Tipa, the Israeli wrapping that biodegrades
It doesn’t melt into a million pieces and stay in the ground for the next 70-plus years. And it doesn’t make offensively loud crackling noises when you touch it.
Armed with disdain for the plastics industry, two Israeli entrepreneurs worked hard to establish their new prize-winning packaging company, Tipa, which creates wrappers as benign as an orange peel.
CEO and co-founder Daphna Nissenbaum is a computer engineer by trade, and a devoted mother who cares so much for the environment that she insisted her kids bring home their drink-box packages after school for recycling. Thinking there should be a way to live the modern and convenient life with throwaways that do not damage the planet, she and business partner Tal Neuman, who is in publishing and graphic design, started brainstorming in 2010.
"The original idea was to create packaging for water and drinks that would decompose when you drop it in the organic compost heap. We started developing certain applications for flexible packaging such as pouches for all kinds of drinks -- packaging that is 100 percent biodegradable, which completely goes back to nature," Nissenbaum says.
The two women hired Israeli experts in packaging and polymers to help them create a "green" plastic that would also be soft and flexible, transparent, not noisy, and offer a good seal. It had to be biodegradable under certain conditions, which include heat and the presence of a certain kind of bacteria.
Since launching, Tipa has won a first-place prize at Israel's Cleantech 2012 out of 50 promising companies; and in Germany, the company won a prize at Anuga Foodtec, a leading food industry packaging conference.
Armed with disdain for the plastics industry, two Israeli entrepreneurs worked hard to establish their new prize-winning packaging company, Tipa, which creates wrappers as benign as an orange peel.
CEO and co-founder Daphna Nissenbaum is a computer engineer by trade, and a devoted mother who cares so much for the environment that she insisted her kids bring home their drink-box packages after school for recycling. Thinking there should be a way to live the modern and convenient life with throwaways that do not damage the planet, she and business partner Tal Neuman, who is in publishing and graphic design, started brainstorming in 2010.
"The original idea was to create packaging for water and drinks that would decompose when you drop it in the organic compost heap. We started developing certain applications for flexible packaging such as pouches for all kinds of drinks -- packaging that is 100 percent biodegradable, which completely goes back to nature," Nissenbaum says.
The two women hired Israeli experts in packaging and polymers to help them create a "green" plastic that would also be soft and flexible, transparent, not noisy, and offer a good seal. It had to be biodegradable under certain conditions, which include heat and the presence of a certain kind of bacteria.
Since launching, Tipa has won a first-place prize at Israel's Cleantech 2012 out of 50 promising companies; and in Germany, the company won a prize at Anuga Foodtec, a leading food industry packaging conference.