WE SHOULD HAVE BEEN USING THIS BAMBOO-BASED CUTLERY ALL ALONG
As someone who does his fair share of takeout, perhaps the one thing I
hate with a vengeance is the flimsy, horribly designed plastic cutlery I
get with my food. The spoons sometimes come with these plastic flares
that get left behind from the cheap injection molding process, the
knives are more flexible than the food I’m cutting, and the forks don’t
possess enough structural integrity to pierce my food. All that’s aside
from the fact that this cutlery eventually reaches either a landfill or
the ocean by the tonne, not having served any purpose whatsoever. The
sad reality is that we’re far from democratizing a solution that
actually works… but with projects like the Knork Eco, we’re getting a
few steps closer to conscientiously designing single-use (or even
multiple-use) plastic cutlery that has little to no impact on the
environment.
bamboo wood cutleryThe Knork Eco has a pretty transparent objective. To A. remove
non-biodegradable single-use plastics from our life-cycle, and to B.
replace them with cutlery that’s eco-friendly, biodegradable, and more
importantly, much more robust and comfortable to use than those horrible
disposable forks and spoons. The Knorks are made from a specialized
material called Astrik, which combines sugarcane starch along with
bamboo fibers. The result is a moldable polymer that’s sturdy, looks and
feels like glossy plastic, is food-safe, dishwasher safe, and can
biodegrade in 2 years. Most importantly, sugarcane and bamboo are two of
the fastest growing plants in the world, allowing Astrik as a material
to cater to the incredibly high demand of disposable cutlery without any
hassle.
The Knork Eco is a spoon+fork set made from Astrik. It looks and feels exactly like plastic, and can do everything plastic can.
The Knork cutlery comes in its own chic case made from the
bamboo-polymer too, allowing you to easily carry it around with you
wherever you go, because the Knorks are much more reliable and robust
than most plastic spoons and forks. They come with a larger
cross-section, making them thicker and stiffer, and even integrate a
broader handle with a finger-rest, allowing you to use them with the
dexterity of metal cutlery.
The Knorks can cleaned either manually or in a dishwasher, and can be infinitely reused until you dispose
them. When introduced to the soil, the Astrik material biodegrades
completely in just 2 years, turning into compost that can then be used
to grow more plants, making it perhaps the best example of
nature-conscious cradle-to-grave designing with zero negative impact.
Yes I said it, we should have been using this bamboo-based cutlery all
along!
