Kelpi - innovation in sustainable packaging
by Startacus Admin
The lowdown on Kelpi, the startup that's using seaweed to develop an innovative solution to the global plastic packaging problem.
In the UK alone, households throw away around 100 billion articles of plastic packaging every year. As we have written so many times now, this is massively damaging to the environment and to sea life, because no matter where plastic ends up being discarded, it pollutes and kills. Whether this is leaching chemicals into the ground and water, releasing toxic particles into the atmosphere when burned, or choking marine life when it’s dumped in the oceans. All this is before we even mention the oil consumption that goes into manufacturing plastic. When most of this discarded plastic is packaging, it’s common sense to start looking at alternatives that can be trusted not to choke turtles.
Bath-based startup Kelpi has been developing a specific bioplastic alternative made, as the name suggests, from seaweed. Much of the plastic in our packaging isn’t only from plastic containers, but from plastic coatings on paper and card packaging, which means that neither that plastic nor the paper can be recycled. Kelpi’s seaweed-based bioplastic replaces this coating, and it’s resistant to grease and acids, it’s durable, and it’s compostable.
Paper and card packaging coated in this bioplastic can go into recycling as they would if they didn’t have any coating. So the end user sees no difference in the usability of a product, fossil fuel reliance and plastic pollution are significantly reduced, and it’s all replaced by a renewable, environment-friendly source.
Kelpi recently announced that they had raised £3 million in funding in a seed round led by Science Creates Ventures and Green Angel Syndicate, with participation from One Planet Capital and Bristol Private Equity Club. This comes after a £320,000 pre-seed round in late 2021. This funding will further the startup’s development of their bioplastic, scale up, and help eliminate our reliance on highly damaging plastics.
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Published on: 14th February 2023
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