Note that if you purchase something via one of our links, including Amazon, we may earn a small commission.
How Notpla is ending ocean plastic pollution.
Available on Apple and Spotify.
Imagine if all packaging disappeared — either composted, dissolved, or eaten …
In this episode, cohosts Janet Kraus and Cleo Carney sit down with Pierre-Yves Paslier, co-founder of Notpla, the Earthshot Prize–winning company that makes biodegradable plastic-free packaging from seaweed.
Pierre went from designing plastic bottles at L’Oréal to building a company that addresses the plastics crisis, and it all started in his kitchen. Working with fellow grad student Rodrigo García González on a project that would mimic the feeling of fruit peels and rinds, the two came up with truly sustainable packaging. “It reminded me that we don't always need a high-tech lab to change the world,” Janet says. “Sometimes we just need a provocative question and the courage to follow our conscience.”
From supplying 36,000 edible water pods at the London Marathon to partnering with brands like IKEA and Wimbledon, Notpla is proving that single-use plastic is a thing of the past. “He’s proving that nature already provides exuberant, abundant solutions,” Cleo says.
In This Episode, You’ll Hear:
• How seaweed packaging can be composted, dissolved in water, or eaten, and how it biodegrades naturally without harming ecosystems
• About the hidden plastic lining in takeaway containers
• How consumer demand drives change
• How nature offers abundance, not sacrifice
About Pierre-Yves Paslier
Pierre-Yves Paslier is co-founder and co-CEO of Notpla, creating seaweed-based alternatives to single-use plastic. After working as a packaging engineer at L'Oréal, Pierre earned a master’s degree in innovation design engineering from Imperial College London and the Royal College of Art. He and co-founder Rodrigo García González won the U.K.'s Earthshot Prize and have partnered with major brands to deploy plastic-free packaging at scale.
Meet the Hosts:
- Janet Kraus: I’m Janet, a serial start-up founder and CEO, twin-girl mom, and wife to a fun and funny guy. I am on a mission to build healthier thinking in young people, stop toxic division, spotlight hopeful climate action, and advocate for safe AI.
- Cleo Carney: I am Cleo, a student at Harvard University, and I strongly believe that conversations, businesses, and the private markets can create profound change. I also love to cook nourishing food, work out in nature, and find sustainable swaps for everyday items and habits.
- Victoria Riskin: I am Victoria Riskin. I’m always looking for the best life has to offer despite a turbulent world. I find comfort in the environment and joy in friendships. We have a great team of all ages at Bluedot who inspire me every day as we work together to build community.
- Ally Giebutowski: I’m Ally, a freshman at Lafayette College. I believe that a sustainable life is a happier life and that human connection is at the heart of it all. Every day, I try to weave greener, more intentional living into every part of my life, whether that’s in the college classroom, in the kitchen, or through meaningful conversations with others.
Transcript
Hosts: Janet Kraus, Cleo Carney
Guest: Pierre-Yves Paslier, Co-founder of Notpla
Victoria Riskin: Hi everybody. Welcome back to the Bluedot Living Podcast. I'm Victoria Riskin, founder of Bluedot Living, and on this podcast we imagine if people were actually making progress toward a healthier and more sustainable future. Because they are. Every episode we talk to amazing people who are doing cool and important things to help move the needle toward creating a better future, for ourselves and for the generations to follow.
Our goal is to leave you feeling more optimistic about the future, and if you take agency and do some small thing, you will feel better and things will get better. That's our goal. And on this podcast we have four co-hosts. As you can see, two of us are a little bit past the halfway mark of life, or quite a bit past the halfway mark of life, and two of us are in the first quarter of life, so that we could reimagine a path forward together. So you might be asking, who are my co-hosts? So ladies, would you introduce yourselves?
Cleo Carney: Hi guys. I'm Cleo Carney, a sophomore at Harvard and a student member of the Bluedot Institute Board.
Janet Kraus: I'm Janet Kraus. I'm a serial entrepreneur and a very proud board member at Bluedot Living.
Ally Giebutowski: Hi everyone. My name is Ally Giebutowski. I am a freshman at Lafayette College, a Bluedot Living intern, and as it happens, I am the daughter of my lovely co-host, Janet Kraus.
Victoria Riskin: I think it's Janet and Cleo who are gonna interview our next guest, Pierre Paslier. He's the co-founder and CEO of a wonderful company called Notpla, which is doing remarkable work to diminish our dependence on plastic. Is that right? Do I have that right?
Janet Kraus: We all know the pain of going on vacation and seeing plastic float up onto the shores and your heart is just hurting. We also all know that feeling of looking in our trash can as we pull it out to the recycling bin in hopes that it's actually being recycled and thinking to yourself, “There has to be a better way.” It makes me feel icky and I bet it makes most of our audience feel icky too.
Well, I just want to say welcome to the podcast where you might start to feel optimistic about the future of no plastics in the world. Today we are really excited. We have the pleasure of welcoming to our podcast the brilliant young man who imagined if that reality could be changed by asking one simple, provocative question: What if packaging could just disappear? I hope people are excited now because it makes me really shivery to think about it.
Cleo and I are excited to welcome to Imagine If Pierre-Yves Paslier, co-founder of Notpla, a company that won the U.K.'s Earthshot Prize for seaweed-based packaging that can be, as I understand it, thrown away, composted, and in some cases eaten.
Pierre-Yves Paslier: That's correct.
Janet Kraus: Hello, Pierre, and welcome to Imagine If.
Cleo Carney: Thank you so, so much for being with us. I'm really excited to hear your story.
Pierre-Yves Paslier: So I'm Pierre. I'm French, but I'm based in London, in the U.K., where this little adventure got started a few years back. I was a plastics packaging engineer, so for my sins I created a lot of shampoo bottles and cream jars in plastic for a few years working for a big cosmetics company.
And so, I'm now excitingly working on an alternative to this, using seaweed as an alternative to single-use plastics with Notpla, with a growing number of solutions that hopefully make it a little bit more nature-aligned to consume things on the go.
Janet Kraus: That's pretty great.
Cleo Carney: Would you say there was a specific moment in your career as a packaging engineer — you were at L'Oreal, right?
Pierre-Yves Paslier: Correct.
Cleo Carney: Yeah. Where did you feel like you needed to make this change? Were there any kind of turning points or was this just a gradual progression of seeing everything accumulate?
Pierre-Yves Paslier: Yeah. There were a couple of moments where you just pause and realize the scale at which we produce things. I remember one of the first times visiting some of our factories back then and seeing that we produced cosmetic products packaged in plastic at the speed of a machine gun. This is just an incredible pace.
And so it's frankly an incredible engineering feat to get this working in the first place. It's quite a formative experience to work at this top level of manufacturing and production building on hundreds of years of engineering. But at the same time, it's also a bit scary to think, where is this all going?
And we don't have a very good plan in the end. We certainly don't have the level of engineering that goes into making this for the actual dealing with the end of life. There was one particular moment where we were working on the launch of a new cosmetic jar and the marketing team said, “It doesn't sound good when I put it on my bathroom surface. It sounds a little bit cheap. Double the amount of plastic that we put just for the sound to be a little bit more premium.” I was like, I cannot be an accomplice…
Janet Kraus: Complicit.
Pierre-Yves Paslier: Really review my career choices and yeah.
Janet Kraus: Oh, I can just see that you're thinking to yourself, “Where is all this going?” And now you're asking me to put twice as much in, just so that when someone puts it on the counter, it sounds better.
Cleo Carney: Or they might sound better. I mean, I don't think that much about my jars.
Janet Kraus: Yeah. OK. So, that was clearly a moment for you, and then what did you do after this awareness of like, “I cannot, my conscience is killing me”?
Pierre-Yves Paslier: So I'd like to say that it was all programmed to bring me to find an alternative, but frankly, it was just a lot of serendipity. I quit my job, not because I wanted to create a better solution immediately, but more because it was just not ticking my boxes.
I came to study for a master's after a few years at L'Oreal, a master's in London called innovation design engineering. It's a master's that is jointly between Imperial College, which is a technology and science university in the U.K., and the Royal College of Art, which is more of an art and design university.
The fact that it's at the intersection of these two fields was super exciting because I came to the U.K. because in France we don't have this kind of mix of disciplines. It was also a really great human experience because everyone who comes to this master's, it's a bit like an MBA where people come back after a few years in the professional field.
The group was super mixed from backgrounds. There were fine artists, people working in the medical industry, in the media. My co-founder, for example, was an architect by background. So very different people that bring different experiences. Everyone takes a couple of years to be very open-ended about where projects might take us and just curious about how to challenge the way we think about things. It was also very free. It's mostly self-driven projects, so you can pick whatever topic you want and then you just dive deeper.
That was really the playground in which we got the permission to really try and explore lots of different things. My co-founder, Rodrigo, who was trained as an architect and a designer, had also a little bit of a backstory with plastic. He was also very frustrated by how plastic is seen as waste, when actually it's a material that has a lot of excellent properties and a lot of good performance.
What he tried to do at that point was to use plastic waste as a building material for installations and architecture pavilions. It was changing people's perception of plastic from waste to actually something that is really useful at a small scale. But there was a little bit of this feeling that there's something inherently wrong with plastic when we use it as something that produces waste.
So, a project that was never meant to become a startup was essentially a very open-ended exploration around the quintessential theme of biomimicry. What if we could create something that feels like it comes from nature? What if we could create packaging that feels like the peel of a fruit? What would be the building materials if we were to replicate the peel of a banana or of an orange or the layer outside a tomato or a grape?
And so that was what got us started. We didn't have access to a lab, so at that point we were just messing around in our kitchen for about a year. When you are in your student kitchen, you're going to have to prepare the next meal in the same kitchen where you do your experiments. So you don't want to bring anything toxic or nasty.
Compared to any polymer big chemical industry, we had to restrict ourselves to things that were very safe and natural. That safeguarding was actually an incredibly helpful guidance because we could only play with things that were naturally going to be used as food ingredients. That's where we started to look at all sorts of gums and starches and fibers and all sorts of things that are used in the food industry for making things like gummies materials that have a role in the food industry, but not necessarily in the packaging industry.
One of the “Aha!” moments came when we realized that if you've ever had this fake caviar, the fake fish eggs…
Cleo Carney: I've seen them. I've never tried them.
Pierre-Yves Paslier: So they actually are an invention from the 1940s from Unilever to make a very cheap alternative to the real expensive caviar.
Janet Kraus: No kidding.
Pierre-Yves Paslier: And they are made using an extract from seaweed. At that point, we had never thought more than five minutes about seaweed. It was just this smelly thing that you find on the seaside on holidays. So we knew nothing about seaweed, but knowing that it was used to make these little bubbles really inspired us. We got ourselves some seaweed extracts that we bought on Alibaba online and just started messing around in the kitchen. Following the instructions from those early patents from the 1940s, we were able to make man-made fruits little bubbles, bigger and bigger, eventually the size of an apple that would be made of a membrane from seaweed that could hold liquids. That was super exciting because all of that was edible. So you could literally eat this transparent looking tomato, both the inside water.
Cleo Carney: How did it taste?
Pierre-Yves Paslier: It tasted horrible because it was very fishy and salty. At that point it was very unrefined. It was essentially the products used for making fake fish eggs. So you can imagine it was not the most exciting experience, but it was the starting point of like, “Wow, we can make something that is safe enough to make in our own kitchen that can be eaten.”
That kind of feels that in the worst-case scenario it's not going to be for an edible application, but it ends up in nature, it's never going to push nature too far. It's something that is inherent in part of the natural environment. And that was the starting point of our fascination for seaweed.
Janet Kraus: Was the reason you used the kitchen because that's what was available to you? It's so interesting how constraints sometimes are better for innovation than all the things, you know. It's what makes entrepreneurs. Necessity is the mother of invention. Like, “We have a kitchen, OK, and we have to make food in this later, so we have to only use things that can be cleaned up quickly and not poison our friends.” It's awesome.
Pierre-Yves Paslier: You are absolutely right and I think that if we had been given access to a lab, we would've probably not self-imposed those restrictions. So, it's something that's been a real blessing in disguise. Having no access to real equipment forced us to be something that was always going to start from a very, very safe, naturally abundant solution that has been around for millions of years on this planet instead of creating synthetic, man-made materials that literally didn't exist a couple of decades ago on the surface of this earth. And that's really where we can work with nature instead of against it.
Cleo Carney: After you found the seaweed extract on Alibaba and were inspired, did you learn about the carbon sequestering benefits of seaweed and all the other extra positive externalities? Was that of great surprise and delight, or was that just sort of like, “This is what works, this is what makes sense”?
Pierre-Yves Paslier: Yeah. At this stage we are looking at lots of different things and, funnily enough, the way we were testing this was we were organizing dinners with our guinea pig friends. So we would go to the shop and repackage everything into fruits. From hummus to cream cheese, all sorts of different kinds.
Cleo Carney: They must have thought you were crazy.
Pierre-Yves Paslier: Super fun, experimental stuff. Some things worked well and some things were terrible, but it was a little bit playful from the beginning. At that point we were looking at a lot of other natural materials. When we looked at seaweed at that point we didn't know anything about seaweed.
So we started to do some research and we were just gobsmacked at how seaweed was just ticking all the boxes. It was the most desirable material to use for something that's going to be as large-scale and as hard to control as packaging.
We learned that some species of seaweed can grow up to a meter per day. It’s incredible how this is literally the most abundant biomass on the planet. When we grow seaweed, we don't need to give it fresh water or fertilizer or GMO or pesticides. Compared to using land for creating starch and other crop-derived biomass that can be used for making some bioplastics, here we're not competing with food. We're not extracting nutrients from the soil. We're really having something that is going to be ethically very easy to get on board with.
Even more than this, we realize that when you actually farm seaweeds, nature takes its first bite at it. About 25% of the biomass of the seaweed gets eaten by the fish, and that's growing the actual ecosystem and the diversity in the ocean. The next 25% is broken off by waves and currents, and that sequesters carbon to the bottom of the ocean. In a way, with the 50% left on the ropes, if you can create an alternative to plastic, you've got a model that is as close to regeneration as…
Janet Kraus: Exactly. It's mind-blowing. This is an almost completely regenerative cycle with so many benefits, and you didn't even know that going in.
Pierre-Yves Paslier: No. And also I think one other thing that was important for us is very quickly we ask ourselves: “OK, this is great. Let's imagine that this goes wild and the world is ready for this and we really start to use a lot of that material category. Are we just about to create the next environmental disaster?”
Because this is kind of what humans do. You find the next thing and the next thing is just as bad or worse as the previous thing. And so we quickly ran the numbers just to understand the scale of it. First of all, we were so ignorant about the current use of seaweed. Today, the world already uses and produces about 40 million tons of seaweed for all sorts of things from cosmetics, pharma, fertilizer, and industrial applications in textiles. There's all sorts of very niche applications for seaweed that we never talk about, but collectively, it's already a huge industry.
So it means that we can work with people who are already really good at it and have been doing it for thousands of years. That was a really good starting point to understand that we're not starting from zero. But then let's push it to the max. If hypothetically our solution was going to work to replace every single-use plastic in the world, are we creating a problem? We don't have the performance and the properties to do that yet, but if we were to crack that and really make this the material category to replace all single-use plastic in the world, we would need to farm 0.06% of the ocean.
Janet Kraus: That's tiny.
Cleo Carney: That's amazing.
Pierre-Yves Paslier: It's the only biomass that really meets the scale and the challenge that we're talking about here.
Janet Kraus: How does that happen?
Pierre-Yves Paslier: It's a lot more than what we are farming today, but it's certainly what nature is capable of producing. I think that's where a lot of hopes that come from other types of crop-derived materials fall a bit short of the reality check. If you're going to use something in as large quantities as plastic, it really needs to scale.
Cleo Carney: Plastic accounts for around 80% of marine debris, and there are around 170 trillion plastic particles floating in the ocean. So having 0.06% of the ocean with clean water cleaning seaweed would probably be a great thing.
How large are your farms now? Where do you gather your seaweed from and what's the process behind your sourcing?
Pierre-Yves Paslier: Yeah, so we'll probably talk about specific applications in a moment. But today we work with lots of different existing players and stakeholders in this seaweed economy where we can essentially repurpose what they have optimized for making seaweed for cosmetics or pharma or fertilizer for creating these packaging-grade extracts.
We use lots of different species. There's more than 12,000 known species of seaweed and it's probably double the amount for the ones we haven't yet characterized and discovered. They are incredibly genetically diverse. Between a red seaweed and a brown seaweed, genetically speaking, they are more different than between a mushroom and an elephant. We call it “weed,” but they have nothing in common because they've been evolving for a billion years in a different path. They are very complex and different structures that essentially are made of completely different building blocks, and those building blocks we can use for the right application.
So that's really where we try to go and learn how we can use the right seaweed species, the right extracts in the right conditions to create the right packaging application. There's lots of sources of seaweed. You can farm it, you can harvest it in nature, or you can actually pick it up on the beach because naturally seaweed as it gets old and breaks down will end up landing on the beach.
There's also places where we have too much seaweed. For example, in Sargassum blooms you might have heard of in the Caribbean. You've got this huge explosion of biomass because of our fertilizers and chemicals that are running off into rivers. When they hit the ocean, they just create a lot of life. We are also looking at these places where we could be using biomass that is actually problematic because it uses all the oxygen in the water and competes with other life forms, so that we could solve two problems at once. We don't necessarily need to just do farming or harvesting. We can actually go into some of those places where seaweed blooms.
Janet Kraus: Amazing. OK. So we've gotten right into the heart of the seaweed part of it, but backing up, we're still in your kitchen time-wise. You've figured out that the best membrane is seaweed. How does this go from kitchen antics to something that you believe is a company in the making?
Pierre-Yves Paslier: Well, it's definitely been a journey and a rollercoaster with lots of acceleration points and then hitting a little bit of…
Janet Kraus: Of course. The entrepreneurial journey is that rollercoaster.
Pierre-Yves Paslier: And it still is today because fighting against plastic can have its challenges. But the starting point is that out of our month of experimentation in the kitchen, we make a little video that is a bit like a tutorial. It explains how to replicate this in your own kitchen. We license it as Creative Commons, we post it online, and we move on to the next project. It was literally not meant to be a startup; it was just a student portfolio project.
To our surprise, this video went viral. People start making this in their own kitchen all around the world from Japan to Germany to Korea. There's all sorts of people who get really excited about this little science experiment. That gives us an incredible amount of variations to our initial formulation.
Janet Kraus: Yeah, you're crowdsourcing all your future product ideas.
Pierre-Yves Paslier: Someone is going to deep fry one of those water bubbles. Someone is going to find some clever ways to encapsulate all sorts of other stuff. We get really inspired, but also people start to call this the alternative to the plastic problem. That actually gave us a lot of faith.
We were like, “Wow, if people are so excited about this, we can't just leave it as a student project.” It's never going to be picked up by the big plastics industry. So we've got to bring this to the next level in terms of readiness. As we graduate, we get a little bit of funding from the European Union to kickstart the development of this technology.
We hired a few scientists to start taking the kitchen formulation to the next level. At that point we really focus on one application, which is filling those little bubbles with water or energy drinks or energy gels for marathons.
Cleo Carney: That's very smart.
Pierre-Yves Paslier: It's a bit like a fruit, so it's not really going to work for retail where you have long supply chains and the hygiene factor of being transported and touching multiple points. But for instant consumption, like for marathons, we've all seen the streets piling up with plastic. That was perfect.
Janet Kraus: Or those little cups that you have to run by and you just throw behind you.
Pierre-Yves Paslier: And so that's where we focus our attention. We start to develop machinery to be able to make this automatically rather than making them by hand in the kitchen. We test with small races and then bigger races and eventually we get the gig for the London Marathon. That's 2019 and we're like, “Wow, we can really prove this.”
Janet Kraus: How did you get that? Tell us how you got that.
Pierre-Yves Paslier: I think this product really struck a chord with people because it was challenging the very basic assumptions around material. Nothing was edible and therefore this was so much better than all of the things that were provided. The second thing is that at that point, plastic wasn't necessarily the hot issue that it's become; it was a known fact. It was pollution far away, but then you had the turtle with the straw in the nose and you had Blue Planet and David Attenborough. It was just a bit of a moment of acceleration where people felt more emotionally connected with the fact that we are trashing the ocean forever and we should probably do something about it.
We just got picked up at the right places. It was almost like waves and you just caught the next wave and waited for the next wave. That was a really exciting moment because we could actually prove that this works for the London Marathon. We did it in partnership with an energy drink brand. It was amazing. We were handing over those bubbles for eight hours straight in the street and seeing that people were able to do their race without the huge pile of plastics. That was a very proud moment.
And that was six months before the pandemic hit. We had a product-market fit and a solution for an activity that completely disappeared for the next two or three years. We accepted that. We accepted that it was going to take a while for the market to come back and also that maybe things were changing.
At that point we realized that with all the material science we had done for making this product work, there were a lot of really exciting applications beyond these moments of consumption like marathons where we could provide a solution. Around the time where marathons came to a halt, online delivered food exploded. So that puts our attention on the next problem, which today is the big problem that we are solving: takeaway containers. I mean, they could be fully plastic, but more and more they are made of paperboard or cardboard.
It's unfortunately never just cardboard. There's a thin layer of plastic in there to hold the grease and the moisture from the food. So it's a bit of a hidden single-use plastic, but that's creating a very complex product at end-of-life because you can't easily get the fibers back. The plastic is going to be there for hundreds of years. We're eating hot food from a flimsy, thin layer of a huge vector of ingestion of microplastics, which obviously from a health perspective is very damaging. And so that became a new focus point.
Cleo Carney: That makes sense. The life of a startup is constantly pivoting. But it's smart that you guys managed to capitalize on that original opportunity. I want to ask because I'm involved with the Harvard Venture Capital Group and different entrepreneurship clubs on campus, and obviously the key thing is funding. So can you tell me about how you managed to get the funding? How did you manage to get to the point when you guys were small to deliver 36,000 water bubbles?
Pierre-Yves Paslier: So, out of our kitchen, we got maybe £50,000 of grant money that came from European Union accelerator programs. That was really the starting point for getting the science going. But quickly, if you want to get involved into machinery, it's a whole other level of investment.
What we ended up doing at that point was to go and ask for intros with funds and VCs and angels. Everyone is interested in having the story, but no one is interested in investing. We didn't have a category that we belonged to. It was all just a weird thing. And so we completely failed to raise any investment for a year and a half of fundraising.
We were like, “OK, that's it. No one is going to fund this.” To the point that my parents were helping me pay my rent, and it was a bit like, “We're not going to do this forever. It's time to accept and move on.” Rodrigo and I gave ourselves an ultimatum, and we're like, “OK, let's just go all in. Let's do an equity crowdfunding campaign. Let's take back control of the time.” It was going to be this month where we fundraise and either it comes in or it doesn't, but at least we are in control of the timing.
So we put together a video and a deck that we uploaded on a platform called Crowdcube. At that point, our level of hope was limited because again, a year and a half of failing to raise investment. But that video went massively viral. Overnight.
Cleo Carney: The power of the internet.
Pierre-Yves Paslier: I think we got like 20 million views on that video. And so our target of fundraising, which was about half a million dollars, we exceeded that within the first 24 hours. And so we're like, “Wow.” Maybe let's just keep on fundraising a little bit more because startup life is complex and you can't imagine what's going to come our way.
Janet Kraus: Always take more when it's there. Right? Just take more if you can get it.
Pierre-Yves Paslier: So we ended up raising a million dollars in just three days out of this viral campaign. That was our starting point for doing the work of developing the machinery and starting to work more as a team and getting ready to face the slightly higher bar of working with the London Marathon and all of those types of projects.
Cleo Carney: Yeah. Would you say, I mean, I think your company was naturally ethical from the start because of the restrictions you said and the topic matter. But the way you guys ended up raising that first million, because it was crowdfunded, did that influence your guiding principles in the company at all? This feeling that we are doing this for other people because other people are helping us?
Pierre-Yves Paslier: A hundred percent. It gave us two very important things beyond just the money. The first one was that it gave us the belief that people wanted to see better alternatives on the market. Before there was a more established category around natural materials and maybe the next generation of bioplastics, there was no dedicated fund for this. There were people who were just not satisfied with the offering and decided to put £10, £100, £1,000 on a solution like this. That was very validating that we were on the right track.
The second thing that was super important for us in our story is that no one was a majority shareholder. So we were very much left with the responsibility and the opportunity to deploy this million dollars the way we saw fit. No one forced us to do the regular way startups get done.
With my co-founder, we really have this peer relationship that's the bedrock of how Notpla works. So, before it was trendy, we were most comfortable as co-CEOs. That was the way we started this. Because there was no investor to say no like, “One of you is going to be the CEO, one of you is going to be the CTO,” we actually deployed that money with that model of being co-CEOs, and we proved that for Notpla, it's worked well.
I think it's not like an endorsement that every co-CEO situation works, but for us that was the right thing. And from then it didn't get challenged at the next round because we had the track record of proving that this is how we were creating value. I think this would've not happened if it wasn't for crowdfunding.
Janet Kraus: Alright, so, now we understand how you got to 36,000 water balloons on the marathon. And then you hit Covid and that forced you again to think with constraints about where you went next. But I imagine that with that as a huge milestone and a very visible one, there was then potentially funding to be able to do some of these pivots and new explorations.
Pierre-Yves Paslier: Yeah, and I think at that time we had started to take more traditional impact VC funding to continue deploying. Covid hits, we pivot to focus on the application for takeaway food containers. We started working with some of those home-delivered meal platforms like Just Eat, which is the equivalent of Uber Eats in Europe. We start to have really good feedback on the fact that this is plastic-free.
In this case, we really integrate ourselves in the existing value chain. So we work with some of the big factories that today produce the board that gets laminated with plastic. By swapping the input material, we can actually make those factories work to make the Notpla coating material. So there was also a really great validation that we don't need to build a huge number of new factories. We can keep the very expert jobs.
Janet Kraus: That must have been a great moment when you realized that.
Pierre-Yves Paslier: And much easier to scale because making machines is very hard. We learned our lesson, so that was really exciting. We started to have more and more restaurants that came in and we realized that we could do this with a lot of pioneering brands who were trying to bring back some trust and transparency that they were putting in people's hands. Notpla was the partner to deliver this plastic-free guarantee.
And so that became a growing opportunity. To date, we've replaced 35 million single-use plastics with this technology. So it's starting to really have a more sizable impact. It's still a drop in the ocean of what plastic is, but it starts to be an industrial-scale drop.
Cleo Carney: Can you share what your vision is today at Notpla and also for the future?
Pierre-Yves Paslier: I think we're just scratching the surface of what we can do with seaweed. We've actually got a number of other product lines that are maybe a little bit less industrially ready than the coating or the edible bubbles, but that are hopefully going to address some of those single-use plastics that have a high chance of ending up in nature: things like flexible films or cutlery or more disposable items.
We are never going to control our products well enough to ensure that nothing ends up in nature. And so we should really use something that was plastic-free from the start. We see this as an ever-growing catalog, and we see Notpla as the “Gore-Tex” of sustainable packaging, the trust mark that you can actually trust is truly plastic-free.
Today there's a lot of confusion. The market is asymmetric because the people who make the materials are not necessarily forced to be very transparent. Often they will hide quite a lot of things, which when they get exposed, reduces the trust in the market. You just end up with something where no one trusts anyone anymore.
I think there's a huge opportunity for an ingredient brand model like “Intel Inside” or Gore-Tex to say, “No, you can trust these things.” You can be transparent about materials. You can push the limits on what's possible to do if you are basing this on essentially the criteria of using things that come from nature and not chemically modifying them, because essentially that's what plastics are. They are things that are not in nature in the first place. Whether you started with natural feedstock, if you chemically modify it, it ends up being something that nature cannot deal with.
Janet Kraus: So I'm curious because I was thinking about the name Notpla from the beginning. Did you know you were going to be ingredient technology when you named it? Or is that just a lucky outgrowth given that it's less of a consumer brand and more of a trust mark? Like you just said, I mean, Gore-Tex, you see it and you're like, I trust that I know what that is, or Spandex or… I'm just curious if there was anything in your mind?
Pierre-Yves Paslier: When we actually started the company we didn't have a name for it. For the first three years we were Skipping Rocks Lab, which was a name we came up with in five minutes. At that time we had just come back from a trip in New Zealand and we were skimming rocks. I didn't know the name of this activity because I'm French and my co-founder is Spanish. So we asked people around what it was called. Someone said “skipping rocks,” and we just kept going with this. We like this idea of like, you make a rock fly; that's an impossible thing. Everyone was a “Lab” by then, so that's how that name came to it. But it was a bit of a random name.
When we realized that there was this bigger portfolio of things that we could create, that's when we thought, “OK, let's think about what could be a shorter, more memorable trust mark that actually could be the Gore-Tex of packaging materials.” And that's something that we are seeing really resonating with brands who now are co-branding their products with the Notpla mark next to it.
Recently, we've just been onboarded by IKEA for their city stores for hot dogs and meatballs. The Wimbledon strawberries and cream boxes have been using it for the last couple of years. We keep on working with more and more of those really exciting hero brands who want to speak volumes about how they're making a bold material choice, and they want people to trust that and be able to deliver on that.
Janet Kraus: Very, very exciting. Can you tell us what Notpla means? Why that name?
Pierre-Yves Paslier: Yeah. When we started we were like, “OK, we are never going to compromise on this plastic cheat that a lot of companies in the market are using.” They'll take a plant or something and they're going to mix it 50/50 with plastic, and they're going to tell you, “Oh, it's sea-based, it's coffee-based, it's whatever.” And we were like, “No, we want to be very strict, so it's not going to be Not Plastic.”
So Notpla was essentially the short version of this. But funnily enough, one of the main bioplastics in the market for the last couple of decades is called PLA. It's a synthetic material that is initially made from plant extract, but then it's chemically transformed into something that doesn't exist in nature and doesn't really break down in nature. It's a bit of a transition solution, but it's not the whole deal.
PLA has done a great deal of harm in this space by pretending that it was the ultimate solution, when actually it was a good solution to start with by not using petroleum, but it just stretched the marketing claim too far.
Cleo Carney: It makes me think of a bit of natural gas as sort of a bridge fuel, but then you build the infrastructure and it's like, “Well, we have the infrastructure, so why change?”
Pierre-Yves Paslier: We like that actually when you don't know how to pronounce Notpla, if you are in the industry and you know about PLA, it's also “Not PLA.” So it was kind of like we are a step above and we are truly taking this material challenge seriously and not compromising on that.
Janet Kraus: I keep feeling like you just keep running into these wonderful two-fer and three-for opportunities out of serendipity. It makes me happy that it's a double and it's so French and that's so perfect.
As someone who in a previous life made apparel, I was working with a supplier that claimed it was making fiber out of recycled plastic. Well, it was true, except I was reading the fine print and it said “pre-consumer recycled.” Basically, they were breaking down bottles that hadn't ever been used so that they could say it was recycled plastic. I was like, “Are you kidding me?” Here I'm the CEO reading the fine print. All of the brainwashing and greenwashing that goes on … I'm so excited that you are so pure in what you're doing. It's really inspiring.
Cleo Carney: To me that seems like a general obstacle that consumers face in their daily life, trying to determine what is actually good. What are some of the obstacles that you guys are facing? I'm sure you are pushing up against a very, very large tide. So I'd love to hear about challenges.
Pierre-Yves Paslier: There are many challenges, but a couple that are worth mentioning. The first one is just that we are competing at a scale that is just unimaginable. Plastic is made in such large quantities that anything you do that is less efficient than this huge scale is by nature going to be more expensive. That premium is friction for anyone involved in the market. So we're fighting a bit of this chicken-and-egg of, until we have the scale of plastic, we can't compete with plastic.
Thankfully, we offer something that is differentiated. There's more and more demand for it. Plastic is actually not that cheap as a material because if you were to account for all of the societal damage that it creates, we're actually using something that's going to be really expensive to clean up and to deal with from a health perspective and an ecosystem perspective. We're just not pricing it in. We're using a very expensive thing, paying the down payment, but leaving the whole mortgage for the next generation. If we were looking at it as a true cost, we would not choose plastic in most scenarios. So we're running about this broken accountancy model, which is fair enough; that's the way the world works.
Janet Kraus: Oh, but wouldn't it be great if we could change that?
Pierre-Yves Paslier: Exactly. So obviously legislation and consumer demand is going to progressively price in this negative shadow cost of plastic. I think the second challenge is the greenwashing. There are lots of people who will pretend a bit like what you were talking about. They'll say, “Oh, it's plastic-free. Oh, it's plant-based, composted, and biodegradable.” And actually, none of these things really stand the test of science, but unless you have enforcement, those guys get away with it.
In Europe, we got lucky that there is a little bit more of a strict definition of plastic and a little bit more enforcement. Since 2019, with a single-use plastic directive, there's actually a real test that exists. Notpla was the first, and at the time it was introduced, the only solution that actually passed this governmental test in the Netherlands that made the difference between plastic and non-plastic materials. That has created a lot of differentiation value for brands, but also for the ecosystem.
Since then, we've seen further investment in actually creating solutions that meet this higher standard — mushroom or shrimp shell or whatever. We need that diversity. There needs to be a hundred Notplas working on those solutions. Up until you create that differentiation, there's no real incentive to solve for this. Because in a way, people with plastic will pretend that it's not and get away with it. So, I think that's a really positive move.
Cleo Carney: I wonder if your startup had started in Europe versus the United States. I used to live in London and whenever I'm there I just see how different the mindsets are compared to America on the smallest things. Hopefully it translates over time.
Pierre-Yves Paslier: Well, I think there's really a reason for optimism because while the European Union has in the past been a little bit more aggressive on this front, we've never really been pushed by hard bans. It's mostly been about brands who decide to up their game to meet the demands of high standards of the consumers.
That demand exists in more places than just the European Union. Excitingly, we are now seeing traction in the U.S. We have the first NBA stadiums using Notpla.Tthe Intuit Dome in L.A., home of the L.A. Clippers, has switched to Notpla, and the Portland Trail Blazers. So we're seeing that actually kinda like there is demand. Maybe it's a little bit easier to start in California where there is some existing legislation in the pipeline that is very aligned with those definitions in Europe. But my experience of the U.S. is that actually, there's been this completely unexpected cross-political spectrum level of awareness around microplastic and health, which is talked about on the right and the left.
It's talked about on the right and the left because polluting our bodies is a “not OK” thing, regardless of your political point of view. I think that's made it a lot easier for solutions like Notpla to be adopted regardless of who's in the room on the other side. So I think that this angle is gonna continue to grow, it goes well. People are kinda like, drawn in to actually kinda like taking care of that problem.
Janet Kraus: I'm seeing that a lot and I think you're so wise to find that place that everybody consistently believes in and that you're kind of just, and sharpening the idea that human health is your top one and all the other benefits for everybody else who knows and or cares. Those can come in afterwards, right? So I'm glad you have found that thread that connects everybody's “do the right thing” back together again.
Cleo Carney: On that positive note, of something that can actually, I think create tangible change because it hits close to home. We always like to end by asking our guests to imagine if the world could turn out as we hoped it would, and could actualize the things that you probably think about at night and dream about. And so we'd love it if you could paint a picture of why more Notpla would be there for the planet. What would you imagine if?
Pierre-Yves Paslier: I think we are getting in that direction. I recently did a microplastic blood test and my results came in at like 160,000 microplastic particles in my blood. That is not good.
If we could just have more solutions that progressively reduce our exposure, we could live such better lives. Often there is this feeling that we're going to have to embrace austerity and have much less exciting, delightful lives. But if you look at nature, nature is exuberant. Nature is full of incredible solutions. Not a single tree or fruit looks exactly like the next one. There's this abundance.
We have to stop imagining that to solve our problems we're going to have to get into austerity. We have to embrace the natural building blocks that we are part of. I see a future where every coastline is producing healthy seaweed that's going to be used for all sorts of different exciting applications. We're going to be able to feel less guilty about our moments out and about. Nature doesn't have a problem with the concept of “disposable” because that's the next building block of the next form of life. Embracing that model that comes from fruit is very much what we are all about.
Janet Kraus: Oh, Pierre. I have goosebumps. and we just need to get you the mic everywhere that you can possibly have a mic. ‘Cause it's so, so good. And just the notion that constraints create innovation and that looking to nature to find those clues is just, it's so brilliant. It's like right back to the Indigenous people. So because our podcast is all about both providing hope and optimism, that there is a future that we look forward to, we also try to give our listeners tangible things that they could literally do this afternoon or over the course of the next week or over the course of the next year to help whoever our guest is be successful in attaining the vision that you see. So, could you give our audience a few take home nuggets of what you wish they would do to help move your success and our success forward?
Pierre-Yves Paslier: I would say, tell brands when you're not satisfied with the options you are given. Next time you order a meal from a street vendor or delivered home, in the comments section just say, “I wish this was plastic-free and there are now solutions existing like seaweed or mushrooms.” If they hear that enough, that's going to be something that they are proactively looking at. You just need to raise your voice. You would like to continue to get your pad Thai, but without the plastic, and I think those are kind of easy enough.
Janet Kraus: I wanna double down on that. I think sometimes we as consumers feel like, “Oh, it's just my voice.” But if we all said it every time, companies would listen. What’s another one?
Pierre-Yves Paslier: Never heat up food in plastic. That is just the worst thing you can do. The grease from the food is going to draw the plastic and the microplastics and the chemical additives into the food. So that's a simple thing that you can do for yourself. I still have too many friends who will reheat something in a plastic container. Just don't do that.
Janet Kraus: Don't heat in plastic. OK. Any others?
Pierre-Yves Paslier: Keep following what we do. If you have the opportunity as a professional to be the internal champion, the navigator, within your own organization for an innovator like Notpla, be that person. All our biggest partnerships have started with someone who said, “I know how this works internally and I want to feel good about myself or my kids. I'm going to help these guys navigate this complex ecosystem.” So yeah, be the internal champion for innovators.
Janet Kraus: All right, I'm going to plan them back:
- Don't heat food in plastics.
- Next time you buy something, write to the company and say you'd rather see something that's plant-based or biodegradable.
- If you are in any role in a company that could catalyze the conversation about better alternatives, go be that person.
Cleo Carney: This was an incredible conversation. It really summarized everything that I love about climate solutions in that they're better for your health, the planet, and often better for bottom lines if you're factoring in those externalities. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us.
Pierre-Yves Paslier: My pleasure and thanks for talking about this topic.
Janet Kraus: Absolutely. Thank you so much.
Victoria Riskin: Thank you for joining us on Imagine If from Bluedot Living. If you want to explore our recipes, products for your home and lifestyle, and read interesting stories, you can find us at bluedotliving.com. And for daily inspiration, you can follow us at Bluedot Living on Instagram. If you enjoyed this conversation, share it and please add your thoughts in the comments on YouTube. I'm Victoria Riskin, and we'll be back next week with more stories from great people doing amazing things in their little corner of the planet.
