Every year, people in the United Kingdom throw away around 96 billion pieces of plastic packaging\u2014an average household tosses 66 pieces every week. Almost half of this packaging waste ends up being incinerated, while a quarter is buried in landfills, according to a May 2022 survey by Everyday Plastic and Greenpeace. The scale of the waste is hard to fathom.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe plastics crisis can be daunting,\u201d says Insiya Jafferjee, the CEO and cofounder of packaging company Shellworks. Speaking at WIRED Impact in London this November, Jafferjee said that even small, seemingly simple pieces of plastic\u2014such as scoops included in baby formula packaging\u2014result in hundreds of millions of pieces of plastic waste every year. Shellworks was created to start making a dent in the amount of plastic packaging that gets thrown away. To do so, Jafferjee and cofounder Amir Afshar developed an entirely compostable material that can be used to package goods.<\/p>\n
Dubbed Vivomer, the company\u2019s material is created from microbes found in the soil and marine environments and can be shaped into solid jars or containers, as well as more flexible products. \u201cThe catch, or the benefit of this, is that if you throw this jar away, the very same microbes in the soil and the marine environment will see it, recognize it as its food essentially, and break it down,\u201d Jafferjee says.<\/p>\n
The packaging doesn\u2019t need any special environment to degrade: It can be composted at home or in industrial composting. If a Vivomer product is thrown away with regular trash, Jafferjee says, it will still degrade, and it doesn\u2019t produce any microplastics in the process. Depending on the size of the packaging, it can take anywhere between a year and five years to degrade.<\/p>\n
Jafferjee told WIRED Impact that since Shellworks was founded in 2019, it has faced multiple challenges. While creating its proof of concept, the team worked in a shed and had to use machinery it was able to get for free. Then, on the eve of its first major delivery, an electrical fire decimated the firm\u2019s stock. It has since learned to outsource manufacturing and started producing products en masse.<\/p>\n
The company\u2019s most significant order to date, Jafferjee says, was recreating the packaging for beauty brand Haeckels\u2019 skincare products. In total, it produced more than 300,000 Vivomer items for 100,000 products, designed to hold everything from face creams and serums to oils and exfoliating powders. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to scale,\u201d Jafferjee says. To tackle the plastics crisis, scale is needed.<\/p>\n
Updated 11-18-2022 05:55 am ET: An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that the Shellworks products mentioned could be turned into fertilizer. The types of products currently available from Shellworks were also corrected.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
British startup Shellworks is fed up with waste, so it created a vegan material that can be turned into fertilizer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":950,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/beautybyneature.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/image-143.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beautybyneature.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/949"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/beautybyneature.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/beautybyneature.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beautybyneature.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beautybyneature.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=949"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/beautybyneature.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/949\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":951,"href":"https:\/\/beautybyneature.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/949\/revisions\/951"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beautybyneature.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beautybyneature.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beautybyneature.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beautybyneature.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}