You wake up, eat some Greek yogurt, then throw out the plastic cup. Later on, you get a salad and a mini-bag of chips, and then you throw away the plastic bowl, the chip bag, and the to-go bag. Snack on a granola bar, throw away the wrapper. Drink some seltzer, toss the can.<\/p>\n
Before it\u2019s even time for dinner, the food-to-trash transfer has happened several times. Nixing that transfer entirely is the task at hand for Hannah Billqvist and Anna Glans\u00e9n, who together are Swedish design group Tomorrow Machine. Right now, the duo have a few inventions that fall under two novel approaches to sustainable packaging: food wrappers that can change shape to double as a dish or bowl, and packaging that\u2019s meant to be composted or washed down the drain.<\/p>\n
Tomorrow Machine\u2019s first invention was the Sustainable Expanding Bowl. A biodegradable, cellulose wrapper fits snugly around freeze-dried food. Pour hot water into a spout, and not only will the food insta-cook, the wrapper will blossom open and morph into a bowl. The bowl is still a prototype, but we\u2019ve seen a similar technology in action already: last year a team at MIT rolled out so-called 4-D printing, in which objects can intelligently assemble into new, useful shapes.<\/p>\n
The newer This Too Shall Pass concept series falls under that second approach. In it, the package is designed to naturally decompose or to dissolve in water. The hypothetical line has three foods: Basmati rice, olive oil, and a raspberry smoothie. The whole point to the project, Glans\u00e9n says, is finding an alternative to plastic. \u201cThe good thing about plastic is that it does not react with other materials very easily,\u201d she says. \u201cBut that is also the bad thing about plastic, because it means that it makes the natural decomposition process difficult.\u201d<\/p>\n
Instead, Tomorrow Machine\u2019s packaging has the same short shelf life as the foods they contain. The trick to making that possible lies in finding material combinations that don\u2019t react to each other. The olive oil, for example, comes in a wax-coated caramelized sugar container. But that couldn\u2019t work with the smoothie, because water breaks down sugar. But the smoothie or fresh fruit juice could come in an agar seaweed gel container. Once it\u2019s un-refrigerated, \u201cthe package will wither at the same speed as its contents.\u201d<\/p>\n
Getting all of this to market is a costly endeavor (Glans\u00e9n predicts that we\u2019ll see this type of packaging on shelves in five or so years), but one of Tomorrow Machine\u2019s inventions will actually go on sale soon. Microgarden is a tiny, paper greenhouse that uses agar seaweed to grow micro-greens and herbs. Infarm, a small German company that builds micro-gardening solutions for homes and businesses, will carry it online.<\/p>\n
It hints of a Jetsonian pantry-of-the-future, but the inspiration behind Tomorrow Machine\u2019s designs are very, very, old: fruit and eggs. The only reason people don\u2019t eat orange peels, for instance, is because they\u2019re sour and unpalatable. (That said, they garnish a cocktail quite nicely.) Glans\u00e9n says the waxy packages they\u2019ve made are too bland to eat right now. But that doesn\u2019t mean a tasty peel (or wrapper, or shell) could be too far off.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You wake up, eat some Greek yogurt, then throw out the plastic cup. Later on, you get a salad and a mini-bag of chips, and then you throw away the plastic bowl, the chip bag, and the to-go bag. Snack on a granola bar, throw away the wrapper. Drink some seltzer, toss the can. Before […]<\/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":"","nova_meta_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5572],"tags":[],"supplier":[],"class_list":["post-22482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bio-based"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22482","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=22482"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22482\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22482"},{"taxonomy":"supplier","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/supplier?post=22482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}