Our injection moulding pellets have successfully passed all four home compostability (EN13432) tests.

Plastics have become an integral part of modern life and they can be found everywhere. However, this prevalence, alongside their persistence in the environment, has caused severe environmental consequences. Furthermore, 95% of plastics produced are single-use, meaning they discarded after one use, and left to linger in the environment for centuries.

Bioplastics are plastics made from renewable resources and were created to solve this problem. However, many bioplastics are derived from land-based crops and require industrial composting – which many countries do not have an infrastructure for. This is why FlexSea places itself as an even more sustainable solution.

FlexSea uses seaweed as its primary raw material, unlike most bioplastics that rely on crops grown on arable land. Seaweed, therefore, doesn’t compete with food crops, nor does it require fresh water, fertilisers, or pesticides. Furthermore, seaweed is actually reported to have carbon sequestering properties.

But what really sets FlexSea apart is what happens after use. Unlike many other well-known bioplastics, FlexSea is completely home compostable, meaning it can decompose in food waste bins or compost heaps – faster than a banana peel!

Production/process?

We strived to make our solution completely plug–and–play with the current processes and machinery, meaning that there is no requirement for expensive infrastructure change when implementing our bioplastics. The animation below demonstrates the production of our thermoplastic-like bioplastic pellets. These pellets can then be processed using injection moulding or 3D printing to produce a final product.

Future–Proofing with FlexSea

At FlexSea, we’re always looking forward. While our current bioplastics are perfect for injection moulding and 3D printing, we are actively working on new formulations to support other manufacturing processes, such as blow moulding or film extrusion. This would allow us to displace single-use fossil fuel based plastics of all kinds and truly remove our dependence on them.