MarinaTex - The next level in sustainable technology?

It’s great to see early stage UK innovators being rewarded, especially when the product under development has the potential to be transformative.

Nobody can claim to be unaware of the threat to life posed by the devastating and ever-growing amount of plastic waste being discarded into the environment, particularly the marine environment. As we recently reported, Coca-Cola is already striving to introduce a step change in plastic recycling and recovery technologies.

Now, a young British product designer has been rewarded for creating a bioplastic derived from fish waste which could help to close the loop of an existing waste stream by creating a more circular product lifespan.

This month, Lucy Hughes, 24, has been named international winner of the James Dyson Award for her MarinaTex bioplastic material, which she developed during her final year of Product Design at Sussex University.

MarinaTex looks and functions like food-grade clear plastic but is made from commercial fish waste and agar. It is produced at temperatures below 100 degrees Celsius and takes just over a month to biodegrade.

Nearly half of the five million tonnes of plastic used in the UK each year comes from packaging, and Hughes hopes to have found a way to replace some of this, while also identifying a stream for the half a million tonnes of fish waste produced in the country annually.

As James Dyson put it: “Young engineers have the passion, awareness and intelligence to solve some of the world’s biggest problems. Ultimately, we decided to pick the idea the world could least do without. MarinaTex elegantly solves two problems: the ubiquity of single-use plastic and fish waste.”

Russell is one of our legal experts, specialising in Employment Law.