3 Strange Sustainable Materials That Can Replace Plastic

Almost 1 million plastic bottles are sold every minute 😱. That’s roughly 1.3 billion plastic bottles a day. Some quick math: two days worth of plastic bottle sales is basically the height of the Eiffel Tower in Paris if it were piled up (that’s over 1,000 feet high)…

Now that we’ve got your attention, let’s talk about how deeply disturbing this is 🧐.

The world’s been mass-producing plastic for the better part of the last 100 years. Most of the plastic bottles we’re used to are single-use, aka they’ll end their lives in a landfill sooner or later 🗑️. So how do we nip this bad habit in the butt before all these plastic bottles, which take up to 450 years to decompose, become a problem far out of our control?

Introducing: bioplastics. What are they, you ask? Bioplastics are derived from renewable resources. Built with the same molecular structure as all the petroleum-based plastics (aka unsustainable fossil fuels) that take hundreds of years to break down, bioplastics are sustainable, often plant-based 🌱 alternatives that are a heck of a lot more likely to biodegrade.

Intrigued, we made a list of the 3 weirdest ones:

1. Olive pits 

Looks like olives are good for more than just a dirty martini 🍸. An active ingredient in olive pits called oleuropein is a known antioxidant which can apparently extend the life of a bioplastic, making it able to decompose in roughly one year! There’s even a company called biolive (we applaud the name pun) in turkey that figured out a way to produce the stuff by using olive oil waste. 10/10 for creativity + sustainability guys. 

2. Mushrooms

Mycelia-based materials (aka mushroom plastics) are no fungi business 😉. Not only are they super resilient and biodegradable, there are even studies that report ‘shroom plastics create zero toxic byproducts. Plus the mycelium 🍄 it’s made of can grow literally anywhere. Like in saw dust + pistachio shells anywhere. 

3. Seaweed

Tbh, we weren’t too surprised to discover seaweed is a great bioplastic resource 🌊. After all, it’s antioxidant benefits for skincare + digestive needs are pretty well known. A company called Evoware is using seaweed bioplastics as a swap for regular plastic for everything from burger wrappers to soap packaging to spice sachets. And when you’re done, just run it under some hot water + watch it dissolve. It’s even edible, if you’re into that sort of thing 🤷‍♀️.

 

While we don’t use mushrooms or seaweed, at Enviroscent, we made the swap from plastic to aluminum when it comes to packaging our safer scents. That’s because aluminum is the most recycled ♻️ material in the world, with 75% of all aluminum ever produced still in use today.

Shop our full selection of safer, sustainable scents here.