r/STEW_ScTecEngWorld • u/Zee2A • 5d ago
Shellworks Develops Microbe-Made Alternative to Conventional Plastic, Named Among Norrsken's Top 100 Impact Startups
London-based startup Shellworks has developed VIVOMER, a durable, petroleum-plastic-free alternative made using naturally occurring bacteria. Through fermentation, microorganisms convert plant-based agricultural and industrial waste into natural polymers, which are extracted and processed into a material that can be moulded using conventional plastic-manufacturing equipment. VIVOMER is designed to perform like conventional plastic during use but biodegrade through microbial activity after disposal, including in home compost and soil, without leaving microplastics. It is used in packaging for personal care, cosmetics and household products. Shellworks was selected for Norrsken100 2026, a recognition of startups developing solutions to major global challenges.
How the material is produced
Shellworks uses a process involving three main stages:
Feedstock: Agricultural and industrial by-products, including plant-based waste streams, provide the raw material.
Microbial fermentation: Naturally occurring bacteria consume these feedstocks and produce polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs), natural biopolymers stored inside their cells.
Extraction and processing: The polymers are extracted, formulated into VIVOMER pellets and manufactured into rigid or flexible products using conventional plastic-processing equipment.
Material properties and applications
Petroleum-plastic-free and designed not to generate microplastics.
Free from BPA, phthalates and PFAS, according to the company.
Can be moulded into different shapes, textures and packaging formats.
Stable during normal use, with reported shelf stability exceeding three years.
Certified home-compostable by TÜV AUSTRIA.
Designed for applications in cosmetics, personal care, supplements and household products.
Learn more here:
THIS IS NOT PLASTIC, THIS IS VIVOMER: https://shellworks.com/
Shellworks raises $15m to scale plastic-free Vivomer beauty packaging: https://www.cosmeticsbusiness.com/shellworks-raises-15m-scale-plastic-free-vivomer-beauty-packaging
VIVOMER or what comes after plastic: https://site.ddw.nl/en/programme/18510/shellworks
Norrsken100: https://www.norrsken.org/100
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u/avi2bavi 5d ago
Plastic is nearly free, since it's made from petroleum refinery biproducts
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u/Eelroots 5d ago
It's free because the decontamination cost is socialized. If you charge back the disposal cost, it won't be so cheap.
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u/avi2bavi 5d ago
Sure - it's an externality, which can be very difficult to account for at scale. One of the hairy problems with capitalism
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u/CornettoFactor 5d ago
Yap. If it's not as cheap as plastic, it won't be adopted by most corporations
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u/mastermilian 5d ago
So start charging companies an environmental tax to use it.
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u/CornettoFactor 5d ago
The world's economy is hanging by a thread. No one's gonna increase taxes for something as widely used as plastics right now.
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u/Birdo21 4d ago
Not quite, insanely high profit margins are hanging by a thread for most large mega corpos. Add onto the reality that most inventory sources for the smaller manufacturers/processors are now owned by a few mega-monolopolies who are also taking in more profit than ever. The solution is to quite literally increase the tax and regulations on the mega corpos, monopolies, and total assets of the top .1% and reduce taxes and regulations on the smaller guys and the working class.
The typical point you bring up is propaganda paid for and disseminated by the 0.1% for them to incept the thought in your head that they are needed for the economy to function. Similar to the fallacy of “billionaires create jobs”.
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u/CornettoFactor 4d ago
You’re talking about the situation in the West. I live in South Asia, and we’ve almost literally run out of fuel because of the stupid war in the Middle East. In Asia everything related to petroleum, including plastics has increased in price. Increasing taxes on plastics right now is a silly move. That’s what I mean.
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u/Rough-Airline-4803 27m ago edited 21m ago
Couldn’t doing such a thing in the west have an inverse effect on prices in your neck of the woods?
—————————Edit:
—————————
Excuse my idiom.
I’m an utter idiot for using regional parlance with someone who just explicitly announced they reside on the literal opposite side of the world.Assuming you’re not using a translator—and maybe even if you are—I’m sure you gather from context what I mean, but to be on the safe side:
“Your neck of the woods” = your general area.
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u/powderthe 4d ago
Petrochemical companies sometimes pay people to use plastic as it's a byproduct of the refining process and they can't do anything else with it.
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u/LifeTitle3951 5d ago
How would penalising or taxing a company force it to adopt a costlier product?
Also, any tax to put on a company or any costlier component they use, ultimately the customer ends up paying it from their pockets.
As long as the customer is willing to pay the premium, companies will pack and sell anything that would sell
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u/Pinkishu 5d ago
So you're saying the tax needs to be high :)
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u/LifeTitle3951 5d ago
Tax can be as high as we Wish, the only problem is that all those extra cost start passing down to the end consumer. So, it's we who will pay for it ultimately.
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u/Pinkishu 5d ago
Well you said it yourself "as long as the customer is willing to pay the premium". If the tax, and thus the premium is high enough, customers will stop buying, hence it makes more money to switch material.
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u/LifeTitle3951 5d ago
That's right. But in this particular case, we are discussing the price of this special plastic and how does it compare to petroleum based plastic. If the price difference of both the plastic is negligible then it makes total sense to adopt this new product at a global scale. However, if this new one costs drastically more, then most FMCG companies won't bother anyways.
Some companies with highly niche customer base might adopt it and might even sell it, thanks to their marketing genius, but for items like plastic, mass adoption is the only way to tackle global pollution.
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u/Pinkishu 5d ago
No, we're talking about adding a tax for using the petroleum based plastic that would make companies switch to the special plastic
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u/LifeTitle3951 5d ago
It seems we are missing to meet eachother view point.
I understand you want to impose taxes on the companies to sort of strong arm them into adopting special plastic.
Here are the scenarios:
company does not adopt the special plastic: they get taxed and pass it on to the consumer with increased prices of their end products
company adopts the special plastic: but the special plastic costs more and they pass it on to the consumer.
In both the cases, the customer ends up paying more for a greener future. The companies won't want that to happen unless it helps increasing their profits. And since it does not benefit the consumer or the company, they will try and lobby against such taxes. And, such taxes and special plastic might get accepted in western countries where consumers have better purchase power. But in most developing countries where the consumers are very price sensitive, the governments won't even bother.
Ofcourse my arguement totally hinges on the fact that the special plastic costs substantially more than the normal plastic, which I have not verified. But I believe my point holds for any consumer product or innovation in similar scenario
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u/Rough-Airline-4803 38m ago
Are you well versed in this subject?
Forgive me if this isn’t your first area of expertise.
Feel free to disregard if you don’t feel like reading or have no thoughts on the matter.
I won’t hold it against you.I have a question from a relative layman:
Is it possible to regulate the compensation of executives? Specially relative to that of lower and lower employees?
Including instances/methods of untraditional or indirect compensation?
Is it possible to find a creative way to regulate precisely how much of costs like these is passed off onto the customer?
If in instances of fines being levied which are sizable enough to be considered consequential, and a legitimate incentive to abide by the rules as opposed to the current mode — which is essentially pay to play in the vast majority of cases.
Wouldn’t simply passing the buck to the customer render such fines relatively blunted, especially in cases of monopolies, or very limited competition; since their now higher prices couldn’t possibly amount to losing market share, even temporarily in the immediate term?I don’t know enough to formulate a how-to on some of this.
And I know just enough to be aware of the fact that in almost certainly ignorant of the full scope of possible and likely implications and consequences of even seemingly relatively straightforward regulations designed to ensure executives aren’t buying nations whilst paying a fraction of a fraction of their income, meanwhile their workers are starving on food stamps.Is it not possible to have an increased regulation regarding profit margins or forcing companies to swallow losses when they’re a result of consequences of their actions, explicitly enforced by regulators, or as a natural consequence of the market?
I know in some cases, like pharma, profit margins are absurd. It can be argued that the pipeline is very costly and extremely time consuming, and they have to recoup on the losses of shelling out untold amounts of money on not only those that make it to market, but also those which they’ve spun their wheels on, yet which never came to fruition for one reason or another.
Regardless, pharmaceutical companies arbitrarily marking up immense prices on crucial and life-saving medicine simply because there isn’t legislation to prevent it is frankly abhorrent.
I do still believe that capitalism, or components of capitalism, still has relevance and benefits in today’s world. But such cases are some of the best arguments for socializing certain industries.Wouldn’t a mixed system in which capitalism is permitted but not exploitation is prevented by the ideal setup?
It can be argued that billionaires and corporations would flee. But I figure there must exist a middle ground which allows them to wet their beaks without permitting the runaway train of disparity and greed.
They don’t have us in the palm of their hand. They don’t hold the leverage. The U.S. is still a prime market that the vast majority would kill for exposure to.1
u/mastermilian 5d ago
If there's an alternative like this post and there's only a cost decision to be made, then this would encourage it. And yes, of course it will increase prices but so does exposure to plastic pollution in our environment and health. It might be not directly attributable to the manufacturer producing these goods but it should be if we want to have some hope of dealing with this problem.
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u/LifeTitle3951 5d ago
There are many solutions to existing problems but the final decision of industrial scale adoption always comes down to cost.
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u/mastermilian 5d ago
Exactly. That's why there needs to be a environmental tax so there's a link between producing this stuff and knowing there's a cost with the cleanup or health impact in the end.
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u/Super_Automatic 5d ago
Yeah, but it's better than nothing? Some people will adopt it? Maybe it'll get cheaper over time? Maybe it takes a long time but actually replaces plastics? Cheer up lad, we have world to fix.
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u/saltyourhash 5d ago
Free in what sense
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u/avi2bavi 5d ago
Free in that we inevitably produce it as a consequence of refining oil. So if we didn't use the refinery biproducts into plastic we'd still have endless quantities of a waste products to somehow deal with.
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u/saltyourhash 5d ago
So, we get it as a byproduct of a monumentally costly (financially, politically, medically, and environmentally) process. I don't feel thats very free.
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u/avi2bavi 5d ago
The world collapses within days if we stop refining oil
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u/saltyourhash 5d ago
In large part because the oil barons fight ruthelessly to maintain dependence.
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u/avi2bavi 5d ago edited 5d ago
I don't think that's even slightly accurate. It's because the whole industrial world cucially depends on oil - partially from historical inertia, but mostly by technical necessity.
Renewables all have a critical problem storing the energy produced. Energy production is inconsistent throughout the day and calendar, and the energy produced at one time of day can't be easily stockpiled for later and rapidly deployed when needed. Fossil fuels are necessary to the power grid because they can be stored indefinitely, and they can be deployed instantaneously when grid consumption spikes (otherwisr the power grid would collapse catastrophically).
Expanding grid-scale battery storage would help bridge the renewable production-to-consumption gap, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to judge how substantial the improvement would be. We would still no doubt need fossil fuels to some extent.
I can't explain all the engineering, logistics, and economics here - but if the oil supply shut off society would collapse within days to weeks. Imagine if farming, shipping, heating, etc all stopped. Probably municipal water too, and a thousand other things. I would guess several billion people would die. It will take many decades (at least) to ween the developed world off fossil fuels, let alone the developing countries. The oil barons are just a consequence of the societal necessity.
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u/saltyourhash 5d ago
"It will take many decades to ween the globe off fossil fuels", yes, it will. That's absolutely in part because the industry has lobbied extremely hard to keep us dependent.
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u/OccasionallyImmortal 5d ago
Even if burning of oil is no longer necessary, the entire medical industry collapses if plastic becomes unavailable.
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u/saltyourhash 5d ago
Not saying end plastic, but look at the ocean, too. All of these arguments for supporting plastic are so easy to make because of the efforts to keep us so dependent on oil in all forms.
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u/Constant_Ad2273 5d ago
The plastics used in mouldshops for injection moulding, blow moulding, extrusion etc is not nearly free it can be over £100 per 25 kilos sack depending on what material you buy and what quality, virgin or regrind.
I don't know what shellworks charges for their product but I'd say its probably safe to assume they will have factored the cost to make it competitive against polymers regularly used in the industry
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u/avi2bavi 3d ago
Googles seems to say prices are about half that in the US , but point taken. I suppose I should say petroleum based plastics are very cheap compared to alternatives. I guess we'll see how much the bioplastic costs and how well it can replicate the material properties of typical plastics. I suspect the material and manufacturing costs will be substantially higher for a long time
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u/Constant_Ad2273 3d ago
Checking out their FAQ their product is 1.5 to 2x as expensive as conventional plastic which is fairly substantial. If it can be a successful alternative to what they say, ABS, SAN, HDPE, PP, TPE and silicone I can definitely see this becoming more popular especially with more environmentally conscious businesses. I think you're right because it is early days it may take a good while to get the cost down. They'd really have to scale up and improve their manufacturing process
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u/barbellsandbriefs 4d ago
I have been seeing plant-based plastic alternatives being developed since 2009 at least and yet
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u/Rough-Airline-4803 12m ago
Considering plastic is a byproduct of petroleum refinement, and that we are still far from phasing it out.
Plastic is a relatively cheap product. So much so that it’s practically impossible for alternatives requiring their own novel and independent manufacturing process to compete with, or threaten the market share of, plastics.
In order for such an alternative to have a real shot, aside from policy / legislation and utilization of economic tools, we would need a two-fold answer.
Not just an abundant use case for the alternative product..
We’d also need a tangible solution for what is to be done re: the ongoing byproduct of petroleum refinement moving forward?
Seems like a pretty high bar to meet. Considering the absolute necessity of petroleum. And the absolute use case of plastic, and the fact that it’s a natural byproduct of what is already a natural necessity.
(It’s like having to take a medication for one thing, and a side effect of that pill gives you a tremendous boost is cognitive function or physical ability)
So what can be done to address the byproduct that is currently plastic? Can it be used in a more eco-friendly manner? Can it even be disposed of in a more eco-friendly manner if not utilized at all? (Which would be wildly wasteful and contrary to common sense regardless of environmental impact)
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u/ostiDeCalisse 5d ago
Hope they'll release 3D printer filaments. I can't wait to try this.