This start-up has just won £1m for its seaweed-based plastic alternative

Greater than six billion tonnes of untreated plastic waste at present litter our streets and fill our seas. Simply six per cent of all of the plastic ever produced has been recycled and 12 per cent incinerated.

World consciousness of the issue is rising and plenty of are trying to find a really sustainable different.

The founders of London-based start-up Notpla imagine they've a solution. Pierre Paslier and Rodrigo Garcia Gonzalez discovered their answer within the sea. Their plastic different is comprised of seaweed and vegetation.

It's very pure, fully biodegradable and can be utilized to make a spread of packaging from bubbles to carry liquid to linings for meals containers.

The place did the thought for Notpla come from?

“It began with just a little experiment in our kitchen,” says Paslier.

“We needed to make artifical fruits. We had been actually impressed by the best way nature makes these elegant shapes and makes use of all these pure supplies and the way we might translate that into packaging.”

Ultimately, they stumbled upon seaweed and located that it was a very attention-grabbing materials. That’s how the thought behind Notpla was born.

The Earthshot Prize
Notpla founders Rodrigo Garcia Gonzalez and Pierre Paslier.The Earthshot Prize

Since 2014 they've made 36,000 capsules full of sports activities drinks at hand to runners on the 2019 London Marathon. They’ve additionally created greater than one million takeaway meals containers for Simply Eat and have the potential to exchange over 100 million plastic coated containers in Europe sooner or later.

Seaweed additionally captures carbon twenty instances sooner than bushes and their farms increase fish populations, creating new alternatives for native communities.

Notpla has simply gained the Earthshot prize

Notpla’s founders have simply gained the Earthshot Prize within the ‘Construct a Waste-Free World’ class.

Arrange by Prince William, the competitors awards 5 winners for his or her contributions to environmentalism, every receiving £1 million (€1.2 million) to proceed their efforts.

Earthshot Prize
Notpla profitable the Earthshot prize.Earthshot Prize

It was impressed by US President John F Kennedy’s Moonshot which introduced collectively hundreds of thousands of individuals with the purpose of reaching the moon. In the same approach, the Earthshot Prize encourages progressive options to the local weather disaster.

Notpla says the cash will go in direction of analysis and improvement in addition to increasing their commercialisation.

Watch the video above to search out out extra about Notpla’s plastic different.

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