🔎 What’s going on?
Lucy Hughes, a female British inventor creates a solution to two massive problems - single-use plastics and fish waste, with her invention of a new material called MarinaTex.
🐟 Amazing, tell me more!
MarinaTex is a translucent and flexible sheet material made out of waste fish scales and skin. The material is home compostable, meaning that every part of the material will breakdown into nutrient-rich soil in your back garden within 4 to 6 weeks. It’s stronger and safer (as it doesn’t leach any toxic chemicals into the environment) than the current material commonly used for plastic bags, LDPE (low-density polyethylene). As a natural material, it doesn’t harm humans, wildlife or the environment! Additionally, producing these flexible sheet material does not require much energy making it a sustainable product to mass-produce. MarinaTex is an alternative for single-use plastics.
❓Why should I care?
Shockingly, from the moment fishes are caught until they arrive on your plate, 27% of it will disappear. This essentially means seafood is wasted at various stages (post-catch, processing, distribution and consumption). According to the UN, over 50 million tonnes of fish are wasted globally every year. Whilst, 172,000 tonnes of fish waste is produced annually in the UK processing plants alone. On the other hand, each year 2.4 million metric tons of (mostly single-use) plastics enter the ocean from rivers - equivalent to about 40% of ocean debris.
Lucy’s unique approach to designing MarinaTex material by starting with a waste stream, rather than virgin raw materials to replace single-use plastics is extremely commendable.
🚦Where do we need to be?
We need to be operating a circular economy wherever possible, with the aim of designing out waste and maximising the resources we do have. We currently operate an unsustainable linear economy where we take resources from the earth, make things out it, use it and then dispose of it. Whereas a circular economy provides an alternative, sustainable model where we keep resources for as long as possible, reuse them, recover them and use them again in a closed-loop system.
👤 What can I do about it?
The golden rule when it comes to plastic is to reduce your consumption - don’t buy it unless you absolutely have to. Same goes for food waste, don’t buy it unless you know it will be eaten.