The Sway Polybag
The Technology: Thermoplastic Seaweed Resin (TPSea™)
Sustainable Impact
Circular Economy
The circular economy is defined by three foundational principles: eliminate waste and pollution, circulate products and materials, and regenerate nature. Sway uses this framework to design their products – and entire supply chain – in support of a future where business thrives in harmony with planet and people.
Regenerative Inputs
Regeneration goes beyond the call for sustainability, nurturing rather than neutralizing. Seaweed thrives off sunlight and sea water, requiring low to no inputs – unlike terrestrial crops farmed through systems of conventional agriculture. It’s abundant, space-efficient, and available on nearly every coastline in the world. Just by growing, it increases habitat for marine life, boosts biodiversity, and mitigates climate change impacts like ocean acidification and erosion. Developing science even suggests that seaweed farming can sequester carbon!
Responsible Sourcing
Sway sources seaweed from a trusted network of global partners, incorporating diverse geographies, species, and cultivation methods to support the positive impacts of expanded seaweed cultivation and avoid over-reliance on any one community. They work exclusively with suppliers who provide dignified employment to farmers, meaning fair wages and good treatment.
Home & Industrial Compostable
Every Sway product is intentionally designed to meet the gold standard of compost certification: TUV Austria Home & Industrial. Composting is an important piece of our waste management puzzle. By providing the optionality of composting at home or through local facilities, Sway is enabling consumers to complete the loop of biological circularity – just as nature intended.
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.