Eco-friendly entrepreneur fights to sell biodegradable boat wrap in Minnesota
Every spring in Jamestown, Rhode Island, boat owners tear off the plastic coverings that sheltered their vessels through the winter and toss them into dumpsters. Within weeks, the boats are back on the water. The plastic heads to a landfill, where it will sit for centuries.
Simon Milne, an entrepreneur and sailor himself, watched the waste pile up, season after season. Marine shrink wrap is built to be durable—to survive months of ice, wind, and sun—but its durability means it persists in landfills, too, outlasting everyone who touched it.
Simon didn’t see anyone trying to solve the problem in earnest. He saw plastic manufacturers coming up with what he called “feel-good factor” solutions to “kick the can down the road.” In his view, recycling didn’t cut it.
“So many people try to recycle plastic,” he says. “I want to make clear that I’m a big fan of any recycling.… But plastic is a product which cannot be effectively recycled or cost-effectively recycled.… So, we looked at alternatives.”
Building bioWRAP
Simon spent years researching those alternatives. He brought a unique set of skills to the challenge, having worked in air cargo, oil spill remediation, and plastic manufacturing.
“Through the air cargo business and air freight business that we are involved in for the last 31 years, [I] know that there’s some similar technology which exists, but for oil spills where they use microbes to eat the oil,” he explains.
In 2023, Simon’s company, bioaqualife, launched its new product: a landfill-biodegradable shrink film designed to replace conventional plastic wrap. He called it bioWRAP.
In third-party testing, bioWRAP matches or beats conventional wrap in strength, puncture resistance, UV protection, weldability, and heat-shrink speed. It requires standard installation tools, and it can be stored indefinitely without degrading. Once it reaches a landfill, natural microbial activity completely biodegrades the film within three to five years into organic matter, water, and benign biogas.
“We took it upon ourselves to be our own environmental stewards,” Simon explains. “We know that our product is good.”
Expanding to Minnesota
Simon’s business grew rapidly. Minnesota, with its 810,000 registered recreational boats and roughly 730,000 vessels getting shrink-wrapped each year, was a prime target for expansion. Minnesota boaters go through 240,000 to 290,000 rolls annually—an $18 million market.
But in 2024, the Minnesota Legislature made it nearly impossible for Simon to sell his product in the state by creating the Boat Wrap Product Stewardship Program. Every producer that wants to sell boat wrap in Minnesota must join and fund an approved stewardship organization, the Commercial and Industrial Flexible Film Recycling Organization (CIFFRO). All three members of its board are corporate executives from incumbent plastic businesses—bioaqualife’s direct competitors.
A competitor-run cartel
CIFFRO, a private organization, exercises sweeping authority to set mandatory producer dues and define technical product standards, without meaningful state supervision. As a result, bioaqualife must follow the rules authored by its direct competitors.
CIFFRO’s dues would raise bioaqualife’s costs from about $450 to $650 per roll. The law also bars producers from listing the program’s cost as a separate fee or line item, so Simon can’t show customers why his price went up—a restriction on truthful speech prohibited by the First Amendment.
“We’re a small company,” Simon explains. “I can’t eat $200 a roll.”
Adding insult to injury, he would be funding his competitors’ messaging.
CIFFRO’s mandates leave Simon with only two options: pay dues to subsidize his competitors’ operations or face a blanket exclusion from the Minnesota market.
Minnesota’s recycling targets
Minnesota’s Boat Wrap Product Stewardship Program also sets strict quotas: It requires a recycling rate of at least 50% of the total weight of boat wrap sold in Minnesota by 2030, and at least 80% by 2035.
Rather than measuring sustainability by an environmental outcome, the statute regulates a favored processing method: mechanical recycling—the very method whose shortcomings inspired Simon to find a better solution.
Every roll of bioWRAP is engineered to break down completely in landfills, but none of it counts toward the state’s sustainability goals. So, Simon’s eco-friendly solution is effectively locked out of the state.
Simon’s pitch to lawmakers
Simon, who admits he’s “not a big believer in lawsuits,” first tried to work directly with Minnesota lawmakers.
“I think that you can always try to resolve an issue by approaching the other party and discussing it with them, resolving it, and just seeing eye to eye with a person,” he explains.
Unfortunately, Minnesota lawmakers declined to amend the statute to recognize landfill-biodegradable alternatives. After a few fruitless conversations, Simon realized a lawsuit might be his company’s only hope of selling in Minnesota. When he found Pacific Legal Foundation and our pro bono representation, he prepared to take on the government.
Simon takes his case to court
On September 29, 2026, bioaqualife filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota. Pacific Legal Foundation represents the company free of charge.
The lawsuit argues that Minnesota violated the Due Process Clause and the Minnesota Constitution by handing regulatory power over an entire market to a private group of competitors.
It also alleges that forcing bioaqualife to join and fund CIFFRO, while banning it from disclosing the cost to customers, violates the First Amendment and that protecting in-state interests at the expense of out-of-state innovators violates the Commerce Clause.
A cleaner environment—measured honestly
Simon built a product to deliver the eco-friendly solutions that Minnesota claims to want, but under the state’s program, his path to customers runs through his competitors. They set his dues, write the standards his product must meet, and decide which kind of waste reduction counts.
No business should need its rivals’ permission to sell.
Simon remains undeterred. He spent his career treating obstacles as problems to solve, and he sees Minnesota’s law the same way.
“You can’t get enraged in this,” he explains. “You’ve just got to see how you can overcome it.”
