Subsequent 12 months will mark alt plastic maker Notpla’s ten-year anniversary. Though not a brand new participant to the packaging scene, Notpla (brief for ‘not plastic’) has come a great distance from the times of sitting round a kitchen ‘creating bubbles’.
“We began with intention and a little bit little bit of magic in our kitchen,” recalled co-founder and co-CEO Pierre-Yves Paslier. What the packaging design engineer refers to as ‘bubbles’ had been truly algae-based membranes able to encapsulating water and different kinds of liquids. Notpla (then often called Skipping Rock Labs) coined the invention Ooho: an edible bubble designed to exchange single use plastic packaging.
During the last 9 years Notpla has been increasing its portfolio to incorporate takeaway meals containers, inflexible cutlery, spice sachets, and meals oil pipettes, in addition to functions for beauty and family cleansing merchandise markets. All are constructed from seaweed and vegetation.
Seaweed packaging impressed by fruit
The impetus behind growing a substitute for single use plastic got here from environmental issues, defined Paslier at FoodNavigator’s latest Local weather Sensible Meals digital summit.
Though plastic is a high-performance materials, cheap and available, additionally it is inherently tied to plastic air pollution. “The quantity of plastic that [humans] pump into the ocean is beginning to have complicated implications for marine life. Microplanktons are consuming increasingly microplastics, which have a detrimental affect on their well being – and ultimately on the well being of people as properly.”
On the hunt for options to single use plastic, Notpla turned to nature for inspiration. Fruit peel, for instance, naturally protects its contents whereas being fully biodegradable in the proper atmosphere. Not like bioplastics, fruit peel doesn’t require any particular end-of-life human intervention to decompose, and a few fruit casings – such because the pores and skin on a cherry tomato – are fully edible.
“If we may design packaging a bit extra like fruits, we [knew we] would have one thing actually attention-grabbing,” recalled Paslier. That’s, partly, the intention of Notpla, he continued, “to create packaging that may be actually edible, that you would be able to eat identical to a cherry tomato”.
In taking inspiration from nature, it’s unsurprising Notpla’s resolution can also be sourced from nature. Seaweed is considered one of nature’s most renewable sources, mentioned Paslier. Not solely does it develop quick, however it additionally sequesters carbon because it grows. Additional, there are many completely different species of seaweed, comprising a lot of completely different properties. “We predict that seaweed is unbelievable…And one of many unbelievable issues about seaweed is that you should use it to create a variety of various packaging options.”
From Ooho to the EarthShot Prize
Notpla’s first seaweed-based software, Ooho, was properly obtained by customers. With the power to biodegrade in 4 to 6 weeks, or else consumed, the corporate trialled its improvements at sports activities occasions such because the London Marathon in 2019. One 12 months prior, Lucozade Sport piloted the edible seaweed packaging – stuffed with its sports activities drinks and gels – on the Richmond Marathon and Robust Mudder sporting occasions.
On these events, Notpla was capable of exchange a ‘large’ quantity of plastic that sometimes would have been utilized in simply someday, defined Paslier. “Now we’re working with Decathlon to exchange [packaging of] its vitality gels, in order that [consumers] don’t have to make use of plastic and aluminium sachets.”
Ooho know-how can also be getting used to create residence compostable sachets for sauces, condiments and salad dressing for the meals service business.
Lately Notpla additionally made its mark within the takeaway meals container area, having received the EarthShot Prize launched by Prince William to assist options that ‘restore and regenerate the planet’.
Whereas typical containers are lined with plastic coatings to guard towards grease and moisture, the start-up has developed a biodegradable seaweed coating.
To make its containers – of which Notpla has manufactured hundreds of thousands already – the corporate extracts ‘gelatinous components’ from seaweed to develop a formulation for large-scale equipment. “It might then undergo the remainder of the conventional chain of producing at business customary velocity and create a lot of completely different types of containers that be utilized in a lot of completely different functions.”
As soon as used, the entire packaging might be composted. In line with Notpla, worms, fungi and microbes love its invention: ‘Our containers develop into meals for different residing organisms’.
“We at the moment are energetic in a lot of stadiums round Europe,” Paslier added.
A ‘future proofing’ invention
From a enterprise perspective, Notpla considers itself fortunate to be working at a time when legislative strain round plastics is constructing.
Within the UK, a Plastic Packaging Tax got here into pressure final 12 months, and a ban on single-use plastic bowls, plates and trays was enforced on 1 October. Within the EU, Member States pay a plastic tax on non-recycled plastic waste, with some Member States introducing their very own plastic taxes on single-use plastic packaging.
In November 2022, EU guidelines on Packaging and Packaging Waste had been adopted. Regulators have outlined ‘very clearly’ what does, and doesn’t represent plastic, defined Paslier. “We’re…clearly out of the plastic class. [Businesses that use our products] are usually not going to face any of the bans or taxes which might be being utilized increasingly to plastics.
“We’re really future-proofing, and serving to manufacturers swap away from plastic.”
