In May Tom Ford and 52HZ announced the Tom Ford Plastic Innovation Prize: submissions are now open from inventors, entrepreneurs and people who want to help fight against plastic pollution and find a replacement for thin-film plastic.
The two-year competition, followed by three years of support for competition finalists, offers more than $1 million to find biologically degradable thin-film plastic alternatives and help finalists reach scale and market adoption by 2025 (please note that submissions run through October 24, 2021, so you have a few months to work on your projects).
Every year, more than 380 million tons of plastic are produced worldwide, and what's even more scary is that 91 percent of the world's plastic is not recycled.
According to the prize site, there are 14 million metric tons of plastic on the ocean floor at the moment that will be nearly impossible to extract. Thin-film plastic makes up 46% of the approximately 11 million metric tons of plastic that leaks into our oceans every year. This figure is expected to nearly triple to 29 million metric tons by 2040.
Fashion and the food industry play a role in these numbers: single-use resealable sandwich storage bags and plastic polybags used by the fashion industry - bags that are almost impossible to recycle and that end up in landfills, on the ground and in our oceans - represent over 300 billion thin-film plastic bags disposed of annually.
The judges of the prize will work with scientific and technical experts from fields such as materials science, ocean health, and product development, and the prize evaluation criteria will include a comprehensive set of lab and field testing analyses conducted in partnership with the BioseniaticSM Laboratory at the University of Georgia New Materials Institute.
Innovators and entrepreneurs willing to submit their projects must remember that the judges are looking for materials that minimize negative social and environmental impacts arising from their production and that their materials must be capable of demonstrating soil and marine biological degradation under conditions that closely approximate natural environments. Algae may be a great bet and some experiments have already been carried out along these lines with a few innovators developing algae-based alternatives.
In the meantime, Tom Ford has been thinking about more sustainable materials for his designs: last year he launched a luxury watch made with 100% ocean plastic with a stainles steel case (also the strap is made with recycled plastic and the packaging with other recycled materials).
Hopefully, more designers will develop products from ocean plastic, as our marine ecosystems are in danger on a daily basis: just when the prize was announced, there was a major environmental disaster off Sri Lanka's coastline.
A fire on a ship anchored off Colombo port at Kapungoda, out skirts of Colombo, Sri Lanka, led to the leak of nitric acid (a chemical used in fertilizers and explosives) and nurdles. The latter are tiny lentil-sized pellets, raw materials that, once melted, can be turned into plastic products.
Recycled plastic is turned into nurdles and nurdles are shipped all over the world (often in sacks that get easily torn during transport, that's why environmentalists often called for changes in nurdle storage) and turned back into plastic products. The nurdles from the fire on the ship were washed ashore covering the local coastlines for miles, turning into a danger for the environment and its animals that can mistake the tiny plastic pieces for food (an image of a crab roaming on a beach polluted with polythene pellets published on many news site became the symbol of this disaster). As the nurdles may have been contaminated with chemicals from the ship they became even more dangerous.Today it is World Oceans Day, a global celebration to remind us that we must take care of our oceans to ensure our planet a better future. We may think that we can not really avoid environmental catastrophes like the one that happened in Sri Lanka, but we would be able to do something to avoid them if we realised that our choices, and therefore the products we buy, the food we eat and the clothes we wear, can genuinely make a positive impact. A prize to raise awareness and find a material that could replace plastic is a great idea, but so are art and architectural installations.
Multidisciplinary Italian architect Niccolò Casas, known for his researches involving science, technology and fashion, and for his collaborations with designers such as Iris van Herpen and Anouk Wipprecht among the others, recently teamed up with environmental organisation Parley for the Oceans and 3D-printing company Nagami.
Using Parley Ocean Plastic®, a catalyst material created from upcycled marine plastic waste that has been intercepted from remote islands, beaches and coastal communities, Casas designed "Plasticity".
This apparently simple sculpture, currently on display at the Venice Architecture Biennale (through 21 November 2021), is a synthesis of technological innovation, digital design and recycling techniques.
The title of the sculpture refers to the ability of a solid material to undergo permanent deformation, but it is also a combination of two terms, plastic and sustainability. This dichotomy is represented in the sculpture by its linear and geometrical shape merged into a more organic one, that at times calls to mind an iceberg, emerging from plastic debris intercepted from the oceans.
Being inspired by water, oceans and architecture, the sculpture stands also as a metaphor for the city of Venice.
Last but not least, the piece is conceived as a way to prompt us to think about how we can balance different aspects of our lives, the human and non-human, and Casas hopes it will be "an instigator for change" that will also inspire architecture to become an activator of circular procedures, a new discipline focusing on the construction of collaborative environments,
"Plasticity" demonstrates indeed how harmful, indestructible plastics can be transformed through digital technologies and be reborn as light and complex architectural constructs, capable of generating ecologically meaningful actions.
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