Bayuble: Water-soluble fruit stickers

What do you do with the little fruit sticker from your apple? Do you put it in the trash or collect them? They can’t be used again and “they’re a major problem in composting facilities,” so what can we do about this bit of waste? Via One News New Zealand, above, a group of students have developed a smart solution to the problem: warm water-soluble stickers.

Billions of the stickers go into the environment every year, and now four Woodford House students from Havelock North have a new idea, called ‘bayuble’, which has the industry excited…

“It’s warm water-soluble, which means it encourages apple consumers to wash their fruit to get the sticker off. You can drop it off outside,” Sarah Wixon, one of the product’s co-founders, said.

Bayuble co-founder Zoe Rookes added, “it’s fully compostable. You can do it at home”.

And they’re not the only inventors working on alternatives to vinyl and plastic PLU produce stickers. From Fast Company: Why Waste Plastic On Produce Stickers When We Could Use Lasers?

“Even though the stickers are tiny, they’re so ubiquitous that they add up to a not-insubstantial amount of waste. Take avocados: [ICA produce manager Peter] Hagg said that switching from stickers to laser marks for that item alone could save 135 miles of plastic, if you laid all the stickers end to end.”

Read more in The Guardian: Swedish supermarkets replace sticky labels with laser marking.

Watch more videos about problem-solving around trash:
• An innovative edible spoon, an alternative to plastic waste
• MarinaTex, a bioplastic made from fish waste
• Turning banana peels into a bioplastic
• Upcycling used chopsticks into furniture, games, and more
• How to Eliminate Single-Use Plastics on Vacation
• How to fit 4 years of trash into a mason jar, a zero waste experiment