Why seaweed bio-plastic?

South Australia is a marine macro-algae hot spot with many abundant and endemic species. The raw sea-weed material used in this project is sustainably sourced from wracks (beach cast material) at Beachport, South Australia. Unlike terrestrial plant based bio-plastics, sea-weed bio-plastics do not compete with resources cultivated primarily as food crops.

Sea-weeds have unique properties due to the challenging environment in which they grow.  They are elastic and resilient to environmental stresses. Their unique structure makes them useful for flexible bio-polymer materials such as gels, films and 3D matrices. Sea-weeds are nutrient rich and can contribute health benefits in the areas of nutrition, healing, agriculture, aquaculture and cosmetics.

Since a large amount of plastic waste ends up in our oceans it is quite poetic that bio-degradable marine bio-plastics might return to the source to complete the carbon cycle; returning original chemical components to the sea.