Plastic Innovation Prize<\/a>. Out of 64 applicants spanning six continents, eight were selected to material test their concepts for plastic alternatives. After a year, three winners will be chosen to share the prize and continue to develop their product, says Dune Ives, executive director of the environmental nonprofit Lonely Whale, which is co-leading the competition.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhile the finalists wrapped everything from agricultural waste to peas into their approaches, they had one clear favorite when it came to a plastic substitute: More than half of them used algae in some shape or form in their designs. \u201cSeaweed and kelp are called the lungs of the ocean,\u201d says Ives. \u201cOver the last several years we have seen more farming to help to solve nearshore coastal ecosystem issues, like warming, acidification, and deoxygenation.\u201d Currently, seaweed is used in products like food additives, fertilizers, and supplements\u2014but as abundance grows, so might innovative uses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Out of the eight finalists, five make bioplastic or plastic film alternatives out of seaweed, kelp, or another algae. Competitors from the UK included Kelpi, which makes compostable and low-carbon bioplastic packaging, and Notpla, which creates natural-membrane packaging that was used in water pouches for London Marathon runners in 2019. Zerocircle, based in Guragaon, India, turns local seaweed into dissolvable, ocean-safe packaging. Sway, based out of Berkeley, California, also works with seaweed for a home-compostable thin-film plastic alternative. Finally, Marea in Iceland uses local algae to design yet another biofilm alternative that fully degrades in the environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The journey from a slimy green plant to plastic-like material can be a stretch for the imagination. But it\u2019s a shockingly simple concept, explains Mike Allen, lead scientist at Blue Microbe, a marine bioscience group based in the UK, and associate professor of single cell genomics at University of Exeter. Plastic manufacturing requires stringing \u201cbasic building blocks\u201d of chemistry into different polymers. Those building blocks, Allen says, can come from most anything. In traditional plastics, they\u2019re typically the result of crude oil that\u2019s extracted from the ground, is refined into polymers, and formed into a clear, durable resin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The same process applies to seaweed, Allen explains. (After all, fossil fuels are just squeezed remains of ancient flora and fauna.) The plant can be whittled down to its carbons and sugars, and then chemically shaped into building blocks. Once the bonds that hold the plant together are broken down, \u201cyou get similar biobricks, essentially,\u201d Allen says. Those \u201cbiobricks\u201d can then be used to make an entirely new product.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The cool thing about turning seaweed into industrial materials is there are assets in its natural qualities, too. Therefore, reengineering all the way to traditional plastics isn\u2019t always necessary. \u201cThe really clever bioplastics, the biodegradable ones, are going less along that scale,\u201d Allen says. \u201cThey aren\u2019t breaking down as much, and are retaining some of their properties like hydrophobicity and permeability. Some of them are biologically active. They have sort of antimicrobial things like that, which are very different to traditional plastics.\u201d Retaining some of these characteristics can help plastic alternatives break down faster, maintain edibility, and resist bacteria.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All five algae-based finalists in the competition are designed to decompose and biodegrade. Notpla, for example, breaks down in home compost in about 10 days. Meanwhile, Zerocircle\u2019s founder and director Neha Jain says its alternative can break down in marine environments in a matter of hours, depending on the temperature of the water. Seaweed is also incredibly bountiful, appearing pretty much anywhere there\u2019s a beach (sometimes it\u2019s even labeled as a disastrous environmental nuisance). Not to mention, it grows plentifully without using agricultural lands\u2014and the freshwater, pesticides, and fertilizers that farms depend so much on these days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe only space left for growth is really the oceans,\u201d says Allen. \u201cBut you\u2019re not going to be growing trees or crops in the ocean, so your option is pretty much seaweed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Still, it will take many more steps beyond material testing to scale up seaweed-made bioplastics to bring to market. \u201c\u200b\u200bPlastic-production technologies have gone through more than 70 years of improvement to reach the current output levels,\u201d Zerocircle\u2019s Jain says. \u201cAchieving the same efficiency and production capacity from any alternative will take time and encouragement globally.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Additionally, Allen emphasizes that swapping out one type of plastic for another won\u2019t make the world any less dependent on disposables. The Plastic Innovation Prize finalists have a chance to address that as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhile we don\u2019t wish to see seaweed-based packaging everywhere traditional plastic currently exists, we believe it\u2019s the optimal solution for the many situations where thin-film packaging plays a vital and irreplaceable function,\u201d says Sway co-founder and CEO Julia Marsh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As the competitors dive into testing their plastic alternatives, they\u2019ll be matched up with major apparel brands like J. Crew, Nike, and Tom Ford to test the products along working supply chains. The products will also be tested for marine animal and environmental safety by the Seattle Aquarium. Which bioplastic will come out on top, be it seaweed or otherwise, will be uncovered in just another year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Editor\u2019s Disclosure: Matt Sechrest\u2014managing partner of North Equity, the lead investor in Popular Science\u2019s parent company, Recurrent Ventures\u2014is an advisor for the Tom Ford Prize. He was not involved in the assigning, writing, or editing of this story.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
About the author<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nSara Kiley Watson is an Assistant Editor at Popular Science, where she has led sustainability coverage since 2021. She started her tenure at PopSci as an intern in 2017 before joining the team full time as an Editorial Assistant in 2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Plastic film can be a menace to the environment. The super-thin material that makes up baggies and shrink wrap has proven to be one of the trickier plastics to recycle\u2014and often ends up festering in landfills or in the ocean. And when humans go through hundreds of billions of plastic bags each year globally, that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","nova_meta_subtitle":"Five out of eight finalists for a million-dollar sustainability prize floated algae as an alternative for plastic film","footnotes":""},"categories":[5572],"tags":[7190,11270,10416,13661,12366,7105,11966,13283],"supplier":[20133,20126,20127,16080,20128,20124,1814,20129],"class_list":["post-107333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bio-based","tag-algae","tag-biodegradability","tag-circulareconomy","tag-films","tag-fuels","tag-packaging","tag-plastics","tag-seaweed","supplier-blue-microbe-marine-bioscience-research","supplier-kelpi","supplier-marea-icelandic-bioplastics","supplier-notpla","supplier-sway","supplier-tom-ford","supplier-university-of-exeter","supplier-zerocircle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107333"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107333\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107333"},{"taxonomy":"supplier","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/supplier?post=107333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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