Ramen noodles have been a go-to food for students for decades. After all, they only take eight minutes to cook in a dorm hotpot and are easy on the budget. Holly Grounds, a recent project design graduate who used to eat a lot of ramen noodles when she studied, started thinking that the packaging of a product shouldn't take decades or more to be broken down. That was why she decided to make eatable wrappers (包装材料) for ramen noodles, avoiding the need for plastic.
Grounds wanted to produce a product that the user could watch actually melt in the pot. "While other biobased alternatives to plastic claim to be able to be broken down, in a consumer's eyes, it's not always that simple," she said. "Many of the bio-based films are only broken down at 50 degrees Celsius, so they often end up in the wrong place without the consumer really knowing that they cause damage to the planet.
Now, instead of plastic packs of seasonings, the dried spices and flavorings (调味品) are part of a flavorless bioplastic film that wraps the noodles and keeps them fresh. The film melts in less than a minute when it comes into boiling water, and the liquid becomes the sauce for the noodles.
"The sauce is heated until the mixture is thick enough. At this point, I add the spices and flavorings before pouring it into a mold (模子) to set for 24 hours," Grounds said. These noodle parcels are then packaged in waxcoated paper bags.
With plastics taking hundreds of years to be broken down, eatable packaging and single-use articles are seen as the way to go. Grounds sees opportunities to use her eatable packaging for other ready meals and she wants to contribute to the global fight against single-use plastics.
