Using Seaweed to Replace Plastic

one of our value is nature knows best we use things that have been around for millions of years rather than introducing very new synthetic things that we have no feedback from nature on but going to be more Plastics than fish in our ocean inner not plot the alternative to single-use Plastics let's take a look [Music] not play the team of chemists Engineers designers entrepreneurs we're developing new solutions that try to use seaweed instead of plastic for a lot of single-use applications typically packaging for food service electronic products lots of things that we consume really quickly and packaging is thrown away we started with Ojo which is a little bubble that can contain water or liquids where we found a really good application for marathons festivals places where there is a big consumption in a very short amount of time and where in a way there is the highest chance of littering there is no waste if you don't eat it nature will eat it and that was really our starting point into this uh this journey you said nature Canada how long does it take for it to go away so typically it takes four to six weeks but actually it can take as little as 10 days in our warmery where we test things side by side breaks down faster than the P11 orange you mentioned you know this this hatchets and then you have some other uses for them we started to put a lot of different things in the machine see what happens and that's when we realized that actually it could be a really good solution for condiments we developed these ketchup sachets and actually realize with our partner just did that we were still sending them in plastic boxes so the next challenge was what do we do about the box and so we started to realize that we didn't have to just make one product but we could create like a catalog of different solutions what was it that Drew you towards focusing on Ocean blast yeah I think it was just one of our kind of like interests like why can't we make things more like nature and I think when we realized that if these things are going to end up in the ocean we could solve the problem by having something that actually belongs to the ocean anyway that was something that was really interesting and when you think about it everything started in the ocean so seaweed have been there for such a long time because of its diversity there's about 12 000 species of seaweed all with their own like DNA makeup very different um some species of seaweed are more different than a mushroom and a bear like that's the spectrum that you've got when you look at seaweed some of the seaweed grow very fast so some of the seaweed we've tried in the lab grow up to a meter per day so it's one of the fastest growing organisms on the planet when you look at it like it also has a lot of added value compared to things that grow on land it doesn't require fresh water it doesn't require any fertilizer and it's really a zero input crop you just like Let It Grow you can't micromanage it like we do with agriculture on land because seaweed becomes more industrialized is there is there a responsible way to farm it or to take it from the open oceans so that's the great advantage of farming is that you can bring additional seaweed in places where it's maybe kind of like disappeared because we've messed with the environment but there's lots of dead zones where water doesn't mix nutrients doesn't flow and there's not much life in those parts of the ocean and seaweed can be the first actor to start restart reboot that system and bring back that diversity so awesome well thank you I'm gonna go down to your lab and chat to Louise who's going to teach me a little bit more about seaweed Louise hi Matthew so can you show me what's going on here what are we gonna look at so I'm going to show you how we actually make the coating that goes inside our box so I can show you the process over here we get all the powders together we can then blend it into a mixture with water and this creates kind of a formulation that allows us to coat it evenly on the material on the paper it's kind of like glue yeah yeah a little bit and it's quite sticky and this is kind of a demonstration of basically how it's done on industry so this is how we do on the lab scale of it so how how would this work in like the bigger bigger machines so there's lots of different coating processes there's one which uses this Rod which is called a mayor bar coating but there's also like loads of other methods so we're currently looking at three different methods that we're scaling up cool so can you show me more of this maybe and the product view so we can check out the products and maybe discuss a little bit more about the science and the chemistry behind them yeah definitely you can show them upstairs all right let's go thanks so we're in the design studio can you give me a little bit about what we just looked at downstairs and like actually how it works on the product yep so we take that coating we convert it into a box so it depends on what the customer wants we've got a takeaway box here we've also got seaweed paper which is actually using waste product from our extraction process that's what I can see in the paper too yeah so this is a waste fiber from the process of extracting the seaweed component that we use to make our Ojo and also our Coatings so we actually found these waste fibers were really useful to incorporate into paper and reduce the dependency on virgin wood this is another type of waste fiber from the Milling process or you can also make sachets and some of these are water soluble as well so we can actually drop them into water and they'll fully degrade cool can I see one of those yeah oh wow yeah it's funny what you experience with plastic and how your mind kind of thinks it's going to feel it's totally different when it comes to Natural materials and the Ojos themselves are also quite squishy and quite fun so we can test one of those if you want sure okay so she bite a bit off there's a little little soup slurp there [Music]

Channel: Bloomberg Quicktake

Views: 11,166

Keywords: quicktake, bloomberg, bloomberg quicktake, quicktake explained, explained, explain, explainer, news, world news, global news, news explained, doc, documentary, mini doc, mini documentary, Replacing Plastics With Seaweed, plastic, seaweed, climate, green, plastic replacement, plastic alternative, sea, seaweed-based packaging, seaweed products, Notpla, notpla seaweeds, not pla, notpla plastic

Id: UlUcztgsze8

Length: 6min 12sec (372 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 16 2022