MY PLASTIC FILM DECOMPOSES LIKE VEGGIE PEELINGS

WHETHER you buy a Snact organic snack bar or a pair of sunglasses from Stella McCartney’s designer range, if it’s packaged in a compostable clear plastic bag, there’s a strong chance it was created by a company called Tipa.

The founder of Tipa is Daphna Nissenbaum, who set out three years ago to develop a clear film that would behave like plastic, but which could decompose in your food bin like vegetable peelings.

‘The idea came from an argument I was having with one of my teenage children about the plastic water bottles they were throwing away.

‘I went out for a jog and thought, “This just doesn’t make sense — we cannot continue like this,” ’ she says.

Although at the time she was working as a software engineer, she was so convinced of the need to find a plastic alternative that she teamed up with two bio-plastics experts to investigate options. ‘They told me there was no such product and that I should wait a few years, but I was insistent,’ Daphna remembers.

She points out that an incredible 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic is produced worldwide each year. Seventy per cent of that is used only once and just nine per cent is recycled. Of that, only 10 per cent is then recycled a second time. Although Daphna’s first focus was to replace the plastic used in bottles, she swiftly switched to experimenting with alternatives to thin plastic film.

‘Plastic bottles can be recycled, so I wanted to find an alternative to the flimsy plastic which cannot,’ she explains. The task was not an easy one.

Her team of chemists, plastic engineers and food engineers worked for over three years to produce the first generation of non-plastic film made from compostable polymers — a combination of bio-based and fossil-based ingredients such as sugar cane, corn and non-edible plants.

‘It’s been tough but this has been a highly rewarding process,’ she says.