Global awareness of the plastic packaging problem has reached record levels in recent years and the search for a true sustainable alternative is ongoing. Could the solution lie in the seas? London-based start-up Notpla, founded by Pierre Paslier and Rodrigo Garcia Gonzalez, believe so.
Just 9% of all the plastic ever produced has been recycled and 12% has been incinerated. The rest lies in landfills or has been dumped into the oceans. Notpla is an alternative to plastic made from seaweed and plants.
It is always totally natural and entirely biodegradable, and can be used to create a range of packaging products, such as a bubble to hold liquids, a coating for food containers, and a paper for the cosmetic and fashion industry.
At the London Marathon in 2019 36,000 Notpla-made Oohos, filled with Lucozade, were handed to runners. This year, Notpla has made over 1 million takeaway food boxes for Just Eat Takeaway.com, with the potential to replace over 100 million plastic coated containers in Europe in the future. The company is continuing to research and develop new formats and solutions, with flexible films and rigid materials in the pipeline.
Notpla’s impact is wide and varied. Seaweed farmed for its production captures carbon twenty-times faster than trees, addressing one of the key causes of the climate crisis. The packaging itself means less plastic clogging our seas, reducing ocean waste. Meanwhile, farms boost fish population and seaweed farming creates new opportunities for fishing communities.
Notpla is just at the beginning of its journey, with new materials in development that could one day replace single-use plastic packaging applications across various industries and at a global scale. Today, plastic continues to pile up in our oceans and landfills, but we may now have the answer. It’s not plastic, it’s Notpla.
Since winning The Earthshot Prize in 2022, Notpla has scaled its team rapidly to keep up with growing demand.
Since winning The Earthshot Prize, Notpla has grown its team to keep up with demand. The company has invested some of the Prize money in R&D, such as a machine to create a rigid form of Notpla material: ‘Notpla Rigid’. It is developing its mass production capabilities to prepare for greater scale and to improve production efficiency as it forges new partnerships with larger companies.
Notpla has replaced 4.4m units of plastic with Notpla products in 2023. Its packaging is the first and only material worldwide to have been recognised as being plastic-free under the European Single Use Plastics Directive. Commercial partnerships are growing in number too. The company is working with Bidfood UK, has partnered with Just Eat in Spain and Belgium and supplied products to dozens of sporting events.
In 2023 Notpla replaced 4.4m single-use plastic units with Notpla products, double the total achieved in 2022. This means that in 2023 it displaced the equivalent of 8.5 tonnes of plastic waste and avoided 250 tonnes of CO2e emissions, double those avoided in 2022. As it has grown it has also expanded its team, creating 17 new green jobs.
The Earthshot Prize’s Global Alliance has supported in multiple ways. Deloitte, for instance, has jointly launched a project with Notpla to develop a strategy for their flexible packaging film. Bloomberg has become a customer of Notpla and featured the company on Bloomberg Philanthropies’ ‘Follow the Data’ podcast. Herbert Smith Freehills, meanwhile, has provided pro bono legal support for the company’s pipeline of commercial agreements.
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