Imitation caviar invented within the Nineteen Thirties may present the answer to plastic air pollution, claims Pierre Paslier, CEO of London-based packaging firm Notpla. He found a budget meals different, invented by Unilever and made utilizing seaweed, after quitting his job as a packaging engineer at L’Oréal.

With cofounder and co-CEO Rodrigo García González, Paslier and Notpla have prolonged the thought, taking a protein created from seaweed and creating packaging for tender drinks, quick meals, laundry detergent, and cosmetics, amongst different issues. They’re additionally branching out into cutlery and paper.

“Seaweed grows quickly and needs no fresh water, land, or fertilizer,” Paslier explains. “It captures carbon and makes the surrounding waters less acidic. Some species of seaweed can grow up to a meter a day.” Best of all, he says, packaging created from seaweed is totally biodegradable as a result of it’s solely nature-based.

Paslier famous an incredible coincidence—Alexander Parkes invented the primary plastic in Hackney Wick, the identical a part of East London that, 100 years later, Notpla calls house. Since Parkes’ first invention, waste plastic—particularly tiny particles generally known as microplastics, which take lots of or hundreds of years to interrupt down into innocent molecules—has been wreaking havoc in ecosystems the world over.

Plastic air pollution is proving especially damaging in the marine environment, the place tiny beads of plastic are lethal to the very important microorganisms that make up plankton and which sequester 30 p.c of our carbon emissions, “without us having to build any new fancy technologies,” Paslier says.

Notpla’s plans to interchange plastic started with a drink container for marathons. This is, in impact, a really giant piece of faux caviar—a small pouch that incorporates juice or water that athletes can pop of their mouths and swallow once they want rehydration. “We wanted to create something that would feel more like fruit; packaging that you could feel comes more from picking something from a tree than off a production line,” he says.

Paslier confirmed footage of two postrace streets—one the place refueling got here in plastic containers and one the place it got here in edible Notpla. The first was suffering from plastic bottles; the second fully waste-free.

The subsequent step was takeout meals containers. Even containers we expect are cardboard include plastic, he says, as grease from meals would make plain cardboard too soggy. Working with supply firm Just Eat, Notpla has pioneered a alternative for the per- and polyfluorinated substances (PFAS), the so-called “forever chemical” plastics that at the moment line cardboard takeout containers. It has even discovered a solution to retrofit its resolution into the outdated PFAS plant, so there was no have to construct new factories.

The firm is creating soluble sachets for detergent pods, ice-cream scoops, and even paper packing for cosmetics. And there’s loads of seaweed to experiment with, Paslier factors out. “You don’t realize it’s already available massively at scale,” he says. “It’s in our toothpaste, it’s in our beer, it’s in our reduced-fat products—so there’s an existing infrastructure that we can work with without having to build any additional processes.”

This article seems within the March/April 2024 difficulty of WIRED UK journal.