Notpla Wins £1 million Earthshot Prize

Prince William has announced the five 2022 Earthshot Prize winners — entrepreneurs and innovators spearheading ground-breaking solutions to repair and regenerate the planet. Each winner was awarded a £1 million prize at the second-annual awards ceremony. The award in the category of “Build a Waste-free World,” was presented to the United Kingdom’s Notpla, a circular solutions company creating a seaweed-based alternative to plastic packaging.

“I believe that the Earthshot solutions you have seen this evening prove we can overcome our planet’s greatest challenges,” said the Prince of Wales at the televised ceremony. “And by supporting and scaling them we can change our future.”

Notpla, founded by Pierre Paslier and Rodrigo Garcia Gonzalez, believes that the solution to the plastic packaging problem, and the search for a true sustainable alternative, lies in the oceans.

Notpla is an alternative to plastic — made from seaweed and plants. It is totally natural and entirely biodegradable and can be used to create a range of packaging products, such as a bubble to hold liquids, a coating for food containers, and a paper for the cosmetic and fashion industry.

At the London Marathon in 2019 36,000 Notpla-made Oohos, filled with Lucozade, were handed to runners. This year, Notpla made over 1 million takeaway food boxes for Just Eat Takeaway.com, with the potential to replace over 100 million plastic coated containers in Europe in the future. The company is continuing to research and develop new formats and solutions, with flexible films and rigid materials in the pipeline.

Inspired by President John F. Kennedy’s Moonshot challenge in the 1960s, which united millions of people around the goal of putting a person on the moon within a decade, The Earthshot Prize intends to discover and help scale innovative solutions that put the world firmly on a trajectory toward a stable climate by 2030 — a world in which communities, oceans and biodiversity can thrive in harmony.