Alanna Chan Xin Tong (FASS), Koh Ci En (BIZ), Loong Xin Yee (FASS), Michelle Mulamootil Mathew (SOC), Poh Yong Yi (SDE)
Academic Advisor: Dr. Florence Ng
Plastics are amongst the top ten common pollutants in the world. Singapore uses an alarming 473 million disposable plastics annually, the majority being takeaway food containers (SEC, 2018). Within RVRC, our preliminary survey (n=63) showed that 90% of respondents frequently take-away food in single-use plastic bags. Hence, our project objective is to develop an alternative for plastic food packaging using biodegradable gelatine to reduce plastic consumption and, thus plastic waste. We conducted a focus group discussion with students and an interview with the caterer to gather feedback on how to improve the flexibility of our gelatin plastic and understand their receptivity towards our prototype. If implemented in the Dining Hall, it could potentially replace 150 plastic packagings a day, 900 packagings a week and 31,500 packagings a year. In this way, we could help reduce plastic packaging and the reliance on disposable plastics in RVRC.