Do not throw away the wrap: eat it

Films and food packaging are an option to explore in the food sector. Biting a sandwich and discovering that we have eaten half wrap can be an uncomfortable accident: papers, membranes and films, biological materials perfectly assimilated by our body, embody an ecological alternative to traditional packaging increasingly explored.

They are also a way of lightening the containers (a fresh food covered with an edible and antibacterial skin will enable its outer protection to be less heavy, or it can be a less synthetic material than plastic) and generate less waste (an edible paper will end up in our stomach instead of the garbage). some of these systems have already been marketed successfully; Others, for the moment, continue to be refined in laboratories.

The Spanish film that prolongs the fruit’s life.

A pioneering university project in 2009 of chemist Javier Osés led to Proinec, a company from Navarra (Spain) that produces natural films based on natural oils. Its coating, which began to form from his doctoral thesis, is composed of “natural ingredients such as polysaccharides and proteins”, and it has the property of extending the life of the fourth range products, such as cut and peeled fruit.

Pocket Water Drops.

A plastic bottle that is not recycled can take up to 1,000 years to decompose in the open. With the idea of making a ‘clean’ container in mind, the Spanish Rodrigo García González and his partners from the London startup Skipping Rocks Lab developed the bio capsules Ooho, edible and biodegradable spheres containing 50 milliliters of water.

The membrane that protects the liquid, composed of seaweed, chlorine and calcium, can be eaten with ease (it is now insipid) or destined for composting since, as its creators have stated in various media, this film is inspired on the fruit skin. It will be commercialized soon. The Ooho inventors received the Energy Globe Award from the United Kingdom in 2016.

Bite without fear of swallowing paper.

The paper is eaten. At least, the paper made by Do Eat, a small Belgian company that makes edible wrappings that taste like edible things. To do this, the founders of Do Eat, Thibaut Gilquin and Hélène Hoyois, developed a moldable material from water and potato starch with sufficient consistency to sustain food.

They did it as a final project in 2013, but the experiment worked so well that they soon embarked on what they called “their ecological option”: Do Eat, which won the 101Projets program co-sponsored by Marc Simoncini, the creator of Meetic, has several product ranges: hamburger and sandwich wrappers, skewers, biscuit sachets. If we want them to crack, we only should put them in the microwave.

Feed the fish instead of killing them.

Reducing marine pollution and protecting the nearly 8,000 threatened fish species is the philosophy of Saltwater Brewery, a small Florida-based brewing company that, using natural debris from wheat and barley derived from brewing, they have made edible and biodegradable rings for the six-pack cans.

An example of circular economy, these rings can be ingested without prejudice by marine fauna and only take about two hours to begin to degrade in the sea.