Belightful Design: bio-based and weather-resistant butterfly oasis

By June 3, 2021July 1st, 2021Technical Blog

Belightful Design (Turku, Finland) focuses on ecological design items. Their first product is a butterfly oasis, which is injection moulded from bio-based ArcBiox™ A-series.

Why butterfly feeding?

Butterflies are important pollinators and good biodiversity indicators that have seen a dramatic population decline in Europe (-50%) during the past 25 years. The Butterfly Oasis offers a fun way to support butterflies locally, and for example to teach children about the importance of pollinators and biodiversity.

We wanted to create something that is fun and brings nature closer to everyday life, as it relieves stress and is beneficial for well-being in many ways. However, the oasis should be considered as an add-on to butterfly breeding plants, instead of as their replacement” says Belightful Design co-founder Miia Liesegang.

The Belightful Butterfly Oasis contains butterfly nectar, which the butterflies can smell from as far as 10 kilometers distance. The colours of the oasis have been designed to attract butterflies, and the small holes prohibit other insects from feeding from the oasis.

About the material

The Butterfly feeders are made using weather-resistant and easily colourable ArcBiox A1008. All ArcBiox A-series materials are high-impact materials based on renewable poly(lactic acid) (PLA). This means that they bind carbon from the atmosphere. ArcBiox A1008 stands out due to its excellent weatherability.

Ari Rosling, the R&D director at Arctic Biomaterials explains: “We want to provide all the necessary material information for our customers, including long-term aging data. All ArcBiox materials go through accelerated outdoor testing in our solar cabinet. Unless fast degradation is a desired feature, we only continue with materials that perform well under these extreme circumstances. ArcBiox A1008 has shown particularly great results for outdoor applications.

Miia Liesegang continues: “We have performed field tests in Europe (Germany, Great-Britain, Finland, Sweden and Italy), North-America and Asia (Japan). The product and the material have worked very well in all of these locations.

According to various life-cycle analysis (LCA) scenarios, the CO2 footprint is reduced by 60-75% when comparing the A-series with fossil-oil based ABS.

As illustrated here, the impact properties of the A-series are significantly better compared to a reference ABS.

More information / where to buy?

Tips: How to create a butterfly garden

The Belightful Butterfly Oasis is available in different colours from the Belightful online store.

Contact Belightful for more information about the Butterfly Oasis.
Contact Arctic Biomaterials for more information about the ArcBiox materials.