The Sway Polybag
The Technology: Thermoplastic Seaweed Resin (TPSea™)
Sustainable Impact
Promoting the Circular Economy
Sway’s supply chain is designed to generate holistic value, from sea to soil. They use the principles of the circular economy to design their products, as well as their entire supply chain, to restore social and natural systems harmed by climate change and pollution.
The circular economy is defined by three foundational principles: eliminate waste and pollution, circulate products and materials, and regenerate nature.
Sustainable Sourcing
Seaweed farming can promote ocean health by reversing acidification, cycling nutrients, and encouraging biodiversity. Sway sources responsibly cultivated seaweed from around the world using a diverse set of red and brown seaweeds as the base of their packaging technology. They also work exclusively with suppliers who provide dignified employment to farmers, meaning fair wages and good treatment.
Regenerative Design
Sway is committed to regenerative design. Regeneration goes beyond the call for sustainability, encouraging us to design not simply to avoid harm, but to replenish our planet. Seaweed farming regenerates ecosystems as it grows, and Sway’s compostable products regenerate soil when composted.
Building a Biomaterial Future Together
This is just the beginning!
Sway is a material innovation company on a mission to bring materials made from abundant, planet-replenishing resources into the mainstream. Their first product – the Sway Polybag – is an entirely new technology that Atlantic Packaging has adopted to showcase a next-generation solution that could viably replace the 180 billion thin-film polybags used annually in the fashion industry alone. While that is an enormous amount of plastic to offset by itself, this packaging format is just the first step in a much more ambitious vision.
Together, Sway and Atlantic Packaging are working toward a myriad of solutions to reduce and replace plastics. From flexibles to rigids, food-grade to waterproof, we are actively exploring the technical boundaries of what Sway technology can do, now and in the future. Right now, we are focusing on scaling this technology for a relatively straightforward application: polybags. But we’re eager to develop Sway films that are food-grade, because we agree that the most promising applications for compostable packaging are in food-contact items. It’s going to take refining our first products like Sway Polybags to get us to a place where we can really bring food-contact films to life.
It’s also going to take radical collaboration withexperts across policy, the compost industry, and science to design solutions that leave a legacy, not waste. Unlike many compostable packaging solutions on the market today, we believe that Sway products are themselves beneficial to compost, enriching it with nutrients not found in other biomaterials. That said, we know that the compost landscape is complex, and we’re committed to working with composters to increase acceptance of regenerative materials like ours. The Sway Polybag as we know it today represents an entry point to solving the broad array of plastics present in our everyday lives.
By scaling seaweed-based next-generation materials, we can transform entire supply chains, reducing demand for harmful petrochemicals while actively healing natural systems.