A Bioloon biodegradable balloon formula developed at Imperial College London breaks down in soil, seawater and deionised water within an estimated nine months, with the team aiming to bring it to market by 2028.
The material looks and behaves like a standard balloon. It inflates the same way, feels the same in the hand, and arrives in the same colours. What it does not contain is the suite of chemical additives that make conventional latex balloons an environmental hazard long after the party is over.
Why ordinary latex balloons became a problem
Balloons have always been made from natural latex, a material derived from rubber tree sap. On its own, latex is biodegradable. The difficulty lies in what manufacturers do to it. To convert liquid latex into elastic rubber, they use a process called sulfur vulcanisation, adding sulfur, accelerators, antioxidants and activators. Those additives block biodegradation and leak toxic chemicals when a balloon ends up in the sea, on a beach or in an animal’s digestive system.
A 2019 study by the University of Tasmania found balloons were the ‘highest-risk plastic debris item’ for seabirds, 32 times more deadly than ingesting hard plastics. A deflated balloon is soft enough to lodge fatally in a bird’s or marine animal’s gut, and it looks like food from below the surface. Between 20 and 25 billion balloons are sold around the world each year. Much of the packaging has long claimed they degrade ‘at the rate of an oak leaf’. The research record says otherwise.
The Bioloon biodegradable balloon formula and how it works
Juliana Cumming, a Ph.D. student at Imperial College London, spent three years working on the problem. ‘Our balloon is still made with natural latex, but we blend it with another biodegradable polymer and we don’t add any of these additives that are used in traditional balloons,’ she says. The vulcanisation step is cut out entirely. What remains is a material that is soft, elastic and stable enough to inflate, but that breaks down when it reaches the environment.
The team tested the formula in soil, seawater and deionised water. It broke down in all three. Cumming estimates full breakdown within nine months. That figure still needs to be validated at commercial scale, and the path from laboratory to shop shelf carries its own manufacturing and regulatory hurdles. There were, as Cumming put it, ‘hundreds of trials’ and ‘many, many failures’ before the formula held together.
According to Imperial College London, the research was led by Professor Jason Hallett from the Department of Chemical Engineering, and the team operates under the name Bioloon. The project sits inside a broader set of questions about how widely the same polymer blend could be applied. Charlotte Melia, who ran a party planning business for over a decade, has seen the scale of the problem directly. ‘We were putting out thousands of party balloons every single week,’ she says, ‘and they were only there for a matter of hours simply to be popped and thrown in the trash.’
Melia and her co-founder Christie Molgaard put up around £30,000 to fund Cumming’s doctoral research at Imperial College, according to the university. That backing moved the project from an idea about polymer chemistry into a testable product.
Beyond the party aisle
Melia sees potential uses beyond balloons. The same material, she says, could be adapted for household gloves, surgical gloves, latex clothing and condoms. Each of those markets carries its own performance and regulatory requirements, so the 2028 target applies to balloons specifically, where the commercial case is clearest and the environmental toll is already well documented.
The Bioloon biodegradable balloon formula does not solve the broader question of how billions of balloons are used, or how release events and mass gatherings should be managed. What it does offer is a material that would, for the first time, make the ‘biodegradable’ claim on balloon packaging accurate. The team’s next step is scaling the formula for manufacture ahead of the 2028 target date.
