Pylantis makes a new plastic using plants, clay and other material, developed over more than 10 years by Michio Komatsu, a pioneer in plastic injection molding.
That same year in Vancouver, British Columbia, several iPad shoppers at Future Shop and Best Buy stores said they opened the Apple packaging to find plastic bags filled with modeling clay.
Filling the pores in the aerogel with plastic should remove its fragility and, conversely, the network of clay molecules in the aerogel will stop the plastic cracking.
So the researchers reckoned that if they mixed casein with the clay and added glyceraldehyde (which substitutes for the poisonous formaldehyde used in the original plastic), they might be able to make something really rather useful.