Since 2011, the month of July has been home to Plastic Free July, a month without plastic: an initiative promoted by the Plastic Free Foundation whose aim is to raise awareness of the uncontrolled use of single-use plastic in our daily lives, encouraging a more sustainable lifestyle for at least one month.

How much plastic is still in our daily lives

Most of the plastic currently produced is virgin, meaning it is made from fossil fuels, and 57 per cent of it consists of flexible single-use packaging such as sachets, films and the like. Plastic's usefulness stems from its strength and durability: making it single-use is therefore a genuine contradiction in terms, since it decomposes extremely slowly and disperses waste (including in the form of microplastics) that poses a serious threat to entire ecosystems, starting with the oceans. In 2021 alone, humanity generated 139 million tonnes of single-use plastic waste, a full six million more than two years earlier: a volume that had never previously been reached.

How Plastic Free July works

Plastic Free July sets a challenge: produce no plastic waste for the entire month of July. It is an opportunity to build awareness and, perhaps, adopt good habits to carry through the rest of the year. To take part, you can register on the official website, which also offers a wealth of resources, tips and ideas to put into practice straight away, as well as a quiz to measure your progress.

In 2022 alone, around 140 million people in 195 countries took part in the initiative, with more than 165 events registered worldwide. The result was remarkable: participants and their families reduced the production of non-recoverable waste by 1.7 million tonnes and plastic consumption by 0.3 million tonnes, while in recent years they have reduced waste and recycling by 18 kilograms per person per year (a 4.1 per cent reduction in waste).

From a small local initiative in Western Australia, Plastic Free July has quickly become a global movement and one of the most widely followed environmental campaigns in the world. More and more people are recognising the importance of limiting plastic consumption, and a growing number of market solutions are emerging with this aim in mind. Here are 5 innovative startups that have taken up the challenge, producing bioplastics, biodegradable or bio-based materials capable of saving us from a sea of plastic.

5 startups to discover for Plastic Free July

• This Unique
• Iuv
• FlexSea
• Notpla
• Apeel

This Unique

Founded in 2020, This Unique approaches menstruation in an eco-sustainable and inclusive way. The Italian startup offers a line of sanitary pads and tampons with a reduced environmental impact, entirely compostable and plastic free. On average, commercially available sanitary pads are made primarily from plastic, and much of their environmental impact stems from their single-use nature: it has been estimated that they can take up to eight hundred years to break down. While tampons, by contrast, are made mostly from cotton, many have plastic applicators which, once discarded, are often dispersed in the environment and are commonly found on beaches and even in the stomachs of dead seabirds.

This Unique's mission, however, goes beyond the products themselves. As well as taking up the challenge of the environmental issues linked to feminine intimate hygiene and offering menstrual products made from one hundred per cent organic, hypoallergenic cotton, the aim is to break down the stigma and shame surrounding the menstrual cycle and to challenge the negative attitudes that still exist today, by normalising the conversation around menstruation and including all categories in the narrative, from non-binary people to those transitioning and transgender people.

Iuv

Iuv is a startup founded in Italy in 2019 that offers edible coatings for fresh food products and innovative plastic-free packaging solutions for fast-moving consumer goods — both food and non-food — through the use of what the company itself calls Naturamers. These are small, naturally occurring molecules that have not been chemically modified, found in algae, plants and even food industry by-products such as, for example, peach skins from fruit juice production.

The result is an innovative, sustainable, edible and completely biodegradable material: in short, a polymer that is entirely respectful of nature and combats food waste, as it prevents the growth of moulds, yeasts and bacteria. Iuv currently has two coating lines. The first is aimed exclusively at the food market, for single-use packaging and food preservation, including in the form of an edible spray film; the second targets the general fast-moving consumer goods sector with virtually unlimited applications, from fashion to stationery.

FlexSea

Based in the United Kingdom, FlexSea develops new biodegradable biopolymers that break down in marine and terrestrial environments and through simple home composting — and are also edible — derived from algae and other natural products. The company's challenge is to offer a substitute for plastic that can fully biodegrade within just a few weeks, while retaining plastic's hallmark strength and efficiency.

FlexSea's production process requires small amounts of energy, as temperatures do not exceed 95 degrees, compared with the more than 170 degrees required by petroleum-based plastics or existing bioplastics. Freshwater consumption is also reduced, since algae do not need to be irrigated, unlike the maize or sugarcane used to make other bioplastics. The material can furthermore be ingested by both land and aquatic animals without any harm and, indeed, provides nutritious food. Its decomposition not only causes no damage to the environment, but actually fertilises the soil thanks to the nitrogen contained in the algae.

Notpla

Notpla is short for "not plastic" and is the name of a startup founded by two researchers from Imperial College London. Since 2019 the company has been working on a material made from brown seaweed, an excellent ally as it grows quickly, does not compete with other food crops and contributes to the de-acidification of the oceans. Notpla's packaging is biodegradable within four to six weeks, home-compostable and edible.

The company's product range is very broad, but its flagship item is undoubtedly Ooho, a flexible food membrane that can be swallowed together with its contents and can be used with any type of liquid, from water to food sauces. For the first time, Ooho was tested during the 2019 London Marathon: instead of traditional plastic bottles, 36,000 capsules containing energy drinks were handed out to runners, and were either ingested or dissolved without leaving any trace.

In 2022 Notpla received the Earthshot prize, the United Kingdom's most prestigious ecological award, launched by Prince William and naturalist and broadcaster David Attenborough.

Apeel

Apeel Science is a startup founded in 2012 in California, also with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has patented Edipeel: an edible coating made from organic lipids extracted from plant waste, such as peels, seeds and pulp, capable of doubling (and in some cases tripling) the shelf life of fruit and vegetables by slowing down water loss and oxidation, the main causes of deterioration. The substance, which is odourless, colourless and tasteless, is diluted in water and then sprayed onto fruit and vegetables at any stage of the supply chain.

There are currently over fifty categories of products to which it can be applied, including citrus fruits, mangoes, papayas, melons, bananas, pineapples, pomegranates, cucumbers, asparagus, artichokes and tomatoes. In 2022 alone, Edipeel prevented 44 million pieces of fruit from going to waste, avoided the emission of 7,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide and contributed to saving 456 billion litres of water, enough to fill 680 Olympic swimming pools.