With a typical single-serve packet of instant coffee—the ready-to-brew kind that Starbucks and other brands sell for home and office use—the plastic wrapper ends up in the trash. In a prototype of a new seaweed-based packaging design, the wrapper dissolves into the drink, adding nutrients.
[Image: Notpla]The design is from London-based Notpla (short for “not plastic”), which just raised $13 million in a Series A round of financing led by Horizons Ventures. The coffee packaging is one example of the company’s work to scale up sustainable packaging that can replace materials that are particularly hard to recycle—like thin plastic films—with packaging that can literally disappear. But the idea isn’t just to replace plastic with something less bad: The Notpla team believes it’s possible to improve on its performance.
“We’re leveraging the natural attributes of seaweed and things you find in nature and not only replacing things that have been made out of plastic, but rethinking the format,” says Pierre-Yves Paslier, co-CEO of Notpla. “One of the things that is quite exciting about seaweed is that it can do things that plastic cannot do. You create new behaviors that we wouldn’t be able to do with polyethylene or polypropylene.”As the company’s team of chemists and designers started exploring new versions of seaweed-based film, Paslier says they “started to see a bunch of interesting formats and applications where solubility could be a big advantage.” Tea bags are often made with plastic, and a single bag can release as much as 11 billion microsize pieces of plastic and 3 billion nanosize particles into hot water, one study found. A tea bag made from seaweed can be safely stirred into the water instead, adding some fiber and antioxidants. The seaweed is processed so it doesn’t add any flavor.
[Image: Notpla]The material can also be used for something like a pack of ramen noodles or a serving of rice so that the whole package can be dropped into hot water during preparation. “For people who go on a hike and want to bring back their packaging, it could be literally consumed within the meal,” Paslier says. Laundry detergent or dishwasher detergent pods could use the material instead of PVA plastic that ends up adding plastic pollution to waterways because it doesn’t fully dissolve.
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