Solving the Microplastic Crisis using Seafood Waste

The equivalent of 50 billion water bottles' worth of microplastics are released each year from washing our clothes. It's a shocking reality that's infiltrating our food and water, causing widespread environmental and health concerns.

This is where my team Neeor Alam, Samir Sharma, Shahmeen, and I have been working on a sustainable solution to this issue: creating biosynthetic materials from seafood waste.

🌱 Using Crustex to Transform Waste into Wear

We developed Crustex, which uses the 6-8 million tonnes of seafood waste released each year to create biosynthetic fibers that can be woven into any type of clothing. Our process begins with extracting chitin from crustacean shells, followed by deacetylation to produce chitosan. Through wet spinning, chitosan is transformed into fibers, ready to be woven into textiles. The result? A Fabric that rivals polyester in strength by 2-3 times, possesses antimicrobial properties, biodegrades 520 times faster and most importantly releases 0 microplastics.

🔄 Advantages Over Current Solutions

Unlike traditional fibers such as cotton, which require 3000L of water to produce a single t-shirt—enough for an average person to drink for three years—Crustex offers a more sustainable alternative. While current strategies focus on mitigating microplastic pollution, Crustex targets the root cause, ensuring a cleaner future for generations to come.

🚀 Recognitions and Achievements

This concluded our moonshot project at TKS, and we are proud to have received the Most Innovative Idea Award!

Learn more about this project here: