7:54 - From China to Mexico
16:20 - The plastics lobby
22:52 - Finding out your product already exists
36:33 - The noriwear business model
43:04 - VC money or grants?
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Jessica Farda is the co-founder and CEO of noriware, a cleantech startup producing sustainable packaging materials based on seaweed. She holds a BA in International Affairs from HSG and founded her company in 2021, straight out of university.
The noriwear idea came during a trip to Mexico, where Jessica for the first time found herself thinking more deeply about seaweed and its possible applications. Later on her research led her to discover plenty of interesting facts about this marine plant, such as that there are over 12’000 species of seaweed, that seaweed are divided into reds, greens and browns (which grow in different parts of the planet), and that some types of seaweed grow 1 meter per day without any need for freshwater, fertilizer or land. Further research then led Jessica to discover that polysaccharides can be extracted from seaweed, with which plastic granules can be made.
At first, it was difficult to be taken seriously in the biotech/cleantech world, considering her background was in business and international affairs — but Jessica persisted, speaking to research paper authors, ETH professors and just about anyone she could find, until she was serendipitously connected to a polymers engineer, Stefan, who later became her co-founder.
Nowadays noriwear produces norifilm, a flexible packaging material that can be used for dry goods of any kind. It offers the texture and stability of a conventional plastic film, but differs in its durability and footprint on the environment. It also becomes entirely transparent when placed on an object, and after usage decomposes like a fruit, leaving no residual waste. While the noriwear team plans to expand their technology to other applications in the packaging industry, their focus now is on reducing the waste generated by plastic cups and packaging films.
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