The winners of a lucrative competition tasking designers to come up with new materials to replace plastic packaging have been revealed.
Announced at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, the Circular Materials Challenge winners aim to develop alternatives for the plastic packaging materials that are currently used for sauces, fresh coffee, and snacks ? which are currently too hard or expensive to recycle.
The five winners will each receive a $200,000 share of the $1 million prize and will join a 12-month accelerator programme, run in collaboration with Think Beyond Plastic, to make the innovations marketable at scale.
The challenge forms part of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation's Plastics Economy Innovation Prize, which aims to dramatically reduce the number of plastics that enter the ocean each year by encouraging innovation to prevent the materfrom becoming waste in the first place. Each year more than 8 million tonnes of plastics enter the ocean, yet the three biggest clean-ups deal with just 0.5 per cent of that volume.
"In a new plastics economy, plastics will never become waste or enter the ocean in the first place," said Ellen MacArthur, an ex-sailor who began her eponymous foundation in 2009.
"These winning innovations show what?s possible when the principles of a circular economy are embraced. Clean-ups continue to play an important role in dealing with the consequences of the waste plastic crisis, but we know we must do more. We urgen...