ALT Festival of Maintenance is back! Online, Saturday 8th October, tickets from £10. Join us for a day of fascinating talks from world-class practitioners, maintaining everything from technology to culture, democracy to the environment.

ALT Ross sitting at his DIY bioplastics lab in our Engine Room space. He is leaning across a table full of trays, some empty and some full of dried bioplastics, and the table is full of equipment such as bottles, trays, a saucepan, a hot plate and a laptop. Participants are surrounding the table and are feeling the plastic in the trays.

ALT Workshop participants sit together around a long table. The group are all looking away from the camera concentrating on making foldable paper microscopes to view the bioplastics. The table is very full of paper and card parts of the microscopes, as these are in various stages of assembly, and there are also mugs of hot drinks on the table.

ALT A participant is using their Foldscope paper microscope, holding this up to the light of the station window, to view some algae bioplastic. The microscope is attached to a mobile phone and the microscopic image of the material is shown on the phone’s screen with a purple, grey and white marbled image flecked with abstract green shapes.

ALT A participant holds up a sheet of algae bioplastic. A clear sheet of a plastic flecked with dark green algae, that forms an effect a bit like terrazzo.