The process that makes this possible takes place in a high-tech lab.

But the raw materials come from seaweed farms.

Companies around the world are racing to find eco-friendly versions of the thinnest packaging.

It's the stuff that makes up about half of all plastics in our oceans.

Neha Jain says she's invented a product that could replace it.

We make clear, thin films, which we call the good plastic or the kinder form of plastic.

Farming seaweed requires no fertilizers, fresh water or land.

Neha and her team say their product is nontoxic and completely dissolves in liquid within hours.

They call the company Zerocircle, a nod toward reducing emissions and waste to zero.

And right now, this startup is competing against seven other plastic alternative companies for a $1.2 million prize.

We traveled to India to see how seaweed can replace plastic food wrappers.

While extracting this new material requires state-of-the-art gear, farming the seaweed used to make it, uses only the simplest tools.

Dilip Kumar owns this seaweed farm and supplies Zerocircle with its raw materials.

And this stuff grows fast.

See, we harvest every 45 days once from the date of seeding.

Dilip hires locals like Coro Pia to build bamboo rafts.

At one time, fishing dominated this area.

But in recent years, more locals have been making a living farming seaweed.

They're working in the same waters where they were used to fish earlier, and now they're able to cultivate.

And with over 4500 miles of coastline, India has quite a bit of space to grow it.

Seedlings get attached to ropes on each raft and each knot holds one seedlings.

Lakshmi has been farming seaweed for 18 years and she says, locals perception of this business has changed quite a bit.

Everyone used to say that growing seeweed caused dieases, and it will destroy fish.

Now, even the fish are growing by eating them.

Every part of this operation is done by hand, including hauling full rafts in for harvest.

If it hasn't been eaten by fish for 45 days, the seeweed will weigh more than 245kg per raft.

Workers cut the seaweed, but leave some segments to regrow.

Then the seaweed dries in the sun.

After about 36 hours, Laxmi removes dried salt, seagrass and other contaminants.

The dried seaweed lays out in the sun for a few more days before heading to Zerocircle's lab.

For these farmers, seaweed provides a livelihood but it's not always easy.

You don't know what comes in the ocean for you today.

It's like a surprise box every day, and you keep solving the puzzle every day.

They do what they can to protect their crop from wind, waves and hungry fish.

Commercial seaweed farming around the world has increased a thousandfold since 1950.

But experts warn that large and rapid increases in seaweed farming could have unintended consequences.

Rafts of seaweed can block light and change the way water flows to the ecosystem below.

And if farming operations are not managed properly, it can be devastating.

In 2013, a bacteria decimated the seaweed industry in the Philippines.

Studies show the disease spread easily among rafts that were placed too close together.

Here at Zerocircle's lab in Pune, seaweed transforms into plastic alternatives.

First, the dried seaweed goes through several washing and milling steps.

Notice how free-flowing this is.

Clean water washes impurities away.

The washed seaweed then goes into a reactor to be heated.

The carbohydrates inside seaweed are what's needed to make plastic-like material.

This material is extremely gel-like and viscous.

Technicians add solvents, it's strained and then we get this.

You can see the gel start to clump together in the beaker.

The next stop is this device called a rotary evaporator.

It removes solvents until it's refined into a more free-flowing gel.

Then it's put into a cast to mold and dry.

If you notice, this forms a nice, think gel.

It can be removed from the plate in a few minutes.

And when stretched thinner, the seaweed mix comes out looking like the familiar film companies used to package food.

Zerocircle's film can be sealed with heat, just like plastic wrap.

But unlike conventional plastic, it dissolves in water.

In boiling water, it's a matter of moments; in seawater, the team says the film would be gone within 2-4 hours, and it takes up to four months in a compost pile.

Zerocircle designed a product compatible with existing machinery, meaning that manufacturers wouldn't need new equipment to make the plastic-free film.

These pellets are then put into a manufacturing line, which come out as clear, thin firms.

We're not disrupting it, but we're sort of retrofitting our product into it.

And the company plans to begin selling pellets by 2024.

The idea is that manufacturers could make edible, biodegradable forms of many products,

like dissolvable soup and tea bag packets, wrappers for burgers, gift wraps, fashioned packaging, and good old grocery store bags.

They have very, very good capacity.

They can hold up to 5 to 8 kg in a single shopping bag.

While these plastic alternatives offer great environmental benefits, traditional plastic film made from oil is still cheaper.

We are trying to solve two big problems.

One is make a fantastic material, and make the material at a cost that people are able to use it.

So Zerocircle claims to have an eco-friendly plastic alternative that it wants to scale up.

But it's not alone.

The company is one of eight finalists for the Tom Ford Plastic Innovation Prize.

The fashion designer partnered with Lonely Whale, a nonprofit that played a huge role in the movement to eliminate plastic drinking straws.

They're offering $1.2 million to find alternatives for thin plastic films.

I was ecstatic.

We almost missed the deadline because we did not know about it.

Four of the finalists this year employ seaweed alternatives.

The seaweed community is not very competitive.

They're very friendly with each other, and we're all friends.

We talk about the same problems.

Judges took over a year to make sure the winning companies solution is more than just marketing.

Scientists ran each product through a battery of experiments.

Samples sat in ocean water for months in the same conditions conventional ocean plastic would.

Those junk on it.

Other trials assessed how the plastic alternatives might affect wildlife.

The finalists and the controls are going to sit in a simulated whale gut for 24 hours.

When Insider published this video, the winner of the Tom Ford Prize had not been announced.

We'll add a link in the description to the winning companies.

I think it's probably one of the longest-running challenges that we've been part of.

But they're doing this right, and I think that's what makes it special.

Neha was inspired in part by her own consumption.

I always had that guilt that I think every millennial has about the amount of pollution that we are creating on a daily basis.

So Zerocircle is not only looking at plastic films but the things we may not think about much.

Brands that are switching to paper are still attaching plastic linings, glues, coatings.

But Neha and Zerocircle are working to switch even those parts out with seaweed.

This is first time we have developed the seaweed-based glue.

This is formaldehyde-free and volatile, organic-compound-free.

It works on cardboard, paper and wood with quite a bit of strength.

So Zerocircle's future could be growing as fast as seaweed.

And there was an ocean of opportunity that nobody was looking at, which I felt like for a country like India, it's unfathomable why people would not look at that opportunity.