Sway represents the next stage in the evolution of packaging, solving for the many harms of petroleum-based plastics through regenerative design.
Plastic has a short but earth-changing history.
Plastic was actually born from admirable goals: To make consumer products more accessible and take pressure off of severely exploited natural resources. How, then, did plastic pollution become one of the greatest threats to our natural environment?
How did we get here?
Plastic is a wonder material. For better and (mostly) for worse,
it has defined the last century of human consumption.
Today
Every day, 8 million pieces of plastic pollution find their way into the ocean. Plastic waste has been found on the world’s most remote islands, its deepest seafloors, and its highest peaks.
Plastic even finds its way into our bodies — you ingest tens of thousands of microplastics every year.
Plastics threaten human and natural life at every step of the supply chain.
Petroleum refineries poison the air and leak toxins into our water. After oil is converted into plastic, millions of pellets spill into waterways during transport, storage, loading, and cleaning.
160 million tons of plastic bags, wrappers and pouches are produced across the globe each year, but only 1-3% are recycled. These flexible, thin-film plastics remain in nature for centuries, clogging waterways and harming human and aquatic life.
Every piece of plastic ever made is still on this earth. Let's turn off the tap.
Plastics are the most inexpensive, lightweight, scalable material on earth. Efforts to combat petroleum plastic waste have primarily focused on the “Three Rs”: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. But petroleum plastic still finds its way into our homes, our bodies, and our environment.
At Sway, we believe in a fourth R. Regenerate.
We make seaweed-based packaging that replenishes the social and ecological systems harmed by petroleum plastics.
Sway's flexible packaging solution technically outperforms petroleum plastic, too. It is derived from a benevolent resource, cultivated to empower coastal communities and restore coastal ecosystems, and can be composted in your backyard after use.
We aren’t simply creating a plastic alternative — we’re Swaying the future of materials.
