While the use of single-use plastic is expected to triple by 2060 worldwide, a Frenchman living in London proves that it can be replaced by packaging made from a completely completely natural and even edible: seaweed.
A welcome cocktail served in a big hotel, in a kind of small carton, which you can eat at the same time as you drink the contents, capsules of energy gel to drink, to supply the runners of the London marathon. These flexible packaging, which has no taste, is made from seaweed and was developed by the startup Notpla, co-founded by Frenchman Pierre Paslier, in east London.
“The idea is to say if the packaging was like a fruit, a cocktail, it could be in the shape of a small cherry tomato, with a dose of toothpaste. It may look like a small blackcurrant berry or something. There’s a whole bunch of shapes you can look at using seaweed that you can’t do with plastic, and so trying to create something that’s really more environment of nature than to an industrial environment.”
The company was created in 2014. It now employs 70 people, and has raised 17 million euros in funding to develop research and development. Notpla also manufactures strong home meal delivery boxes, used in eight European countries and claims to have already avoided three million plastic containers.
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A catalog of solutions
A graduate of the INSA engineering school in Lyon, Pierre Paslier explains that the industry has been using algae for nearly a century: “From toothpaste to the foam in our beers, to different fertilizers or types of medicine. There is already a large-scale industrial use of algae, which allows us not to start from scratch. Today, we work with people who produce phenomenal quantities for other industries. This is why we use algae which have the capacity to grow, of the order of one meter per day for certain species.
The company works with seaweed farms which provide it with the raw material for its totally biodegradable packaging, such as seaweed-based films, to produce pasta sachets, for example:
“We work with people who are already active in cosmetic, pharmaceutical, food applications, and in fact, we manage to use their algae and their processes to create formulas of materials based on algae. It’s a bit like the start of this catalog of solutions that will allow more and more brands to stop using single-use plastic and replace it with algae.”
It is estimated that today, 200 million tons of plastic waste pollute the oceans. Suffice to say that the margin of progress for Pierre Paslier’s start-up is immense. His company also received, last December, the prize “Earthshot“created in the United Kingdom by Prince William, to reward the best innovations in the field of the environment.
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