These Compostable Utensils Look Just Like Real Veggies
3D-printed using molds of real fruits and vegetables, this set of disposable tableware is entirely biodegradable. Each individual piece of the Graft series by Chinese designer Qiyun Deng is a realistic replica of a carrot, orange peel or celery stalk. Eat your soup with a spoon made from an artichoke, or cut into salad with the blade of a pineapple leaf. Compostable utensils have never been cuter.
Deng chose fruits and vegetables with notable physical features that would stand out in plastic form, taking careful molds of their shapes and textures so they could be reproduced by a 3D printer. The details are really quite beautiful, with all the little variations of color that you see in real vegetables. Doesn’t it almost make you want to take a bite out of them? Try doing that with a metal fork.
The set is made from a renewable bioplastic, so it doesn’t have the negative environmental impact of typical plastic tableware. Disposable plastic utensils are transformed from crude oil to polystyrene before being used for an average of twenty minutes. Then, they sit in a landfill oozing chemicals like bisphenol-a (BPA) for hundreds of years.
Other utensils take that a step further, cutting out the composting process: they’re entirely edible.
More from designer Qiyun Deng
“Graft is a series of disposable tableware made of bioplastic PLA revealing its sources materials – the plants. Texture and form in nature autonomously exist with a function that can be utilized for another purpose. A celery stem for example, serves as handle for the fork; a petal of artichoke then becomes the bowl of spoon. By waking both visual and haptic sensation it brings along a question: Will you throw them away easily? The 4-months project was a study of texture and color, as well a practice of casting.”
