Sussex graduate wins UK Dyson Award with fish bioplastic

MarinaTex looks and feels like clear plastic but is produced at temperatures below 100 degrees Celsius and biodegrades between four and six weeks. Nearly half of the five million tonnes of plastic used in the UK each year comes from packaging. Lucy hopes MarinaTex can replace some of this single-use plastic while also finding a stream for the half a million tonnes of fish waste produced in the country annually.

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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. “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.