Innovation Gallery • Discovery Museum

‘Waste only becomes waste if you throw it away’ is the slogan of EGGXPERT, which established that in the Netherlands the shells of 30 million eggs end up in the waste every day. While there are valuable substances in the eggshells.

EGGXPERT has therefore developed SCND SKIN, a face mask made from eggshell membrane proteins and other natural substances. According to EGGXPERT, the mask is moisturizing and supports the skin’s self-generating function. It contains no parabens, sulfates or phthalates, which are harmful to humans. EGGXPERT works without animal testing, a common practice in the development of beauty products.

ComposTerra offers a solution for two waste problems. On the one hand, plastic: a material that lasts for hundreds of years, but that we often throw away after just one use, such as food packaging and flower pots. Furthermore, in the food industry many residues are created that are no longer used.

ComposTerra has looked at how you can replace plastic with material made from organic residues, such as coffee grounds, tea leaves, orange peels and wheat bran. These materials are created by compression at a high temperature, for example to-go cups and plant pots can be made. Because it is organic, it can be recycled through the GFT system after use.

Turtlehorn makes clothing from textiles that have been used before. The material comes from organizations that collect textiles or from fashion companies with overproduction and leftovers. No new fabrics are produced for Turtlehorn clothing, which keeps the ecological footprint small.

Turtlehorn garments are always unique and invite you to reflect on how they came to be. Customers can visit the workshop for repairs; when a piece of clothing reaches its end of life, it is reprocessed into a new creation.

The type of clothing Turtlehorn makes is streetwear, loved by young customers from the skating scene. Turtlehorn consciously opts for a gender-neutral style.

A Dutch person drinks an average of two to three cups of coffee a day. What happens to the enormous amount of coffee grounds that we produce with it? The food company Zwamburg has decided to put the coffee grounds to good use by growing oyster mushrooms on it. Coffee grounds still contain many organic substances and are therefore an ideal breeding ground for oyster mushrooms.

Zwamburg collects coffee grounds from local entrepreneurs in South Limburg. In order to keep the CO2 footprint small, this takes place within a maximum radius of 25 kilometers around the company. Zwamburg processes the mushrooms in its own products such as the Zwambal and the Zwamkroket. The company makes degradable consumer objects from the substrate that remains during the cultivation process, such as packaging material, flower pots and lampshades.

Cycles dreams of a world without plastic. The company focuses on products that are mass produced in our convenience economy with delivery and to go meals, but usually end up in the trash after one use, such as plastic cutlery. Cyclups has found an organic alternative: wheat remnants that arise during the processing of the crop and which are normally incinerated.

In addition to cutlery, Cyclups also makes straws, stirrers and cotton buds from this agricultural residual waste. After use, the products can be composted. In this way they turn into nutrients for new crops. It shows how products can be created from a circular vision: our everyday objects can also be part of a permanent cycle of creation and decay.

Every year we produce about 300 million tons of plastic waste on Earth. The majority of this is incinerated or dumped, only 5 to 10 percent is recycled. One of the reasons for this is that used plastic needs to be cleaned first. This costs a lot of energy and water, because the material is hot washed and then dried.

Blue Plastics has developed an energy- and water-saving way of cleaning used plastic. A cleaning component is added instead of hot water. This cleans the plastic from grease, paper, print ink, glue and odor. After that, a granulate (granules) is made from the plastic, from which a new product can be created.

Blue Plastics currently has a pilot factory on the Brightlands Camelot Campus in Geleen. Here, 10 to 15 kilos of plastic are processed per hour.

Bleijerheide is a stone’s throw from Discovery Museum. This is where the first circular district in Europe is being created under the name SUPERLOCAL.

SUPERLOCAL is developing a water cycle for a total of 130 households. This is based on five types of water that are purified and reused in different ways. Rainwater is collected and processed locally into drinking water. Thanks to innovations in the homes, for example water-saving toilets and food waste shredders, residents save water and can dispose of the real waste water (black water) in a concentrated manner. It is cleaned locally and energy and fertilizers are extracted from it. Waste water from the shower and sink (grey water) is purified by plants, and it is investigated whether this water can be reused.

SUPERLOCAL is a key project of IBA Parkstad and co-financed by the LIFE program of the European Union.

The Kipster company recognizes a current dilemma. On the one hand, the massive, climate- and often animal-unfriendly chicken farming is no longer tenable. On the other hand, the whole of the Netherlands will not stop consuming eggs tomorrow. Kipster says that if we have “the arrogance” to keep chickens for animal products, we have a duty to treat them with respect, and that they should be part of the food cycle.

Traditionally, chickens and pigs forage around the farm and eat the leftovers here and there. That’s what Kipster is reintroducing, but on a larger scale. The company has two climate-neutral farms, near Venray and in Beuningen, with elongated glass greenhouses with an inner garden and an outdoor outlet. The chickens are fed by-products of human consumption, such as leftover bread, rusk and pasta. From ‘nothing’ they make something that contributes to the food supply: eggs. The manure produced by the chickens is returned to the land to be used for vegetable products.

Styrofoam is a widely used packaging product because it insulates well. But there is a problem with Expanded Polystyrene (EPS), as Styrofoam is officially called. It is plastic, is often not recycled and if the small spheres from which it is made end up in nature, they are not biodegradable.

As an alternative to EPS, Smurfit Kappa has developed the ThermoBox. The insulating packaging is made from a combination of honeycomb and corrugated cardboard from sustainable forestry. Unlike Styrofoam packaging, the ThermoBox is fully recyclable and biodegradable if it ends up in nature. The ThermoBox is also delivered flat, which ensures that it saves space during transport and storage.