The end of polystyrene fish containers? Sustainable solution for Havelock North students

A Havelock North High School alumnus is helping the fishing industry preach when it comes to sustainability, developing a prototype alternative to Styrofoam packaging containers.

Eighteen-year-old Sam Wixon has been hard at work for the past two years developing a sustainable alternative as part of his school business program.

“My dad was working on a cardboard sleeve to wrap around some styrofoam and we were talking about how New Zealand talks about its sustainable fishing industry.

“And yet we are packing all of our export fish in polystyrene, which is one of the most damaging items you can use.”

The first step for Wixon was to research what existing alternatives existed.

A “strong boy Ngāi Tahu”, he also wanted to bring his family history to the project.

“I went back to looking at the ways my tīpuna used to preserve the products, the lamb poultry, that they used to trade and what we used in the past before plastic.

The result is a 3D-printed bin with a biodegradable polymer filament, modeled after the bull algae used to preserve lamb poultry.

“They traditionally used a bag made from seaweed,” Wixon explained.

“It has a natural striated cell structure inside that creates pockets of air.”

He said the idea behind the containers was to get the polystyrene out of circulation; being made of a biodegradable material, they could also become industrial compost.

“With something completely new, going through the design and prototyping process has been a real challenge.”

Equally challenging has been finding time to fit into other commitments like finishing school and various extracurricular activities.

The next challenge will be getting the prototype to the manufacturing stage and mass producing it, he said.

Wixon recently received the Rangatahi National Award of Excellence for Entrepreneurship and the HSBC Award for Environmental Sustainability from the Young Enterprise Trust.

He has also been appointed a youth trustee to the Young Business Trust Board, in hopes of helping other young people with their ideas.

He said he was incredibly grateful for the trust for the support and assistance they had given him.

“It has been such an influential and amazing opportunity.”

Having finished his final year of high school, Wixon will head to Victoria University in Wellington to study a Bachelor of Design Innovation, with a specialization in Social Innovation.

“It is a fairly new course and is linked to the development of solutions, systems and services for social problems.”