Graduate shows 2016: Royal College of Art graduate Tessa Silva-Dawson has used cow's milk to create a natural alternative to plastic (+ slideshow).
Silva-Dawson, who studied on the institution's Design Products course, explored the possibility of replacing oil-based polymers with an organic waste material that can perform in the same way.

For her Protein project, she sourced waste milk from a dairy farm in Sussex, which throws away 3,000 litres of skimmed milk each week.
"That's just one farm in the UK, so 3,000 litres a week is, potentially scaled up, a really big industry," Silva-Dawson told Dezeen.
The production process starts similarly to cheese-making, using heat to separate the curds from the liquid whey. The curds are then dried out in an industrial dehydrator and mixed with a natural plasticiser to turn them into pellets.
According to the designer, these can be used in the same way as synthetic plastics and moulded with existing machinery.
To demonstrate the material's properties, Silva-Dawson created a series of vessels using compression moulding ? a technique used to form many plastic products.
"It's a crafted way showing how it could be commercialised and manufactured," Silva-Dawson said.

She added pigments and dyes to the plastic substitute to create marbled and dappled effects, then finished the surfaces with wax.

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