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A plastic option made of fish, developed to change the type you may discover on a sandwich packet, has won the 2019 worldwide James Dyson award.
Lucy Hughes, 24, won the UK classification earlier this year.
The product, called MarinaTex, is made from fish off-cuts and beat 1,078 entries from worldwide, winning Lucy ₤30,000 in reward cash.
” For me, sustainability has never ever been an afterthought,” she tells Radio 1 Newsbeat.
Lucy’s mum says she’s constantly had a “three dimensional brain,” and after school she would do her research before anything else.
She studied Item Design at the University of Sussex, and the award-winning material was her last project before finishing.
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The material is made from fish waste integrated with algae.
Lucy states ecological effect is an important part of anything she creates.
” Generally, we develop in quite a direct method. You take material, make something with it, and after that discard of it.”
The worldwide James Dyson Award is a student competition run by the James Dyson Foundation.
It says entries need to “design something that solves an issue”.
Sir James Dyson, the creator, says Lucy’s creation “elegantly resolves” the problems of single-use plastic and fish waste.
She said: “It’s quite insane that I won, particularly with the other entries which were truly ingenious and resolved pushing problems.”
The James Dyson Foundation states 2019 saw the highest variety of female entrants, across all 27 nations that took part, since it began in 2007.
Lucy spoke with the BBC when she won the UK award in September.
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The material, unlike a lot of other bioplastics, will biodegrade in regular temperatures. This means individuals could deal with it in compost bins in the house.
According to a United Nations report, 27%of fish that are captured and given land never ever get used.
MarinaTex takes this waste and integrates it with red algae – among other things – to make the plastic alternative.
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This pastry shop bag has Lucy’s plastic option on it.
Lucy states she hopes the material can be utilized for things like bakery bags, “which can often be used for a total of 15 seconds”, along with sandwich product packaging and little provider bags.
After dealing with producing the product for a year – and winning the award – Lucy states she’s “still just in the early days” of what she wishes to finish with it.
” The next phase is advancement, to see how I ‘d be able to mass manufacture it.”
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