Every piece of plastic you’ve ever used still exists somewhere on the planet, from the ziplock bag of leftovers to the bag of chips to the packaging holding in all the grapes you picked up at the store. We used to ship all of our plastic waste to China, but in 2017 they stopped taking it, so the vast majority of our plastic, including what we put in the recycling bin, at the very best just ends up in a landfill, and at the worst ends up in the ocean. 

Enter TIPA, an Israeli startup promising to revolutionize plastic packaging by making it fully compostable. That means you could take the bag your grapes come in and just put it in your backyard compost. That’s a big deal, because a lot of packaging labeled “compostable” is actually only compostable under industrial composting conditions which are much higher heat than what you’d typically get in a home composting system or if the product ends up in nature.

TIPA’s already raised $130 million USD in venture capital funding, employs more than 60 people in Israel, the US, and Europe, has developed numerous plastic replacement products that are now sold on several continents, recently acquired another startup in the space, and is working feverishly scale further so they can turn off the faucet of plastic pollution humanity is dumping into our environment every year.

TIPA is Hebrew for “droplet,” and in this conversation with TIPA’s founder and CEO, Daphna Nissenbaum, we chat about her journey from a software engineer to a plastic revolutionary, what the difference between biodegradable and compostable is, what her alt-plastic is actually made of, and more. Most entrepreneurs dream of having the success Daphna’s had so far in terms of fundraising and product launches, so it was fun to hear her story.

Discussed in this episode

• TIPA raised a $70M USD Series C financing round.

• Inc Magazine on Daphna’s fight to make all plastic compostable.

• TIPA acquired Bio4Pack in $8M USD deal.

• You can see a range of TIPA’s compostable packaging here.

• Many products sold in the US come in TIPA alt-plastic, like these.

• As an example, you can see what a TIPA bag looks like by checking out these Sunrays brand grape bags. As you can see it really looks just like a normal grape bag!

• Plastic-eating microbes could help degrade current plastics.

More about Daphna Nissenbaum

Before launching TIPA®, Daphna was CEO of the Caesarea Center for Capital Markets and Risk Management at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC), Herzliya. Previously, she held various management positions at SPL World Group Ltd, a provider of revenue and operations management software, prior to which she held the position of project manager at Whelty Lager Ltd., located in Boston MA, USA.

Daphna holds an MBA specializing in Marketing and Entrepreneurship from IDC Herzliya (graduated with honors) and a BA in Economics and Software Engineering from Bar Ilan University. She graduated the elite Israel Defense Forces software engineering program (Mamram) and served in the Israeli Navy software unit as an officer (ranked Captain).

Today, Daphna is leading the TIPA® team in the movement to revolutionize packaging systems and rid the world of plastic pollution. TIPA® fully compostable flexible packaging replaces conventional plastic, turning waste into resource, a crisis into an opportunity.