Lucy Hughes' Bioplastic Made From Fish Scales Just Won the James Dyson Award

Most people look at fish guts and think, “eww.”

Lucy Hughes looked at the bloody waste from a fish processing plant and saw opportunity.

Then a student in product design at the University of Sussex, Hughes was interested in making use of things people normally throw away. So she arranged to visit a fish processing plant near her university, on England’s southern coast.

She came away a bit smelly—“I had to wash even my shoes,” she says—but inspired. After tinkering with various fish parts, she developed a plastic-like material made from scales and skin. Not only is it made from waste, it’s also biodegradable.

The material, MarinaTex, won Hughes this year’s James Dyson Award. The £30,000 (nearly $39,000) award is given to a recent design or engineering graduate who develops a product that solves a problem with ingenuity. Hughes, 24, beat out 1,078 entrants from 28 different countries.

Hughes, who grew up in suburban London, has always loved to spend time near the ocean. As a budding product designer—she graduated this summer—she was disturbed by statistics like 40 percent of plastic produced for packaging is only used once, and that by 2050 there will be more plastic in the sea by weight than fish. She wanted to develop something sustainable, and figured the sea itself was a good place to start, given that the University of Sussex is outside the beach town of Brighton.

“There’s value in waste, and we should be looking towards waste products rather than virgin materials if we could,” Hughes says. Read more about Hughes’ project Smithsonian.com.

When Biodegradable Plastic Is Not Biodegradable -- Only To A Degree

When Biodegradable Plastic Is Not Biodegradable -- Only To A Degree

The idea of a “biodegradable” plastic suggests a material that would degrade to little or nothing over a period of time, posing less of a hazard to wildlife and the environment. This is the sort of claim often made by plastic manufacturers, yet recent research has revealed supposedly biodegradable plastic bags still intact after three years spent either at sea or buried underground. So un-degraded were these bags that they were still able to hold more than two kilos of shopping.

The study’s authors, Imogen Napper and Richard Thompson at the University of Plymouth, tested compostable, biodegradable, oxo-biodegradable, and conventional polythene plastic bags in three different natural environments: buried in the ground, outdoors exposed to air and sunlight, and submerged in the sea. Not one of the bags broke down completely in all of the environments tested. In particular, the biodegradable bag survived in soil and sea almost unscathed.

The Surprising Way Plastics Could Actually Help Fight Climate Change

The Surprising Way Plastics Could Actually Help Fight Climate Change

What do your car, phone, soda bottle and shoes have in common? They’re all largely made from petroleum. This nonrenewable resource gets processed into a versatile set of chemicals called polymers – or more commonly, plastics. Over 5 billion gallons of oil each year are converted into plastics alone.

Polymers are behind many important inventions of the past several decades, like 3D printing. So-called “engineering plastics,” used in applications ranging from automotive to construction to furniture, have superior properties and can even help solve environmental problems. For instance, thanks to engineering plastics, vehicles are now lighter weight, so they get better fuel mileage. But as the number of uses rises, so does the demand for plastics. The world already produces over 300 million tons of plastic every year. The number could be six times that by 2050.

Petro-plastics aren’t fundamentally all that bad, but they’re a missed opportunity. Fortunately, there is an alternative. Switching from petroleum-based polymers to polymers that are biologically based could decrease carbon emissions by hundreds of millions of tons every year. Bio-based polymers are not only renewable and more environmentally friendly to produce, but they can actually have a net beneficial effect on climate change by acting as a carbon sink. But not all bio-polymers are created equal.