Would you like your sandwich wrapped in fish skin?

A 23-year-old Briton has created a compostable compound she hopes will someday replace much single-use plastic, and it's made mostly of fish byproducts. Lucy Hughes created MARINATEX for her final project in product design at the University of Sussex. It's intended as an alternative to plastic typically used in bakery bags, sandwich packs and tissue boxes. "It's not necessarily plastic that's the problem," she says. "It's our overuse of, for example, single-use plastics that may be used only for 10 or 15 seconds before we throw them away."

After seven months of testing, she produced a flexible, translucent sheet that forms in temperatures below 212F, and which is stronger than plastic. MARINATEX biodegrades in four to six weeks in home compost, and does not contaminate soil. Best of all, you can eat it. And no, its doesn't taste like chicken.