‘We don’t want to be a niche brand’: Seaweed is taking plastic out of stadiums and sandwich boxes

If you’re fortunate capable to beryllium seeing Beyoncé astatine Tottenham Hotspur stadium successful London this month, chances are your performance snacks will travel successful a instrumentality made retired of seaweed.

Notpla, nan institution which makes seaweed-based packaging to switch single-use plastics, has gone from spot to spot since winning nan Earthshot Prize successful 2022, bagging a prize of €1 cardinal successful nan world biology grant created by nan UK’s Prince William.

The task started pinch its 2 French and Spanish founders, Pierre Paslier and Rodrigo Garcia Gonzalez, experimenting successful their student room while astatine Imperial College London. Now, Notpla has replaced much than 21 cardinal items of single-use integrative crossed Europe, and is aiming to displace 1 cardinal units by 2030.

In bid to make a existent dent successful nan insidious rumor of plastic pollution, nan ‘disappearing packaging’ solution is being rolled retired successful caller venues and fashioned into caller shapes and sizes. We caught up pinch main gross serviceman Lise Honsinger, Notpla’s first worker successful 2017, to find retired more.

Notpla and fronds: The dispersed of a seaweed solution

Notpla’s prototype was an edible h2o capsule called Ooho. It garnered viral liking successful 2017, which Honsinger partially attributes to a “zeitgeist” of integrative contamination awareness. 

The start-up collaborated pinch Lucozade to switch 36,000 plastic bottles astatine nan London Marathon successful 2019. Then COVID hit, events stopped, and nan institution pivoted to attraction connected seaweed coatings for nutrient packaging which make takeaway boxes compostable for illustration consequence peel. 

In business pinch Just Eat, Notpla’s packaging was utilized astatine nan UEFA Women’s Final astatine Wembley Stadium, London successful 2022. From 7 types of folded carton committee boxes that year, it has grown into a catalogue of complete 50 different designs. 

Imagine beautiful overmuch immoderate food packaging you’d prime up from a thoroughfare nutrient van - burger clam shells, spot trays and forks, churros scoops - and there’s a seaweed-coated alternative.

There is simply a purity to Notpla’s imagination - which intelligibly impressed nan Earthshot Prize judges. Winning successful nan ‘Build a Waste-free World’ class further “unlocked credibility”, arsenic Hosinger puts it.

“We're not going for nan easiest win,” she says. “We're not going to operation our merchandise pinch a spot of plastic to make a semi-natural merchandise because that's a spot easier. We're going to spell for it moreover if it's nan hardest thing, to make judge it's genuinely natural.” 

Seaweed packaging is coming to stadiums, offices and museums

Notpla products are now utilized astatine awesome stadiums and venues successful nan UK, including nan Kia Oval, The Principality, Tottenham Hotspurs, Aston Villa, The Aviva, Twickenham and nan ExCel Centre.

The Johan Cruijff Arena successful nan Netherlands is connected committee too, and Levy - portion of nan Compass Group catering institution which Notpla useful pinch - has conscionable won a statement pinch stadiums successful Germany. That’s each portion of a “step change” to dispersed crossed Europe and nan US, Honsinger says.

The purpose is to make nan move arsenic friction-free arsenic possible, and Notpla products tin fresh into immoderate discarded watercourse the stadium already uses, from composting to recycling aliases wide waste.

Meanwhile, IKEA has conscionable rolled retired Notpla’s seaweed-based packaging successful its caller Oxford Street London restaurant. 

And nan institution is launching a caller deli range, featuring plastic-free windows truthful group tin spot their sandwiches earlier buying. Honsinger hopes this will thief Notpla branch retired into agency catering and museums, wherever that sneak peek is important. 

“We perfectly want this solution to beryllium everywhere. We don’t want to beryllium a niche packaging brand,” she says. 

The scheme is to spell upstream complete nan adjacent fewer years - providing coatings to committee manufacturers, for example, alternatively than trading boxes to container buyers. Ultimately, Honsinger wants Notpla to go a family name, successful nan realm of Tetra Pak aliases Gore-Tex. 

“Everyone will know, if I've sewage a packaging that's Notpla, it's not sewage integrative successful it, it's not sewage everlastingly chemicals, it's not going to springiness maine crab - because I deliberation nan world’s woken up to nan wellness consequences of plastics arsenic well.”

New frontiers for natural, plastic-free packaging

With seaweed extracts from France, Spain (ROKO) and South America, Notpla is fashioning its wonder ingredient into various caller shapes and sizes. 

The scientists are moving connected creating acold and basking cups, for example, while Notpla continues to create its existing solutions - for illustration speeding up nan manufacture of Oohos.

But location are limits to this R&D. “The logic integrative is everyplace is because it's not natural,” Honsinger explains; it forms a complete obstruction to oxygen, water, and grease. Seaweed is ne'er going to beryllium nan aforesaid arsenic plastics, she says, and that’s a bully thing.

“You've sewage to retrieve nan logic why it hasn't sewage arsenic utmost properties arsenic integrative is nan logic it will break down successful nature.”

Notpla created nan Natural Polymers Groups pinch immoderate of its competitors past year. It bears nan favoritism of being nan only plastic-free replacement to meet nan EU Single Use Plastics Directive (SUPD), according to nan Dutch government, which carried retired extended testing successful 2023.

With regulations connected single-use plastics and forever chemicals (PFAS) tightening up, nan early is agleam for alternatives for illustration Notpla.

Are plastics companies alert of their seaweed competitor yet?

“I deliberation mostly astatine nan infinitesimal we're not large capable to scare them,” says Hosinger. “But I deliberation they cognize it's coming.”