Instead Of Throwing Out This
Plastic Wrapper, You Eat It
Evoware is made from seaweed–and if you don’t feel like eating it, it
will biodegrade just fine.
If you buy a Belgian waffle at a food
festival this weekend in Ubud, Bali, you’ll be able to eat the wrapper it comes
in. A waffle vendor is one of the early customers testing new food
packaging made from seaweed instead of plastic: The wrapper is nutritious if
it’s eaten, and if it ends up as litter, it naturally biodegrades.
“We want to create a cleaner world by
stopping plastic waste from the root,” David Christian, cofounder of Evoware,
the Indonesia-based startup that designed the new packaging, tells Fast
Company. Indonesia is second only to China in creating plastic pollution
that ends up on the ocean, mostly coming from single-use packaging; four
Indonesian rivers are among the most polluted in the world. Garbage dumps in Bali are often overflowing.
As a material, seaweed has some obvious
advantages to oil-based plastic beyond the fact that it doesn’t create waste.
While seaweed grows, it sucks up CO2. An area of ocean roughly the size of a
baseball field can grow 40 tons of seaweed in a year, absorbing 20.7 tons of
greenhouse gases. Unlike some other sources used to make bioplastic–like
corn–it’s grown without fertilizers, water, or other resources. Seaweed farmers
in Indonesia currently produce more than they can sell, and struggle to make a
living.
The startup won’t share the details of its
production process, but says that the seaweed is treated for food safety and
converted into packaging without the use of chemicals. Seaweed is naturally
high in fiber and vitamins; it’s also halal, important in a country where the
majority of the population is Muslim.
Because the new packaging dissolves in hot
water, the startup plans to use it to begin to replace packages like the tiny
plastic sachets filled with seasoning in instant noodles. Instead of struggling
to open the package, you drop the whole thing in your bowl of ramen and stir it
in (the packaging is almost tasteless, so it doesn’t affect the flavor of the
soup as it melts). It can also be used for instant coffee, which is popular in
Indonesia. The company is also making edible wraps for burgers and other
sandwiches.
The company is one of six winners of the $1
million Circular Design Challenge. One challenge,
Christian says, is that despite the abundance of plastic waste, Indonesians don’t
yet recognize a need to solve the problem. “The awareness, understanding, and
sense of urgency to minimize the use of single-use plastic is still very low,”
he says. “This makes our bioplastic seems irrelevant and ‘unnecessary.'” The
seaweed-based packaging is more expensive to produce than plastic, though costs
will come down as the company moves from pilot production to full-scale
manufacturing.
It will get help making that transition. The
company is one of six winners of the $1 million Circular Design
Challenge, a contest run by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and OpenIdeo that focused on finding solutions for the 30% of
plastic packaging items that are too small or complex to normally get
recycled–like seasoning sachets, wrappers, and coffee cup lids.
In a category focused on groceries, an app
called Miwa from the Czech Republic won for a system that
delivers custom quantities to customers in reusable packaging. Algramo, from Chile, won
for its system of selling products in reusable containers in local convenience
stores. In a category focused on plastic sachets, Evoware won along with Delta,
a U.K.-based company that helps restaurants make sauces in edible packets. Two
winning companies focused on coffee cup lids: CupClub, a U.K.
subscription service for reusable lids, and TrioCup, an origami-style folding
cup that doesn’t need a separate lid. All of the winners will join a yearlong
accelerator program in 2018.
BY ADELE PETERS
https://www.fastcompany.com/40477587/instead-of-throwing-out-this-plastic-wrapper-you-eat-it?utm_source=postup&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Fast%20Company%20Daily&position=2&partner=newsletter&campaign_date=10062017
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