According to Sway, seaweed grows up to 60 times faster than other crops on land, and can remove up to 20 times more carbon from the air than forests

The American startup Sway could have found a suitable material to replace a considerable number of plastic in the packaging industry. The startup has developed a plastic from seaweed that, it explains, could serve to reduce the pollution caused by the mishandling of plastic waste.

With this new development, thinner film packaging, such as polythene bags, retail bags and wrappers, will be compostable and even carbon negative by using materials derived from algae.

Julia Marsh, co-founder and CEO of the company in Berkeley, California, said that Sway’s seaweed-based plastic replacements offer immense ecological and social benefits in the face of climate change.

“At the end of her life, the material (of Sway) will be gone in four to six weeks,” she noted Marsh.

The new plastic from algae has a shelf life of 12 months and the algae used to make Sway materials can remove up to 20 times more carbon per acre than trees, all without requiring fresh water, soil, pesticides or other inputs. .

In this way, a significant of all plastics currently used for the food industry could be reduced, causing the more rigid plastics to be used for medical or other solutions.

“We want to make sure it feels good and people like it and are actually composting it,” Marsh says of the bags.

“It’s also important that people place value on the material and that the seaweed story resonates – these are compostable bags to replace those made from petroleum,” Marsh noted.