An average family in the UK discards 66 pieces of plastic packaging every week, or almost 96 billion pieces annually. According to a May 2022 survey by Everyday Plastic and Greenpeace, about half of this packaging waste is burned and a quarter is buried in landfills. It is difficult to imagine the amount of garbage.
The CEO and co-founder of packaging company Shellworks, Insiya Jafferjee, admits that the plastics dilemma might be intimidating. Speaking in November at WIRED Impact in London, Jafferjee asserted that even tiny, seemingly uncomplicated plastic items—like the scoops seen on baby formula packaging—resulting in hundreds of millions of pieces of plastic garbage annually. To begin reducing the quantity of plastic packaging that is thrown away, Shellworks was established. Jafferjee and partner Amir Afshar created a completely compostable material that may be used to package things in order to achieve this.
The company’s material, called Vivomer, can be formed into solid jars or containers as well as more flexible droppers that release liquids. It is made from microbes found in soil and marine environments. The drawback, or advantage, of this, according to Jafferjee, is that if you discard this jar, the same microbes in the soil and marine environment will see it, identify it as food in essence, and decompose it.
The packaging doesn’t need any special environment to degrade: It can be composted at home or in industrial recycling. 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.
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