Festival and mega events single plastic usage 

Big events like marathons or festivals lead to massive single plastic usage that are generally not recycled. The WWF states that approximately 75% of all water bottles are not recycled. They end up in landfills, litter roadsides, and pollute waterways and oceans where they take about 450 years to break down. Day events like the London Marathon for example use over 919,000 single use plastic bottles in just one day. (Number for 2018 according to Forbes)

Takeaway Boxes

In order to protect takeaway boxes from the fluids of the foods they carry, most are lined with a plastic coating or packed with health compromising chemicals known as PFAs, so called ‘forever chemicals’. That small, invisible layer of plastic will, like other plastics, not break down even if the cardboard that it's attached to has long decomposed. PFAs can accumulate in humans and have increasingly been seen to be contributing to a range of cancers. In the UK alone 500 million plastic takeaway boxes are used each year.

The Notpla product is a non-chemically modified, polysaccharide-based material made from brown seaweed, and is classified as a natural, organic substance by EU law. It is similar to fruit peel, and unlike PLA, is home compostable and doesn’t contaminate PET recycling. Notpla biodegrades naturally in 4-6 weeks. 

Notpla has developed a number of products of which Ooho and Notpla Coating are the most well known at the time of writing (Dec 2022). 

Ooho

Ooho was designed to replace single-use packaging for liquids used especially at big sporting or music/festival events. It’s an edible bubble made from seaweed that can contain drinks; such as water, juice, energy drink or alcohol. They can be instantly consumed either whole, when of a size of cherry tomato (23ml) or bitten into and then sipped from for the bigger sachet (70ml). The remains of the larger packages and smaller sachets that are not consumed are fully biodegradable.

The thickness of the product is adjustable, and hence chewable drink sachets can be produced as well as thicker more sturdy sachets for ketchup and the likes. A bespoke manufacturing machine produces Ooho’s sachets in the range of 15-100ml, depending on the application.

The sachet can be made flavourless making it the ideal vehicle for any edible liquid. Flavour however can also be added if needed. 

Notpla Coating

Notpla Coating that is put on degradable takeaway cardboard boxes has many of the same grease and water-resistant qualities of traditional coatings used in takeaway food packaging, but is made from seaweed and is fully biodegradable. The whole Notpla coated takeaway box can be recycled or thrown in home compost, leaving no harmful traces behind in the environment.

Other products include Notpla film for dried goods, such as pasta and seaweed paper but also the Notpla Pipette for packaging edible oils and Notpla Rigid for primary packaging.

Initially Oohos started to be handed out at small running events, and for the 2019 London Marathon Notpla partnered with Lucozade to replace single-use plastic cups and bottles with 36,000 Oohos. 

In 2022 Notpla made over 1 million takeaway food boxes for Just Eat Takeaway.com. 

Seaweed is one of the planet’s most abundant sustainable biomass sources. It is growing up to 1m per day, doesn’t compete with food crops, doesn’t need fresh water or fertiliser and actively contributes to de-acidifying our oceans. Seaweed captures carbon twenty-times faster than trees.

Notpla works primarily with European seaweed suppliers, as locally as possible. As UK seaweed farming is growing, they are steadily building partnerships farms. Their current UK partner is Car-Y-Mor, a seaweed farm on the coast of Wales.

Making decomposable packaging comes with the challenge of short shelf lives. Oohos for example have to be produced in close vicinity of where they are used. Also the content of the Oohos is important, with liquids such as vinegar and alcohol giving the Oohos much longer life spans than juice for example. Coated cardboard takeaway boxes on the other hand have a much longer life span in general and can therefore be transported to wherever they are needed. 

Notpla is at the time of writing (Dec2022) producing the coated takeaway boxes themselves. In the future, it has plans to work directly with the packaging industry, so that Notpla solely sells the film and the paper mills and packaging companies produce the cardboard boxes themselves.

The seaweed processing is split in 15-20% for biopolymers that are used for products such as the Oohos and Notpla coating and 80% for fiber. The fiber is turned into Seaweed paper, used for products such as labels and leaflets.

Notpla has won an number of awards:

For Notpla coating: Innovation of the Year, UK Packaging Award 2022 & Innovation Award, The Responsible Packaging Expo Awards 2022

2022 Earthshot Prize for the category of “BUILD A WASTE-FREE WORLD”