86697Sustainable Soluble Laundry Bag for Healthcare Hygiene and Staff SafetyClosedCollaborative R&DInnovate UKCovid-19 has created new challenges which in some cases leads to conflicts between safety and sustainability. Single use Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) is one of those cases. Most single-use PPE is made from plastic. This provides vital safety to healthcare workers during the pandemic, but is creating a sustainability problem -- all this plastic PPE is bad for the planet. Xampla is developing an innovative, entirely natural replacement for plastic, made from plant protein. We've identified a specific PPE application where our materials can enable healthcare providers both to keep their staff safe and to protect the planet. Every day, thousands of healthcare workers in the NHS and elsewhere use soluble laundry bags. They remove their contaminated clothes at work and seal inside a plastic bag. Then they wash themselves, and change into their home clothes. This keeps their families safe, and the hospital or care home then safely handles the plastic bags containing the contaminated clothes, which go into a washing machine. In the wash, the bags dissolve, and clean clothes come out out of the machine. This is a great application, but there's a problem. These soluble, or dissolving, plastic bags are made from polluting fossil fuel plastic. The plastic is washed down the drain and can reach the environment, contributing to the ocean plastic pollution problem. Xampla's solution is a soluble bag that offers the same hygiene and safety for the healthcare workers, but is made only from plants. It dissolves and washes away, but the completely natural material can be eaten by microbes in the environment with no harm at all. It's a neat solution to a major challenge created by Covid-19\. This project aims to develop, prototype and trial innovative, sustainable soluble laundry bags for healthcare hygiene and healthcare staff safety.