How an Australian teenager turned prawn shells into a plastic alternative

Angelina Arora hopes to be able to adapt her bioplastic for use as packaging for medical supplies.

How to recycle plastics is a hot topic, and something that is being talked about more and more as we see plastic reductions in multiple sectors, including both retail and hospitality. However, the properties of plastic are what makes the material so desirable and suitable for a large range of applications within the medical sector.

Bioplastics is becoming an increasingly popular term; however, these are often very expensive, and this limits its use and practicality. Therefore, a teenager from Australia has come up with a clever plastic alternative.

When Angelina Arora went shopping one day, she noticed how her mum had to pay for the plastic bag to hold their purchases. She was curious why and asked the shop assistant, who informed Arora that the reason was to deter people from buying lots of plastic bags, and to encourage people to reuse bags and help improve the planet as a result.

At sixteen years old, Arora begun thinking of ways to create a sophisticated, biodegradable plastic bag. She experimented with banana peels and various other types of organic waste, however, she found none of these to be successful. Then one day she noticed how similar prawns’ shells were to plastic. Explaining the discovery in an interview, she said: “I looked at prawns and thought what makes their shells look like plastic? Maybe I can take that out and use it some way and bind it to make a plastic-like material.”

In an attempt to create a sophisticated, biodegradable bag, Arora extracted chitin, a carbohydrate, and chemically converted it into chitosan. She then mixed chitosan with fibroin, which is a protein in silk and cocoons. This combination created a plastic-like material that was reportedly able to decompose 1.5 million times faster than commercial plastics, and able to completely break down within just 33 days.

The bag she has designed is flexible, durable, insoluble, and transparent. The concept has already won Arora multiple awards including the Innovator to Market Award in the 2018 BHP Billiton Foundation Science and Engineering Awards, and international recognition at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, where she won 4th in the world. She was also awarded a comprehensive scholarship to a prestigious university, as well as the opportunity to share her invention in a TED talk.

The legal aspects such as patenting are currently being finalized, although the final prototype is ready for manufacture and commercial distribution. She is currently in talks with manufacturers and companies about the next stages, and as a medical student, Arora hopes to be able to adapt her bioplastic for use as packaging for medical supplies.