand. Secondly, the methods we need to use contradict some rules of book design, and it is difficult to even tell that the work produced at the beginning is a book. Because we want to replace the most important material in book design, we need to make it with different textures of plastic to achieve a readable effect.
Project Duration
The project started in October 2019 in Dalian, Liaoning and finished in November 2019 in Dalian, Liaoning.
Operation Flow
Production process: research-collecting materials and production tools-cutting page size-content design planning-pasting production-binding into a book
Research
This work mainly studies whether it is feasible to replace common paper book design with plastic. In the work, we study the book binding method for plastic, because plastic cannot be bonded by ordinary glue. If nails are used to fix it, it will increase the plastic Stability, so we use hot-melt plastic to fix it.
Inspiration
There are four courier spots around our school, and discarded plastic bags can be seen everywhere every day. When we found children chewing plastic bags around the express delivery point one day, we realized that the plastic pollution around us was very serious. So we came up with the idea of making plastic books. Such a book is not only the reuse of waste plastics, but also a way to remind people by means of brochures. Therefore, we adopted the theory of book design and picture books.

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