<aside> 💡 Hey! I’m Chandhana (Website | LinkedIn), a 19-year-old from India interested in making the future more sustainable. Currently, I’m working on making edible bioplastic from seaweed.
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https://www.loom.com/share/4a3a372e2c074e9f9114795fccc75b0c
I’ve been working on making an alternative to single-use plastics using seaweed as the main raw material. This project aims to create a cheap biomaterial that can help reduce the dependency of the FMCG market on plastic packaging.
The main gap in solving this problem is to make the material cheap for producers to switch to using them instead of extremely cheap and convenient plastics. I’m working on tackling this by using a renewable resource (seaweed) that can be mass-produced at a low cost and developing bioplastic pellets that can feed into existing manufacturing lines and, hence, would be much cheaper to implement than regular bioplastics with unique manufacturing processes.
So far, I’ve been able to make a prototype of this material for less than 1 USD per 1.5m^2. My immediate next goal on the research and development side is to make the material cheaper and more durable.
Biodegradable film made from plastic that can break down naturally
Bioplastic Prototype encapsulating beans to replace plastic packs
Much of the plastic produced is used for packaging, and much of it is only used once. Living in India, I see the detrimental effects of this problem on people's lives every day. Be it the sanitation workers who have to sort the plastic by hand, animals feeding off plastic waste, or stretches of land by the highways just covered in plastic.
Two main factors need to be addressed to eradicate this problem completely.
Many bioplastics today are marketed as compostable and are often confused with biodegradable. Compostable bioplastics don't naturally break down and need to be collected and transported to specific industrial composting facilities to break down. Most developing countries, including India, don't have the infrastructure for this. Although many of these solutions have ideal properties, they're too expensive to be considered a suitable alternative to single-use plastics.
Bioplastics in the market today are hard to scale due to their high cost and hence don't serve as a suitable alternative to plastics. This is mainly because bioplastics are incompatible with existing manufacturing technology, and the cost of switching is expensive. Current stakeholders (FMCG companies that use single-use plastic packaging) don't have the incentive (from a financial standpoint) to switch from a cheap material to an expensive biomaterial.
