A British student who designed a compostable alternative to plastic film made of fish waste has won a prestigious design award and a £30,000 prize.
Lucy Hughes, a product design graduate from the University of Sussex, was the 2019 International Winner of the James Dyson Award for her product MarinaTex, which has the potential to replace plastic in food and drink packaging.
In designing the product as part of her degree, the 24-year-old sought to solve the twin problems of single-use plastics and inefficient waste by using fish off-cuts that would otherwise end up in landfill to create a home-compostable alternative to plastic film.
A report from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation states that 50 million tonnes of fish waste are produced globally each year, whilst fish processing in the UK alone produces 172,000 tonnes of waste annually.
MarinaTex claims to find a new use for this waste with a more circular end product that can biodegrade naturally in a soil environment in four to six weeks, despite tensile tests showing the product to be stronger at the same thickness than LDPE – the polythene commonly used in plastic bags – making it ideal for packaging applications.
“Plastic is an amazing material, and as a result we have become too reliant on it as designers and engineers,” said Hughes.
“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.”
“For me, MarinaTex represents a commitment to material innovation and selection by incorporating sustainable, local and circular values into design. As creators, we should not limit ourselves in designing to just form and function, but rather form, function and footprint.”
Hughes had already pocketed £2,000 in September as the winner of the UK awards, before beating competition from over 1,000 young designers from 28 different countries this month to scoop the international prize.
The James Dyson award is open to current and recent design engineering students, challenging them to “design something that solves a problem”.
The awards are run by the James Dyson Foundation – the British designer’s charitable trust – as part of its mission to get young people excited about design engineering.
Dyson said: “Young engineers have the passion, awareness and intelligence to solve some of the world’s biggest problems. Ultimately, we decided to pick the idea the world could least do without. MarinaTex elegantly solves two problems: the ubiquity of single-use plastic and fish waste.”
Image courtesy of MarinaTex.co.uk.
