Agar alternative to plastic for packaging tops award event

Plastic container discards floating in oceans are an ugly sight and troubling environmental issue; scientists are exploring better ways to assure a cleaner future. That includes exploring materials that are earth-friendly and can replace plastic.

Plastic cannot—unlike aluminum and glass—be recycled over and over again. Plastic is also notorious for its resistance to decomposition, with estimates placing its life cycle somewhere between 500 and 1,000 years. Concerned about the implications of using so much plastic, a new Japanese design company, AMAM, is developing a more earth-friendly way to package goods.

Namely, AMAM is exploring an alternative to plastic which uses agar, a substance from algae. The big news for AMAM this month is that its efforts have resulted in the group being announced as the Grand Prix winner of the Lexus Design Award 2016.

The description of their winning entry was that “AGAR PLASTICITY is a project exploring how agar, a gelatinous material obtained from marine algae, can be used as an environmentally friendly packaging material alternative to plastic.”

Read more at Tech Xplore

Image Credit: Lexus Design Award 2016

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