Imagine a world where new replacements for plastic—inspired by nature, and designed to regenerate—are more than just materials. Their sourcing stories and end-of-life enable a healthier planet. They enable true biological circularity, the way nature intended.
Welcome to the world of biomaterials: technologies that offer a shift away from petroleum by leveraging renewable sources that can be grown again and again. Corn, potato, sugarcane, and wood-based plastic alternatives are already commercially available and widely adopted. Excitingly, there’s also a new wave of “next-generation” materials made with feedstocks that are not just renewable, but regenerative. Mycelium, coconut shells, coffee grounds, pea protein, wetland grasses, and countless other renewable resources are now being leveraged into new innovations while offering ecosystem benefits throughout the value chain.
Seaweed may be the most generous resource on Earth. That’s why at Sway, the material innovation company I co-founded, we’ve centered seaweed as the hero ingredient in a new type of truly circular packaging.
Prior to Sway, I worked as a designer building brand and packaging systems. I loved my career, but didn’t love that I was often the person responsible for bringing plastic into the picture. In fact, too often, I found myself designing beautiful trash. I learned that 80 percent of environmental waste is determined at the design stage, and became obsessed with the idea that designers could be the key to evolving society away from plastic.
While completing my MFA in Design at the School of Visual Arts in New York, I began practicing principles from the Circular Economy framework. Our planet’s primary product economies are linear: we extract materials, transform them into usable items, and eventually dispose of them. In a Circular Economy, “waste” doesn’t exist. Rather, resources are reconfigured such that new value is found.
The three pillars of a circular economy, as defined by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, are:
Despite my non-technical background, this design-centered framework inspired me to create solutions of my own through my thesis work. As a packaging designer, I saw ample examples of the first two pillars being utilized through package-free and reusable solutions. The third pillar, centered around regenerating nature, felt relatively unexplored. Through my research of “regenerative” feedstocks, I quickly found that seaweed had the most potential to fuel a new wave of circular materials.
I have a personal relationship with seaweed. Growing up beside the ocean, I spent countless hours in tidepools and at the giant kelp exhibit at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I’ve always been enraptured by the diversity and beauty of underwater gardens and forests. As an adult, I learned seaweed is also rich in natural polymers—the molecular building blocks that could feasibly be transformed into plastic-like materials.
As my research progressed, I learned seaweed is almost a zero-input crop and can be farmed incredibly efficiently.