Day: November 17, 2022

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 droppers that release liquids. “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 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.

Lab-grown meat is one big step closer to grocery store aisles and your dinner plate. The Food and Drug Administration announced its first-ever rubber stamp for a cultured meat company on Wednesday. UPSIDE Foods completed the FDA’s pre-market consultation process, and the agency found no reason to doubt the company’s safety claims.

Though technically not an “approval process” the FDA’s assessment of UPSIDE amounts to a green light for the company’s technology and production method, which uses small amounts of chicken cells + a growth medium to culture larger quantities of meat, minus the slaughter.

“We have no questions at this time regarding UPSIDE’s conclusion that foods comprised of or containing [its] cultured chicken cell material…are as safe as comparable foods produced by other methods,” the FDA wrote in its letter to the company—which is a clunky way to say: ‘sure, looks good.’

Cultured meat has been hyped up for years as a potential solution for the multitude of environmental downsides of standard, animal-made meat. Though some studies have called into question the actual environmental benefits of lab-grown steaks, filets, and drumsticks, the reality is it’s hard to measure the relative climate and pollution costs while “meat minus animals” has stayed mostly theoretical.

Companies have been vying for regulator approval of cultured meat in the U.S. for a long time, to no avail. Without the FDA’s blessing, no manufacturer has actually started producing their product at marketable scale. There are lots of different environmental considerations involved in accurately determining a food’s impact.

In the case of cultured meat, important factors like the land used to grow the grains included in cell growth medium and the energy needed to run these facilities are big question marks. Lots of varying estimates are out there, but until a company actually navigates those decisions and manages to make money—it’s hard to say how cultured meat’s environmental footprint compares to that of factory-farmed livestock.

In 2020, Singapore was the world’s first country to approve the sale of cultured meat. In that case, the product was Eat Just’s chicken. Wednesday’s FDA announcement isn’t quite the same thing—one specific product hasn’t gotten the go-ahead for grocery aisles quite yet. And if UPSIDE wants to sell their stuff in stores, they’ll have to navigate further oversight from the USDA and the Food Safety and Inspection Service.

Nonetheless, it’s one of the biggest steps in recent years towards expanding cultured meat from the conference-circuit sample tray to actual consumers. Well over a hundred companies and start-ups have invested in the idea that lab-grown meat could be food’s future, and now we might actually get to find out.