Packaging

Greener Solutions 2022: Moisture Barrier for Seaweed-based Poly Mailers

This project focused on identifying potential strategies that Sway, a San Francisco Bay Area startup developing seaweed-based films, could implement to enhance the moisture resistance of their seaweed-based poly mailers, while also maintaining optimal mechanical performance, biodegradability, and compostability.

Final Report Final Presentation Slides...

Greener Solutions 2021: Compostable Packaging for Frozen Kelp

This team partnered with Noble Ocean Farms, a kelp farming startup in Cordova, Alaska, to identify sustainable and biodegradable packaging strategies. Their first strategy completely replaces polyethylene with a bioplastic, which is significantly less persistent in the environment. Their second strategy uses a durable material (i.e. paperboard) in combination with a bioplastic laminate/coating, eliminating traditional plastics completely. And their third strategy combines a bioplastic packaging with a structural material separate from the bioplastic....

Greener Solutions 2020: PFAS-free home product packaging

The product packaging researchers identified biopolymer films for product packaging for a range of Method Home products, including laundry powders, detergents, and soaps, with a range of moisture barrier needs. The team came up with strategies that fell into three categories: Biopolymer films derived from natural sources, including chitosan, pectin, and gelatin; chemical additive cross-linking film to improve barrier and mechanical properties, including with genipin and ferulic acid; and physical additive nanofillers to reinforce film’s barrier and mechanical properties,...

Greener Solutions 2018: Ocean Plastics with Method

The Ocean Plastics team compared the performance and end-of-life behavior of bio-based plastics to petroleum-derived types, with the goal of identifying polymers that behave more similarly to cellulose, keratin, or DNA polymers in the environment. Their research indicated that plastics that degrade only to nano- or micro-scale structures can be very hazardous, readily absorbing persistent organic pollutants and remaining in the food chain. The problem of the ubiquity of nano-plastic bits in the environment was an additional and novel performance challenge that they considered...

Greener Solutions 2020: PFAS-Free Compostable Food Packaging

The food packaging team identified alternatives to fluoropolymer mixtures in molded fiber such as rhamnolipids and pectin added to the existing paper system and nanocellulose and lignin sourced from within the paper system. The team thought creatively to identify how materials that would normally be wasted in the existing paper production system could be reused.

Final Presentation...