Israeli woman invents biodegradable plastic

It looks like plastic. It feels like plastic. And it can even be used by plastic manufacturing machines. However it isn’t plastic at all.

Israeli chemical engineer, Sharon Barak, has developed an alternative to plastic that literally dissolves in water. Sharon used to work in a plastic manufacturing company, but quit to find an alternative to plastic that was better for the environment.

Social Impact IL reports that it can take between 20-1000 years for a plastic bag to break up into smaller pieces and up to 15,000 pieces of plastic are dumped into the ocean every day! To put it into perspective that is about 6.4 million tonnes of plastic every year! In steps Sharon Barak, Israeli born CEO of Solutum and inventor of the products that will make the world a cleaner and safer for us.

The idea is that Solutum can be used for anything that plastic is has traditionally been used for. “This plastic is not really plastic at all but looks and feels like one,” says Barak when interviewed by Nowsum. Solutum has actually made provisions for their products to be processed using regular plastic machinery, “reducing costs and meeting manufactures’ requirements.

A 2018 first place winner at the MassChallenge Impact Solutum is making the UN’s 2025 goal of prevent and significantly reduce marine pollution a reality.