MarinaTex bioplastic wins international Dyson prize

MarinaTex looks and feels like clear plastic but is made from fish waste and agar, produced at temperatures below 100 degrees Celsius, and takes just over a month to biodegrade. With nearly half of the five million tonnes of plastic used in the UK each year coming from packaging, Lucy hopes MarinaTex can replace some of this, while also finding a stream for the half a million tonnes of fish waste produced in the country annually. After being named the UK winner of the Dyson Award earlier this year, Lucy will now receive £30,000 for taking the overall international prize.

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“Plastic is an amazing material, and as a result, we have become too reliant on it as designers and engineers,” said 23-year-old Lucy, who developed MarinaTex during her final year of Product Design at Sussex University. “It makes no sense to me that we’re using plastic, an incredibly durable material, for products that have a life-cycle of less than a day.