Note
Notpla is a sustainable packaging company based in London that uses seaweed to create biodegradable packaging solutions as an alternative to plastic. The company’s vision is to empower coastal areas to produce locally virtuous materials, creating jobs and replacing plastic with sustainable alternatives. Notpla’s solutions have been rigorously tested and verified as non-plastic polymers, offering a truly plastic-free option for brands looking to make sustainable choices. Brands can help drive innovation by listening to consumer feedback and making changes to meet the demand for more sustainable products, ultimately contributing to a circular economy and reducing environmental harm.
Highlights
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2024-12-01 10:16 So I’m Pierre, Pierre Paslier, co founder of notpla. We’re a sustainable packaging company based in London and we’re going to be talking a lot about seaweed.
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2024-12-01 10:17 My name’s Emily Hill. I’m the innovation lead within Cantel’s Sustainable Transformation practice
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2024-12-01 10:16 So when we saw those little bubbles, we were like, wow, like, what if we could make them bigger and bigger? And there was something really interesting. So we got ourselves some seaweed paste from the Internet and started messing around in the kitchen. And to our surprise, we were able to make some tomato shaped, kind of like transparent bubbles filled with water or juices. And it was like completely edible, the whole thing.
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2024-12-01 10:17 Actually like funny story, we are based in London recording this podcast. London is where plastic was invented in 1866 by Alexander Parkes in Hackneywick. And I was, I had the chance of like reading some of his notebooks recently and he was saying like, came from like noble intentions. He was saying like, I think this could be used for reducing the amount of like ivory and tortoise shell that we are kind of using. But he also said like, I think it’s never going to be cheap enough to work because the solvents and all the kind of like petrochemicals that he was using at that point were really kind of like expensive. So it’s taken 150 years of R and D to get to the material that is used every day in our lives for wrapping everything that we use.
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2024-12-01 09:45 Like today plastic is so kind of like prevalent because it is priced so low in the market. But actually this is a virtual cost. Like this does not take into account this forever kind of like implications that it has on all of these systems.
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2024-12-01 10:17 And same story. We’re like, we’ve got a big amount of waste that we generate in the stadiums, like millions of those, like hot dog like trays and boxes and they all having a thin layer of plastic on the inside. Let’s just kind of like not give the choice to consumer. We’ll just mandate it, we’ll just make it happen in all of those venues. So that’s Wimbledon, Twickenham, the Oval, O2, like Chelsea, Tottenham, all of those places that are kind of like moments where millions of people are kind of like enjoying the sports or the concerts. And to know that they can do that without plastic is quite exciting.
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2024-12-01 10:16 Pierre, what’s slowing the acceleration of plastic free technology? I think unfortunately and that’s going to probably resonate with some marketeers, but there is a lot of greenwashing. There’s lots of people claiming all sorts of things today on the market that are not substantiated and that is truly hindering innovation when you’ve got a, like create a brand new material technology that requires kind of like tens of PhDs and like millions of pounds of investment. That’s something that like, needs to have a level of reward that is high enough that there’s not just one not plot, there’s like 100 not plot out there who are like, this is worth solving. And today the problem is that lots of companies will just kind of claim the exact same things that we would claim, like, untruthfully, by kind of like blending a little bit of plastic in what they do.
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2024-12-01 12:06 And only 7.2% of those materials are actually from circular sources, which is staggering.