🍬 An edible plastic packaging

🍬 An edible plastic packaging

An alternative to plastic that is compostable and you could eat it if you’d like. The project won this year's Green Alley Award.

Linn Winge
Linn Winge

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Plastic contributes to an enormous waste and has an dreadful impact when it ends up in nature. Now Dr. Anne Lamp from Germany has designed a new type of plastic that is both edible and compostable.

Dr. Anne Lamp, has an engineering background and a passion for a ‘cradle to cradle’ lifecycle (which means closed loop production). She has designed a system to transform agricultural residues into various types of plastics.
After the plastic has been used it can safely be reintegrated into the food supply chain, again. Lamp’s process is estimated to be able to cut carbon emissions by 87% as compared to ordinary plastic production. It will cost less too.

Lamp launched her circular bio-economy startup Traceless in order to commercialise her idea. Traceless offers three different materials of packaging: a flexible film, a moldable plastic and a sprayable solution for coatings.

Traceless film - colour samples. Photo: Traceless

On Traceless website it reads:

“The key for Traceless' excellent compostability lies in its natural ingredients: Unlike many bioplastics, our materials are not based on polymers that are chemically modified or synthetically polymerized.
Instead, we simply make use of natural polymers - those polymers that nature has already designed itself. That's why microorganisms out there already know how to handle them, and can easily digest them.
Depending on the conditions and the thickness of the material, composting takes only 2-9 weeks.”
Composting test of traceless plast (left, thickness 0,2 and 1,6mm), compared to a film cutout of a commercially available organic waste bag (right, thickness 0,03mm, certified DIN 13432 compostable). Source: Traceless

The startup has already gained  alot of interest from investors and customers. EU:s ban on single-use plastics are coming up and therefor  solutions like Traceless are needed.

Traceless has won this year's Green Alley Award which recognizes and celebrates startups that display the circular economy's potential.