We are thrilled with all the new innovative ways designers around the world are thinking outside the plastic box. This week we bring you a more earth-friendly way to package good in the form of seaweed-based agar containers.
Have you ever considered how much plastic you might be responsible for wasting? If you’re the average American, you’re likely to throw away an astonishing 185 pounds of plastic per year. Worse, 50% of the plastic that ends up in landfills and the oceans was only used once before it was discarded.
On average plastic requires 500 to 1,000 years to decompose and only 5% of what’s tossed into the trash is every recovered, but a Japanese design company called AMAM is looking to change that.
The products they have created is derived from agar, which is a gelatinous material that is readily found in red marine algae. Agar seaweed is a traditional Japanese food ingredient that is sold dried in supermarkets but people can also melt the agar in hot water to make traditional Japanese sweets and desserts.
Making the agar-based packaging is quite simple, first, the agar powder is dissolved in simmering water and then poured into a mold. Once the agar sets into a kind of jelly, the mold is frozen for approximately two days.
After the mold is frozen that agar will hold is structure and can be thawed and completely air-dried. The designers hope that algae-based agar packaging will replace plastic. Although they emphasize that their product is still in a prototype phase it is exciting to sees natural solution being developed to replace plastic.
The three designers behind AMAM are Kosuke Araki, Noriaki Maetani, and Akira Muraoka. In 2015, the trio teamed up to create things beyond their respective areas of interest; the algae-based alternative to plastic is their first collaborative project.
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