Curtis Kwok
Space Capsule - Vol. 3
With the fast-growing food delivery industry and the low recycling rate of plastic, how might we create a more environmentally-friendly alternative to replace the current plastic used in take-out packaging?
This project aims to explore the potential of future take-out packaging by glancing at the current system of disposal and emerging trends in dining habits.
The concept is ‘home’ dissolvable take-out packaging to eliminate/reduce plastic waste (i.e. simply throw them into your dishwasher & puff!) in response to the growing food delivery industry. The packaging will be using a biopolymer made from a highly renewable resource called chitosan (i.e. a substance extracted from the exoskeletons of crustaceans) as backbone with a novel mechanism to abolish any use of bagging.
Insight
Technological advancements could be great for creating a better living society; nonetheless, there are many negative impacts as a result of their by-products. Take plastic bags, for instance, they were created to save our planet from the wood-water-energy-consuming paper & cotton bags back in 1959, and it was not meant to be single-use. Yet, due to its versatility, unbeatable price-point and, most significantly, everlasting lifecycle, we don’t know how to deal with it anymore.
There are many more single-use plastics in our living environment, and take-out packages constitute a great proportion of them, just like plastic bags.
Idea
As technologies evolve at an incredible pace, our living habits are also transforming to adapt to all of these emerging product advancements. With many of us spending more time in the digital world, e-commerce has set foot in almost every aspect of our life; food delivery is a huge one among the others and will continue to grow in the foreseeable future.
However, our waste management system simply cannot keep up with our consuming speed. With less than 10% of plastics being recycled, alternative(s) are demanded before we run out of land to fill or air to pollute from incineration.
Impact
Although the required material is still to be further tested, this concept has great potential in helping to ease the current plastic disposal urgency owing to the overload of our waste managing system. This concept also transforms crustacean wastes (e.g. restaurants, seafood market etc.) into reusable resources.
As environmental consciousness becomes a hot topic in many countries, our disposal habits are another crucial thing that demands our will and education to make changes. Since we are genetically born with convenient-ism or laziness, the proposed disposal method is hoping to find the balance between human inertia & the environment.
