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This Plastic Packaging Alternative Can Compost in a Year
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Matt Burgess

Science
Nov 17, 2022 7:00 AM


THIS PLASTIC PACKAGING ALTERNATIVE CAN COMPOST IN A YEAR

British startup Shellworks is fed up with waste, so it created a vegan material
that can be turned into compost.
Photograph: James Mason

Save this storySave
Save this storySave

Every year, people in the United Kingdom throw away around 96 billion pieces of
plastic packaging—an 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.

“The plastics crisis can be daunting,” 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—such as scoops included in baby formula packaging—result 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.

Dubbed Vivomer, the company’s 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. “The 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,” Jafferjee says.



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The packaging doesn’t 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’t
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.



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’s stock. It
has since learned to outsource manufacturing and started producing products en
masse.

The company’s most significant order to date, Jafferjee says, was recreating the
packaging for beauty brand Haeckels’ 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. “We’re
trying to scale,” Jafferjee says. To tackle the plastics crisis, scale is
needed.

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.

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