Israeli Mom Goes Green

October 9, 2012

The idea for Tipa started with a big pet peeve. Nissenbaum is a doting mother who also cares for the planet. Worn out after years of nagging the kids to bring home their used food packaging and cans so she could recycle them, Nissenbaum hired expert consultants in biopolymers to search the world for a fully compostable packaging material. They found nothing to fit the bill.

The material had to be made to decompose under certain conditions—with the right heat and bacteria—and not in the kitchen cupboard. “The packaging we’d create would have to have a nice touch, yet be flexible enough not to break. It couldn’t be noisy. It would have to be transparent, yet be equipped with certain barriers, like against oxygen and water. Plus it would need to be sealed well,” she says.

“If we take all these characteristics…it would really be the most difficult package to make. And it would need to be able to hold food with a six-month shelf life, at least.” She decided to take on the challenge. Nissenbaum and her partner Tal Neuman, a designer, started fundraising and hired their own Israeli and US experts to make Tipa’s patentable packaging solution.

“The breakthrough was in creating a flexible film for food packaging. There are biodegradable films out there, but they can’t be used for food packaging. We created the first-generation and then second-generation packaging from new and different green materials that can be used for all kinds of food packaging.”

She started with 100-percent biodegradable drink pouches and then quickly moved to other packaging ideas: granola bar wrappers, yogurt containers, and small plastic packages for liquefied natural sweeteners. “One important thing to note is that during our R&D up to now, all our packaging has been tested on existing machinery in working factories. Any customer that will adopt our solution will not have to buy any new machinery,” Nissembaum explains.

Plastics packaging is the bane of environmentalists. Taking hundreds of years, if at all, to degrade, plastic wrappers and plastic-lined juice boxes clog landfill sites, choke wildlife, and eventually leach dangerous chemicals into groundwater. Cities including San Francisco, Toronto and Mexico City have gone so far as to ban plastic bags, and savvy consumers are seeking better alternatives. That has made for a marketing environment ripe for Tipa’s packaging solution, which will go on sale shortly. For more information: www.tipa-corp.com

Source: Excerpts of an article by Karin Kloosterman, www.israel21c.org