Prevention of Environmental and Health Issues due to Spread of Glitter Particles

Sammanfattning: Plastics are known to cause plenty of problems for the environment such as sewerage water,birds, marine life and even human health issues. Normally the cause for such small particles tobe such a huge problem lies in the adversity of collecting it after the use phase. Other occurringproblems are health related, where such small-sizes particles are getting in the eyes or eveninhaled by the workers handling the material. An example of such material is glitter. Tarkett AB is a Swedish company located in Ronneby, Sweden, and deals withmanufacturing of flooring mats created with homogeneous blends of different plastic materialsresulting in interesting designs for customers. One of their products uses glitter flakes in themix and causes the company a few problems, the biggest of which is the glitter getting stuckinside the blender thus risking the glitter particles getting into the next blend that isn’t supposedto have any glitter flakes in it. The company’s current solution is mixing waste material in theblender to clean the blender from most of the stuck glitter. The purpose of this work is to investigate why the glitter flakes stick to surfaces in generalthus getting an idea of why it could be sticking inside the blender. This knowledge is later usedto ideate different solutions for the company and select one winning concept that will beprototyped and possibly tested through conduction of experiments. There are a few reasons asto why this problem is worthwhile solving, firstly and most importantly is the operator’s healthwhere the glitter that is being used can be inhaled by the operators thus leading to potentialhealth problems. Secondly the company will save time by not needing to clean around andinside the blending machines to get them ready for the next mix. Thirdly, solving this problemwill lead to environmental sustainability where no energy or water will be used during thecleaning process both around and inside the blending machine. Method used to achieve this will be the design thinking process with plenty of differenttools. Starting off by understanding the problem further through need finding and tech watchingto investigate the problem further and the current available solutions for it. A literature reviewwill be done on the material to get a better idea of the root causes for the problem. Ideageneration will be a big part based on previous tools used to generate many different ideas tolater be filtered using concept selection methods. Through this a concept will be developedwhich can potentially lead to a prototype that’ll be tested at the company. The main finding from this thesis is a concept derived from biomimicry which is atransparent slime and oil mixture to prevent glitter spread during the handling stage at theproduction line. Both variants prevent glitter particles from spreading, which results inminimized glitter spread thus minimizing the cleaning requirements. Experiments show that theoil-glitter variant had a positive effect of improved distribution of glitter flakes in the finalproduct. The experiments were discussed with a design expert at Tarkett to evaluate the twopresented variations and assess the final product.