Episode 44 Transcript: Solving the Plastic Crisis with Seaweed

Molly Wood Voice-Over:
Welcome to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast for the climate conomy. We dive deep into the climate crisis and come up with solutions. I'm Molly Wood.

This week, you already know, I hope, that the world has a major single-use plastic problem. Over 380 million tons of plastic are produced globally each year, much of it for disposable packaging that ends up in landfills and oceans.

And we’ll talk in just a few minutes about all the reasons it’s terrible. But plastic is a very hard habit to break because in some cases, we just flat out NEED it. So my guest this week is working to replace it…

Julia Marsh:
I'm Julia Marsh. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Sway. We're a California-based materials company using seaweed to replace plastics.

Molly Wood:
So I think it is fair to say that people are generally familiar with the problem of plastics. But I still think it's valuable to set up why tackle this problem specifically.

Julia Marsh:
There are a lot of avoidable plastics, and there are a lot of opportunities to implement reuse systems, which I think is definitively the best answer. Like let's just eliminate materials wherever possible. But there's a specific category of unavoidable plastics that really are causing a lot of harm, not just to nature, but to ourselves, to our communities, and to the city. It's not just an environmental issue; it's a human health issue. Unfortunately, unavoidable plastics include flexible films like bags, wrappers, and pouches. They're the cheapest, lightest weight method of packaging just about anything, but they're also the most likely to not be recycled and thus to go to landfill, where they often float into nature, into our cities.

I'm really interested in unavoidable plastics and the harms they cause, which I think we're all very familiar with. And then they're made from petroleum, which is the other piece that maybe this audience definitely knows. Not everyone knows, but if we want to divorce ourselves from the fossil fuel industry, plastics are a part of that story.

Molly Wood:
All too, yes, all too.

Molly Wood:
In fact, I often call plastics their escape hatch in a world where they're like, "That's fine. We'll still just make clothes and bags, and it'll be fine."

Julia Marsh:
Mmm, indeed.

Julia Marsh:
Yeah, I mean, big oil is definitely betting on plastics to save itself. BP projected that over the next 20 years, 95% of net growth in demand for oil will come from plastics. And a huge percentage of those plastics will be single-use packaging. So it's definitely a multifaceted challenge, but it also presents many opportunities for innovation.

Molly Wood:
So let's dig into a little more of this avoidable versus unavoidable. Talk about what's avoidable. That's just sort of like, "We do not need to have soda in a plastic bottle" kind of thing.

Julia Marsh:
I think of your Amazon packages where you order a keychain, and it's packaged inside of a bag that's packaged inside of another plastic bag. Like needless, thoughtless packaging. So much of packaging and plastic waste in general comes from the design and logistics person maybe not giving as much love to the decisions as possible.

Molly Wood:
Mm-hmm.

Julia Marsh:
Designers and supply chain operators wield so much power in this challenge. Like plastic waste is a design flaw. So those are the kinds of avoidable plastics I think of like, "Why?" Or your toilet paper is wrapped in seven layers of plastic film. So unnecessary. It's engineered to survive disaster conditions. Very unnecessary.

Molly Wood:
Mm-hmm.

Julia Marsh:
We literally need less or no material at all. I think of how your clothes arrive when you order a shirt from one of your favorite sustainable fashion brands, and it shows up in a plastic bag inside of a plastic bag. That's not necessary. So those are good examples. Indeed. Yeah, sustainable items in non-sustainable packaging aren't sustainable products.

Molly Wood:
Yeah, I'm looking at you, Rent the Runway. We're so close, Rent the Runway.

Julia Marsh:
The necessary packaging is you need a pouch to keep your protein powder dry and fresh, or you work in the medical industry and need hygienic tools, or you made a beautiful cashmere sweater, and it's being shipped across the world. You don't want it to rip, get dusty or dirty, or tear, or the product would be ruined. That is necessary packaging. We need to figure out better solutions there.

Molly Wood:
Right, and that sort of gets the idea that plastic is, in fact, in many ways, wonderful as a mechanism for distributing vaccines or packaging powders or all of these things. Is the thing that makes it unavoidable not just that we've come to use it in all of these ways, but you mentioned the economics of it, that any replacement for this product currently has been too expensive?

Julia Marsh:
Yeah. Totally.

Julia Marsh:
Totally, yeah. It's cost and efficacy. You want to keep your beautiful product in perfect condition, or you need to keep it safe. And it's certainly the most affordable, most heavily subsidized, and optimized packaging solution on earth. But there's an opportunity to play within the parameters of how plastic is manufactured to solve some of those unavoidable plastics.

Molly Wood:
And that gets us to what you're doing. Wait, but first I want to back up to one other thing. But hold on to your listener because I want to ask you about that very important word "subsidized." Because that is key to one of the things that's happening here too, right?

Julia Marsh:
Indeed.

Julia Marsh:
Right, it's the intertwinedness of the fossil fuel industry really benefiting and profiting from plastics production. And, you know, there is a lot of policy and lobbying that is informing the public consciousness and the collective strategies of consumer brands moving towards "recycling," where this is really just a way to continue using plastic and not turn off the tap.

The plastic industry wants recycling to succeed, and in a lot of places, recycling can totally work. Recycling of aluminum, recycling of paper, and recycling of certain types of plastic can absolutely work and is the solution, but it's not the only solution.

Molly Wood:
Okay, that gets us to all new materials. So tell me how you are tackling this problem and creating a replacement.

Julia Marsh:
Got to play within the system that already exists. Need to be able to plug into existing infrastructure, need to take advantage of really this window of opportunity where consumers, you and I, do not want garbage in the mail or purchasing off the shelves. We want to feel good about our purchasing decisions.

And brands, based on consumer pressure, but also based on investor pressure and regulatory pressure, are being forced to either adopt totally reusable, recyclable, or compostable solutions. And we fit into the third bucket. But I think we have to go a step further and say, "How can we actually check multiple boxes simultaneously? How can we help you not just get away from plastic pollution but actually create positive value in your supply chain?" And for that reason, we work with seaweed.

Molly Wood:
Tell me more. So it is clear on its face how seaweed checks a compostable bucket. But what are the other check marks that are contained within the solution?

Julia Marsh:
So seaweed grows on every coastline in the world. There are 10,000 plus species of it. They come in reds, browns, and greens, and there's a commercial industry already dedicated to seaweed cultivation around the world, mostly for use in food and pharmaceuticals, but now in biomaterials as well, because seaweed contains natural polymers. And we can use those natural polymers and combine them with other plants to create replacements for plastic.

The reason seaweed is such a good fit for this challenge is when it's growing in the ocean, it doesn't require fresh water. It doesn't require pesticides. You don't need to feed it anything. You don't need arable land that could otherwise be used for food crops. And guess what? We live on a blue planet. It's 70% ocean. There's a lot of space to really scale seaweed. And it's been cultivated for centuries. So there's a lot of history to learn from and to kind of scale in tandem with. And then seaweed is really fast growing.

Compared with some of the other alternatives, it goes 20 to 30 times faster than corn or sugar cane. It's oftentimes grown year-round. So you'll have growth cycles where you're harvesting it every two to three weeks. So it's just a lot of material available and lots of other reasons, but I'll stop.

Molly Wood:
And it's not extractive from a resource perspective to cultivate, grow, and harvest. Talk to me about the end product. How hard is it then to convert into a plastic replacement?

Julia Marsh:
Sure. As I mentioned, there's a global industry dedicated to the natural polymers that come from seaweed. You may have seen it listed as an ingredient in your ice cream (carrageenan) or your agar petri dish. Alginate is used in certain cosmetics. These are the kinds of natural polymers that come from seaweed, and that's what we work with.

You cultivate the seaweed in the ocean. You give the seaweed a haircut.

Molly Wood:
Mm-hmm.

Julia Marsh:
You dry it on the beach, separate the natural polymers, and then Sway combines those natural polymers with other plants, starches, and sugars using traditional plastic infrastructure to create pellets, which is how basically all plastic is made. Then those pellets can be molded, formed, blown, and shaped into whatever packaging needs you have. So that's how it works.

And in theory, it's really easy. Obviously, there are challenges interwoven there, but the process itself is restorative to oceans, efficient, and results in a material that returns to nature. And the idea is that at every step of the supply chain, there's positive value being delivered rather than negative or detrimental impacts happening.

Molly Wood:
How is it restorative?

Julia Marsh:
Seaweed isn't just fast-growing and efficient. It also does a lot of work when it's being farmed. Seaweed cultivation is really good for biodiversity. It actually encourages the replenishing of underwater life without harming that life when it's being harvested. It cycles excess nutrients. So it'll help to reverse the effects of ocean acidification, which are one of the negative features of climate change.

It's a low-carbon crop. In fact, seaweed itself sequesters immense amounts of carbon. And then it's restorative to coastal communities as well that have maybe been affected by overfishing, where seaweed cultivation can represent a new income source that complements their overall activities.

So it's beneficial for the environment itself. Like, I would grow seaweed just for the purpose of growing seaweed because it's good for the ocean. But then on top of that, it has this positive social benefit. And then on top of that, we're replacing plastic.

Molly Wood:
Yeah.

Molly Wood:
I wish that everybody listening could see, like, there is such joy and love on your face when you talk about seaweed. It's wonderful. You're like, "It's so great." Not long ago, I read that book, Eat Like a Fish, and I am totally with you on the ocean agriculture situation.

Tell me a little more about the process. The key thing that I heard you say and have heard you say a couple of times is plugging into existing plastic…

Julia Marsh:
Hahaha! Come, my people, come to the ocean. Play with me.

Molly Wood:
…production infrastructure. That seems huge.

Julia Marsh:
Indeed. Yeah. And it's not easy because seaweed doesn't melt. So really, my team, my team of engineers, some of whom come from the traditional plastic industry, have had to really work in partnership with what seaweed wants to do versus what we need it to do to scale. And the unlock, the major unlock is we figured out a way to make seaweed…

Molly Wood:
You…

Julia Marsh:
…not just melt, but actually flow through plastic systems so that it's not causing problems for plastic manufacturers. And they can actually help us scale and be a part of the solution rather than perpetuating the problem.

Molly Wood:
Right. Easy to adopt.

Julia Marsh:
Easy to adopt. Yeah. And I mean, a lot of solutions, unfortunately, don't scale, or they get stuck in a lab or in, you know, a research environment because they're not designed with legacy industry in mind.

I would love to highlight that this is such an opportunity to bring along legacy industries in the movement toward climate solutions. There's no reason that they should be exclusive or for the limited few. Like too often, they're designed for these niche places, and they're not acceptable or accessible to people who oftentimes are left out of the climate narrative.

Molly Wood:
You don't want a Sway plastic replacement to only ever envelop a cashmere sweater. It should also be able to hold protein powder.

Julia Marsh:
Indeed. Yes, indeed. Yeah, I want it in Costco. I want it, you know, in Walmart. I want it in Target. And to do that, you need to work with the suppliers of those giant organizations.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:
Time for a quick break. When we come back, a world tour of seaweed farms and the key component of Sway’s business model: making seaweed plastic the same way we make regular plastic.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:
Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. We’re talking with Julia Marsh of Sway about using seaweed to replace plastic…

Molly Wood:
Yeah. How did that part of the solution come about? Was it science first, infrastructure after? Was it always part of the ethos to make sure that it would be something that could plug into the way plastic is currently made?

Julia Marsh:
Systems first. So my background, I'm a designer, and my co-founder, Matt, is a sustainable development practitioner. Both of us have spent a lot of time working both with giant corporations and consumer brands, as well as smaller nonprofits, companies of various sizes. And I understand why and how change actually happens.

And it's because the system is designed well. It's not necessarily anything to do with the validity of the material or the soundness of the concept. It's got to be, "Does this actually work in the system that exists?" So from the beginning, we actually built our supply chain and the whole concept around adoption prior to innovating the material or scaling up a technology.

Molly Wood:
Yeah.

Molly Wood:
Amazing. And then tell me more about that process and building out that supply chain and like, where are you getting? Are you farming your own seaweed? Are you working with existing infrastructure? Tell me all of it. Give me the whole origin story.

Julia Marsh:
I would like to find my own seaweed. I grew up in the Monterey Bay area, which is famous for the Monterey Bay Aquarium and Big Sur and just a lot of gorgeous underwater appreciation happening. A lot of people learn how to scuba dive for the first time in Monterey Bay. So growing up in an area like that, you're familiar with the ocean, and you're familiar with seaweed, certainly.

Molly Wood:
I can tell.

Julia Marsh:
Seaweed was not a new concept for me, but building out a supply chain that could support an earth-changing solution and really an industrial application like plastics is a different story.

When Matt and I first came up with the concept for Sway, we were in Indonesia and got to visit seaweed farms and see how farms that are literally centuries old have been cultivating seaweed for eons. Like, what are the really tried and true methods and saw that it could be so simple and that much of the seaweed industry is actually upheld by just human hands. It's not tractors; it's not mechanized.

I mean, this is true not just of Indonesia, but a lot of Southeast Asian countries that rely on seaweed cultivation. It's people in the water tying seaweed with little strings to ropes and maintaining their crop in this beautiful, pristine coastline. And we thought, "Man, there should be more of this."

We visited other farms, not just in Southeast Asia, but in Central and South America. We met with aquaculture specialists who were cultivating seaweed on land. We had met people doing efforts in the Caribbean around Sargassum. We familiarized ourselves with all the different ways seaweed is cultivated.

Up in Maine, they do these long-line kelp. It's very different from the tropical waters. You have one harvest season. You have these boats that all belong to lobster fishermen. You have mass volumes of seaweed that's growing two feet every week.

Lots of different seaweed cultivation methods, lots of different species of seaweed, and a lot of humans involved, not machines.

So we wanted to invest in sourcing seaweed from responsible farmers and processors who are working with that. Yeah, really investing in the human component, the social component of seaweed cultivation.

For that reason, we work primarily with farms that are close to home in North and South America, as well as in Southeast Asia.

Molly Wood:
And an answer that includes a world tour is a winner.

Julia Marsh:
We have partners on every continent except Antarctica. So that's all I'd ask is that we've built out this vetting scorecard so that we can really understand what's going on underwater, what's going on on land, what's going on with the people, and then how do we tie our success and scale to the success of those partners.

Molly Wood:
Amazing.

Molly Wood:
And is that when you think about replacing even unavoidable plastic, which is a category within a category, it's still a very big category. Is it scalable with human hands? The way that you've described it, like it sounds pretty artisanal.

Julia Marsh:
Mm-hmm.

Julia Marsh:
It's not, it's not artisanal. I mean, there's 35.8 million metric tons of seaweed cultivated every year, supposedly. That's the best data that we have. The vast majority of that is happening from human hands. So it has been done for decades this way.

I think when you think about safety or the really rapid expansion of the industry or seaweed cultivation that might happen in deeper or more treacherous waters, then you start to think about mechanization. But if Korea can cultivate, I think we'll need to fact-check this, three million metric tons by hand every year, then we can probably continue in that direction.

Molly Wood:
Wow, yeah.

Molly Wood:
And then how does that compare to the million metric tons of plastic that we want to replace?

Julia Marsh:
I mean, the interesting thing about seaweed is that it is so diverse, and different types of seaweed can solve for different types of plastic. I'm again not interested in replacing all plastic with seaweed. I'm not even interested in replacing all necessary plastic with seaweed. There are so many cool solutions for necessary plastics.

But is there an immense amount of seaweed? Is it very diverse in terms of how it can replace different types of plastic? Yes.

And then is it really scalable? Definitely. The seaweed industry is growing rapidly. That number I cited doubles every 10 years. And there's a lot of investment going into the blue economy and into our oceans in tandem with climate action more broadly.

There are farms being set up where seaweed's being cultivated not to be consumed but just to be sunk to the bottom of the ocean to sequester carbon, which is a spicy topic in the seaweed industry and not fully vetted. I would argue that rather than sinking the seaweed to the bottom of the ocean, you could be giving it to companies like Sway to turn into replacements for plastic.

Molly Wood:
Really? It does feel a little wasteful. I'm not trying, don't at me. I don't know; I just learned about this. I know, don't at us, spicy. We stipulate the spice, and we're moving on.

So then what are the types of plastic that you want to and/or are able to replace?

Julia Marsh:
Maybe, yeah. Don't at me either. I'm just saying it's a spicy topic. Yeah. The science is coming. Look for the science.

We're currently focused on poly bags in the fashion industry to start just because it's a really simple first application. There are 180 billion poly bags used every year. And while I don't think that this is a forever solution, it's a great transitional technology where giant supply chains that require poly bags could instead be supporting the health of oceans and a plastic-free, compostable solution.

Where you're using millions and millions of bags per month, and the whole system's been oriented towards the use of that type of packaging, that's a great place for Sway to start. Where consumers do not want the plastic bag showing up in the mail, we can help.

We're also really interested in places where the packaging comes into contact with food. Looking at grocery bags as well as produce bags. I'm always frustrated when I'm putting my lemons or my Brussels sprouts in a plastic bag. Just feels wrong.

And then we also have a range of packaging aimed at addressing product windows, which are oftentimes not necessary, but they provide a view of what is inside that creates trust with the consumer. They are often used for hygiene to keep loose items inside. When you walk down the bakery aisle next time, just look at all the product windows around you, or walk down the pasta aisle and you'll notice all the product windows or the candy aisle.

Unfortunately, this is how we make purchasing decisions. We want to see that the product's intact. So it's a great sneaky plastic for Sway to replace with a bio-based, home-compostable, seaweed-derived solution.

Molly Wood:
Yeah, right. For some reason, the product that I'm picturing right now is powdered donuts. Even though everything in that powdered donut is already pretty artificial, I'd still rather have a bio-based material touching it.

Okay, so then talk to me a little more about the process and the parts that you said earlier, like it sounds really easy.

Julia Marsh:
Yeah, sure.

Molly Wood:
And then here are the hard parts. So you tackled the system first or wanted to approach something that would be easily adoptable and then talk to me about embarking on the science.

Julia Marsh:
Mm-hmm. The first thing that we did when we started the company was we, while we were still bootstrapped, hired our first employee out of the plastics industry. So our senior materials engineer today is someone who really understands what running thousands of metric tons of plastic looks like. We always say he came from the dark side over to the light and now is a full-on seaweed guru.

Molly Wood:
Mm-hmm. Skills transfer. It's, you know, we have to have it, skills transfer.

Julia Marsh:
Indeed. And please, like anyone who's considering coming from the dark side to the light, please come. We're nice. And we need your skill sets.

But that was the starting place, was literally running hundreds of trials of different compositions of seaweed in combination with different additives and running them through what the traditional plastic industry uses, which is basically a pellet-making machine. It's called a twin-screw extruder, which spits out the seaweed composition as spaghetti and then chops it into tiny little pellets, and then running those pellets with partner manufacturers.

So literally, again, going through hundreds of trials, hundreds of formulations, failing aggressively early on, making things that looked black and gooey or brown and gooey, things that came out really rigid and not flexible at all, things that smelled bad, all in this effort to where we're at now where we have this perfect, beautiful, golden seaweed pellet that doesn't smell like anything, that can again melt and flow in existing plastic equipment.

Molly Wood:
Mm-hmm. Seems key. Mm-hmm.

Molly Wood:
Incredible. Where, if at all, is it currently in use? What stage are you at in terms of deployment and commercialization?

Julia Marsh:
Different products at different stages. Our product windows, which are produced in a slightly different method that I will not get into because it's perhaps not interesting, but we have our product windows. Those are on the market. Anyone can buy them from our partners at ecoenclose.com. We have stock retail window boxes that are made with seaweed.

And then we do custom windows as well. So if you're… You want a beautiful blue box with a squiggly-shaped window and you want it to be made of seaweed, you can make that happen easily. We're working with a lot of different swimwear brands and those types of activations.

For our flexible film that's produced using the pellet, we're working behind the scenes with a lot of amazing home goods and fashion brands, including J.Crew and Burton, Herman Miller, all of whom are associated with the Tom Ford Plastic Innovation Prize that was organized by Lonely Whale, which Sway won last year.

Molly Wood:
And what is the background of you and your co-founder that led you to this? I mean, it sounds like your upbringing was a big part of it, but how did you come about this? And what are your signs? Where did you even start in terms of thinking, "Oh yeah, we could totally, we could seaweed this"?

Julia Marsh:
Ha!

Julia Marsh:
We could seaweed this. That's a great slogan. Yeah. Like how hard can it be? I come from the design world and spent about a decade building brand and packaging systems for consumer brands, design studios, and tech companies. So I was really involved in material selection, definitely non-technical. I understand the design choices. I understand the structure of packaging, but not the formulation at all.

Molly Wood:
Throw some seaweed on it. Got it. So you were in there seeing it.

Julia Marsh:
But as a person who was often rejected for pitching alternative materials because they fell short for XYZ reasons, I really empathize with brands who have not yet made the switch. Like, I know, I know why. And that really informed the thesis for Sway, which literally was my graduate thesis.

After spending time in the industry, I went to get my master's to really try to create work of consequence. So not to just make beautiful packages but to make impactful materials. And didn't expect to start a company, but here we are.

My thesis, called Sway, was based on this idea that we should introduce benevolence into materials, that we should create more value, not less harm, but like more value for brands as they're making these really hard design decisions. So that it would be an easier yes for people like me when they're pitching the alternatives.

Molly Wood:
Yeah. And is it sway like the sea? I assume everybody immediately pictures the seaweed in the ocean swaying back and forth when they hear the name. Is that where it came from?

Julia Marsh:
Yeah. Indeed, yeah. That is what Sway, yeah, it's what seaweed does in the ocean, it sways. But the technical answer is that mechanical systems are rigid and unchanging, but Sway moves in response to the rhythm of natural cycles.

Molly Wood:
I love it. Gorgeous poetry. Let's move abruptly and painfully from poetry to economics.

Because adoptability is one thing, and then affordability is, in many cases, where the rubber meets the road, so to speak, to use a somewhat unfortunate metaphor.

Julia Marsh:
Great.

Molly Wood:
Do you have cost parity? Is that the goal? Is it something that companies will pay more for? Are there subsidies? How do the economics work out?

Julia Marsh:
At least initially, our target is just to be competitive with the next best thing. And the next best thing right now is paper. There are a lot of really compelling bio-based or compostable alternatives on the market, which are imperfect in one way or another but certainly being chosen by brands. So if we can compete with paper and if we can compete with corn or sugar cane or starch-based alternatives, we're in a good spot.

And we're on track to do that in the near term. Obviously, in the long term, you do want to beat plastic. We can compete in the near term with recycled plastic. Competing with virgin plastic is a different story. This material has been optimized for over a hundred years. It is globally available.

There's 118 million metric tons of LDPE, which is the flexible type of plastic, produced every single year. 118 million metric tons. I'm operating in, like, you know, we'll be, if we're successful this year, we'll be in the hundreds of metric tons range. And that is a lot of material. So it's an unfair comparison. We just need time.

And then brands are not going to continue using plastic. No one's sitting at a very long conference table looking at their colleagues thinking, "How can we get more plastic into our company?"

Molly Wood:
All right. I'm going to die on that hill. Yeah, like, of course not, right?

Julia Marsh:
We need more. Yeah. And regulators are not saying, "I really hope that all these brands are using more plastic going forward." So I would say there are a lot of tailwinds supporting the use of alternatives to plastic. And we will see, based on what's happening in Europe, we will start to see more legislation in support of compostable materials, alternatives to plastic, in the States.

Molly Wood:
And then just for people who aren't aware, what are some of those bio-based materials? I think probably a lot of people have seen the potato-based utensils, that kind of thing.

Julia Marsh:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Okay, so within the rigid world, you're most likely seeing PLA, which is derived most often from corn. There are potato-derived or starch, cassava-derived plastics called TPS, thermoplastic starch, that are blended into a lot of those kinds of applications.

There are even wood-based bioplastics, cellophane, cellulose. Cellophane, like the OG cellophane, was actually the first plastic invented right around the same time as fossil-based plastic. It was one of those critical moments in the history of time where one material won, and you wonder what would have happened if the other had instead. Cellophane's been around for a long time and it's still around today.

So yeah, those are the materials that are really on the market. PLA being the most prominent, the most scaled, and certainly the most affordable alternative on the market that's derived from bio.

A lot of the bio-based bags, the green compostable bags that you see, are probably made with a mixture of PLA and PBAT, which is a compostable polymer that is non-renewable.

There are a lot of non-renewable bioplastics where they're still derived from fossil fuels, but they're technically compostable, which is interesting. So yeah, and I think, you know, something that'll be really helpful that is emerging is just better labeling around what these materials are, where they came from, where they're supposed to go, and what they're actually made from will be really helpful.

Molly Wood:
Yeah, I am sitting here trying not to ask you for like consumer tips on, you know, "Is that poop bag that I'm using for my dog? What does compostable even mean in that scenario?" You know, "I'm not going to put it in the green bin."

Like I think there is, to your point, a ton of opportunity to mislead.

Julia Marsh:
Hahaha! Hmm.

Julia Marsh:
Totally, and it's not fair to put that on the consumer. It should be easy for you to tell the truth and decipher what a material is.

So very quickly, if you're unsure about a material, look for the BPI certification for compostability (that's industrial). Look for the TUV Austria Home Compost certification or industrial certification. Look for the USDA Bio Preferred bio-based certification, which will show you the percent of bio-based content in a product.

And then look for really clear messaging. If it says, "This is home compostable," you can put it in your backyard, you can put it in your home compost bin. If it says "industrial," it can only go to a commercial facility. And then if it just says "biodegradable," that doesn't mean anything.

Molly Wood:
Incredible. Incredible. Thank you. Perfect. That is the perfect place to stop before I ask you to do that like 50 more times on everything.

Julia Marsh:
Hahaha!

Molly Wood:
Julia, where can people find out more about Sway?

Julia Marsh:
Or at Sway the Future on literally any social platform, although we do love social media on Instagram.

Molly Wood:
Incredible.

Molly Wood:
Yes, I am a follower. Incredible. This is wonderful. Thank you so much. And also, I want to go on a Seaweed World Tour someday. I think that maybe you want to build some ecotours into your business somehow. Like, I don't know how, but I, you know, I'm sold.

Julia Marsh:
There we go, let's make it happen.

Julia Marsh:
Visit a seaweed farm near you. That'll be our next venture. Yep.

Molly Wood:
Exactly. And put some seaweed on it, t-shirts.

Julia Marsh:
Julia, thanks so much for the time today.

Julia Marsh:
Thanks for having me, Molly.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:
That's it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool, the show where every day is a good day as long as you get a t-shirt out of it.

Thank you so much for listening. Email me your thoughts and suggestions at in@everybodyinthepool.com, and find all the latest episodes and more at everybodyinthepool.com, the website.

And if you want to become a subscriber and get an ad-free version of the show, hit the link in the description in your podcast app of choice. Thank you to those of you who already have. See you next week.