Madeline Warner (MW): This is Madeline Warner calling from the Bard Graduate Center here in New York, and I'm speaking on the phone with the brilliant Julia Marsh, now based in San Francisco, California. I have had the pleasure of knowing Julia since her time at the School of Visual Arts, where she was studying for her MFA in Design, and was in the process of founding Sway. Hi, Julia!

Julia Marsh (JM): Hello!

MW: I'd love to start us off by asking how you identify yourself professionally?

JM: I identify as a designer, first and foremost. Designer and Creative Director. Then I would identify myself as an environmentalist because much of my work is inspired by the health of the planet. And I'd also identify as an entrepreneur.

MW: Wonderful. So many great words in there.

JM: Thank you, Madeline Warner.

MW: And where did you grow up?

JM: I grew up in Carmel, California. Well, really, the Monterey Bay area. Right where the ocean meets the forest. A very, very idyllic place.

MW: Did you grow up spending a lot of time outdoors?

JM: Definitely. I mean, there's not much to do in Carmel other than go to the beach or run around in the forest and climb trees. That's pretty much how I was raised. And we grew up right next to Big Sur. My sister and I were constantly in tidepools inspecting hermit crabs, sea slugs, and shells, playing jump rope with long strands of kelp, building sand sculptures, and trying to avoid mountain lions when we went hiking. [laughs.] I’ve never seen a mountain lion, that's a total joke. But both of our parents really taught us to spend time in nature and to respect the power of nature. This was something that I returned to in grad school. When my sister and I would play on the beach, my parents would always warn us to never turn our back on the ocean.

MW: That's very good advice.

JM: It's a great way to not drown. [laughs.] But I really like that phrase, "never turn your back on the ocean." It became the basis for my graduate thesis. How can I face the place where I was raised? How can I honor the powerful force of the ocean?

MW: That's really beautiful. And, getting into your education, where did you do your bachelor's, Julia?

JM: I studied in another coastal town in California, at UC Santa Barbara. There I studied English Literature and earned a double minor in German and Professional Writing.

MW: And what drew you to the field of design? That’s a big jump going from a BA in literature to design school.

JM: I was raised in a family of artists. My uncle is a rather successful ceramicist, my grandmother was a Broadway dancer, painter and sculptor, my father is a videographer and musician. So I was surrounded by a lot of art of growing up, but I never necessarily thought that my personal creative pursuits had a practical application. When I got to UC Santa Barbara and went to work for the university newspaper, they didn't have any writing positions open. They only had a design position open. I spoke with the creative director and she was lovely, took me under her wing, and within three months, she left the paper and I became the design director. My passion for design kind of snowballed from there. Design is this perfect blend of art meeting function, I was creating work that felt both beautiful and important.

MW: Beautiful and important! [both laugh.] So succinct. Could you talk to me a bit about your interest in sustainability and when you sort of became aware of sustainability as an issue?

JM: My interest in sustainability is definitely influenced by my love of the forest and the sea. Being raised next to the ocean, on the beach nearly every day, definitely influences your perspective. I'm also an active hiker and have been fortunate to go on some really gorgeous treks all over the world. People who care about nature use the mantra, "Leave it better than you found it." It’s important to me as well. But in everywhere I've visited, I’ve found candy wrappers, granola bar wrappers, plastic bags, littering these beautiful places. So I've been regularly confronted by the ubiquity of waste in our environment. I'm also very aware of my own role in that, because I enjoy a Snickers from time to time, and regularly snack on Clif bars for energy, and like pretzels which come in plastic bags whether I want the plastic or not. So a few years ago, I asked myself what I can do, as a designer, to help address this incredibly vast problem? It’s a problem so large that it literally plagues the entire planet. And designers, you know, we don’t typically engineer new materials. We don't necessarily operate as activists either. But we can evaluate emerging complexity, find patterns, and design compelling new systems that solve these problems. That's not a very elegant way of phrasing it.

MW: No, that was great.

JM: Especially having worked in packaging design, constantly using the same materials, I learned firsthand that these flexible single-use plastics are particularly hard to replace. That's kind of where my passion point emerged.

MW: Yeah.

JM: Although, I should put an asterisk on all of this. My interest is a sustainability isn't limited to packaging. I'm interested in efficient water use and clean energy and all the aspects of sustainability, not just plastic waste.

MW: No, I mean, that's a great access point for all those things. Would you say that all of those issues are deeply connected? That is the definition of a leading question, but [laughs.]

JM: No, they are! They are super interrelated. I think that when people realize the scale of these problems, it can be staggering and can lead to indifference. So my strategy, and I think this is the strategy many environmentalists use, is to focus on one corner, a little piece, of this very complex puzzle. My corner happens to be plastics, but plastics key into all the larger problems.

MW: Yeah, totally. So tell me, I think this is a great segue, tell me a bit about Sway.

JM: So Sway emerged out of my graduate thesis. The focal point, as I've already alluded to, is to see if we could come up with a material that could replace a single-use flexible plastic that is benevolent and giving, rather than destructive and reliant on fossil fuels. Since graduating, Sway has evolved into an actual company with efforts to make this a reality. We use seaweed as our source material and actually have a prototype that shows good promise. It does a lot of things that plastic needs to do already. It's a smooth material, it's transparent, it's heat-sealable. So the things that we're focusing on engineering now are all the barrier properties that a plastic needs to have, and that's where the real challenges arise.

MW: I'm going off of my script here but, the current product that you're working with, how long will that last before it decomposes? That must be something you think about a lot.

JM: Yeah. So the issue with most bioplastics that exist on the market is that they are not truly naturally degradable. Saying that something is biodegradable does not mean that it's good. Many bioplastics are biodegradable, but most of them need to be incinerated in industrial composting facilities to actually degrade. Otherwise they can last just as long as normal plastic.

MW: Wow.

JM: So our metric for success is that this material needs to degrade naturally with microbes found in waste environments within eighty days. That's how we qualify success.

MW: That's incredible. Also something I did not know. You're educating the masses! [laughs.]

JM: There’s a lot of misinformation out there! So if you do use a “compostable” utensil or a “compostable” packet or whatever it is, make sure it ends up in a compost bin. Otherwise, it's most likely not going to degrade in the waste bin.

MW: That's so important to know.

JM: Yeah!

MW: So, here at Bard, we're very materially-focused, and really spend a lot of time thinking about materiality and making. With that being said, I was wondering if you could just walk us through how your product is made. What's the process?

JM: I want to be very clear that we are still very, very much in the early stages of creating our product and things will likely change, but I can describe the ideal scenario.

MW: I'd love that.

JM: So something cool about seaweed and the reason we've chosen it as our source material is that it is a regenerative crop. It restores ecosystems, some call coastal seaweeds “ecosystem engineers.” It grows incredibly fast. It encourages biodiversity. It consumes insane amounts of carbon. It reduces ocean acidity, which is a good thing. It means that shellfish can grow their shells, which is kind of important. Seaweeds are a really, really cool species. And for that reason, the process of making the material relies heavily on sustainable aquaculture. Sway is in the process, currently, of building relationships with a whole array of seaweed farmers. And when that seaweed is harvested, you're not totally depleting this beautiful environment you've created, you're just giving the crop a haircut, basically.

MW: Yeah, wow.

JM: And when that seaweed is harvested, it goes to a bio-refinery, and in an ideal scenario, and we have not finalized this process, but in an ideal scenario, the bio refinery reduces that seaweed to its base parts. It goes to a biomaterial center where additives are integrated. And then it goes to a packaging converter which turns it into sheets of bioplastic, and it's heat-sealed to create packaging and that goes to the distributor, or likely to whatever brand is using it, to package their products and then distribute it. And then in an ideal case, at the end of its life the material re-enters the waste system as a nutrient rather than a plague on humanity and the planet as a whole. [laughs.]

MW: What an incredible description, thank you for that. I mean, it also involves so many people from so many different fields. What's it like to work with a bio engineer, for example?

JM: Sure, it’s definitely been a learning curve. I mean I'm a designer—early on I struggled a bit to get through certain meetings, but what I've found is that scientists tend to be very passionate about their work, always eager to share insight into, for example, what a polysaccharide is. And working with people from all sorts of different fields over the past few years means that I have become very good at admitting when I do not know something! [laughs.]

MW: That's a skill! [laughs.]

JM: It is, honestly. Being able to say, “I don't know, but I would love to hear your thoughts on that, please.” [laughs.]

MW: Totally. Obviously, when you're working with people across fields, people are coming in with different knowledge bases. Has that posed any particular challenges beyond, you know, basic communication hurdles?

JM: I would say definitely there's a skepticism that comes from scientists who have been in the field for a long time about the process to create new materials. Most innovations take about, and I've heard this repeatedly, ten years to go from concept to mass scale. Which actually isn’t horrible when you think about it. For a company like any of these giant CPGs [consumer packaged goods brands] to integrate a new material into their system probably takes ten years. So when a newcomer, a designer comes in and says, hey, I can make this material out of seaweed, there's a lot of push back. Which I think is healthy. Because the designer's job then is to say, “Alright, how can I participate in the process of innovation? How can my ability to communicate effectively accelerate our pace? How might I bring more people together to make this thing happen faster?”

MW: That hypothetical ten-year timeframe, does that worry you?

JM: Not really, because there are lots of peripheral goals that go along with our efforts. Replacing wrappers and baggies and pouches at a mass scale is the long-term goal for Sway, because those single-use packages make up some 40 percent of the waste in our oceans currently. But our overarching mission is to create infrastructure for all life, to encourage the use of materials that benefit all life, not just a humanity’s immediate needs. So along the way, Sway asks, “Can we create large-scale regenerative systems that benefit the planet, benefit people, benefit animals, at all stages of the supply chain?” That means increasing access to information about materials, collaborating with adjacent groups, and operating as spokespeople for regenerative design, because even climate activists don't know what regenerative design is. So we’re also increasing access to stories about how the ocean is really an immense frontier that's largely unexplored, and pushing projects that work in tandem with our efforts. We’re already partnering with brands that contribute to ocean conservation, other packaging design studios, and other biomaterial innovators, because we recognize that there's no one solution to the plastic problem or our dependency on fossil fuels. It also means partnering with other seaweed organizations that are working on different aspects of problem. There’s an incredible company in Baja farming seaweed to make “sustainable sustenance” in the form of pasta. There's a company based out of Hawaii that's using seaweed for cattle feed to reduce their methane emissions.

MW: How cool.

JM: Because new research shows that inserting even two percent seaweed into a cow's diet reduces their methane output by ninety-nine percent.

MW: Oh my gosh, wow.

JM: So, while our core focus is creating this new material to replace plastics, there are all these other activities we're focusing on as well. And hopefully none of those activities inhibit our material progress.

MW: Seaweed just seems like a magic material.

JM: It really is.

MW: Speaking of, I know you’ve spent a lot of time at seaweed farms. Could you speak a little bit about what a seaweed farm is like?

JM: Very wet.

MW: Are they mainly in oceans? Are they cultivated in, like, pools? I clearly know nothing about this. [laughs.]

JM: So it's interesting, seaweed is, yes, largely grown in the ocean and that's where you get all those awesome environmental benefits. But there are also seaweed farms that are based on land. And there are also benefits for that approach. You get a more controlled crop, and you can get a faster turnaround time. You can grow all year around. And you can filter water back into the ocean with a lower pH, which helps combat ocean acidification. Ocean farming is quite different. It's really interesting to visit a seaweed farm. If you're visiting a kelp farm, oftentimes there's not that much to see because it's all [pauses] underwater. [laughs.] But I can describe to you what we saw at seaweed farms in Indonesia for instance, where the seaweed is grown in more shallow water. It's usually warm water, it's about a meter deep. The seaweed grows from a spore, and when the seaweed grows to be of age, it can be broken into multiple pieces, and that's how you propagate seaweed rapidly. As I mentioned, it's a regenerative crop, so you just split the seaweed and it multiplies, multiplies, multiplies, multiplies. It’s super abundant and it's super cheap as a result.

MW: That's so cool.

JM: I’ll also say that all the seaweed farmers that I've met are super happy people. They get to hang out on the ocean and harvest this awesome, benevolent crop all year. I recommend bringing a seaweed farmer into your life. [laughs.]

MW: Oh I hope to. I also had a question about this, as of right now, you know, while Sway is still in its infancy, what kind of products are seaweed farms producing?

JM: So there's an enormous seaweed culture in Southeast Asia. As you can imagine it's primarily used as a food source.

MW: Got it.

JM: It's a huge part of Asian cuisine, but it's also used in a lot of pharmaceuticals. It's used in beauty products, as well. And seaweed is in a lot of the foods we eat every day. The reason that ice cream is thick and creamy is often because of the carrageenan found in some seaweeds.

MW: Oh, how about that? [laughs.]

JM: And then there's this whole wave happening on the east coast of the States right now where people are finding new and innovative ways of eating kelp. As I already mentioned, there's seaweed pasta from Blue Evolution, there's another company called Akua that makes kelp jerky, they're really cool. There's a company here in San Francisco called Salt Point Seaweed that makes crunchy seaweed snacks, they sustainably harvest all their seaweed by hand from the California coast.

MW: That's great.

JM: And then there's also a bunch of algae and micro-algae companies, which are sisters to seaweed, and you know, that’s a whole other story, but there's a lot that's going on.

MW: So the infrastructure is there?

JM: It’s growing, definitely. There's less infrastructure in the Western Hemisphere for seaweed farming, but it's actually a big part of the reason that my partner Matt and I are going on this epic Latin American road trip is to evaluate our supply chain up and down the Pacific Coast. There’s a large number of seaweed farms we’ll be visiting in Mexico, Peru, Chile, and Argentina.

MW: That's amazing. And have you had a lot of interest from seaweed farmers who want to be involved in the project?

JM: Definitely. Only positive responses. I mean, seaweed farmers know, more than anyone, the good that their crop does for the environment. They’re the most eager to partner with us. And another thing I should mention about seaweed farming is that it can also offer both environmental and economic benefits to regions that are polluted and in need of more job opportunities.

MW: Yeah, for sure.

JM: Down the road, Sway plans on supporting seaweed farming in regions that would benefit from the cultivation of the crop.

MW: That's incredible. And are you mainly looking at Latin America then?

JM: Yes. In an ideal world, we're able to source our material from North America. We'd like to reduce our carbon emissions as much as possible. I mean, the whole concept of our packaging is that it can be either carbon negative or carbon free. That means developing a supply chain that doesn't rely too heavily on importation.

MW: Absolutely. With that in mind, do you have a general idea about Sway and mass production yet? Or is that still also sort of in the works at this point?

JM: There's a lot of possibilities. I think the most likely scenario is that we partner with a larger brand that's focused on improving the overall sustainability of their products, which may already be cruelty-free, organic, and non-GMO. They’d want to go the extra step and see their packaging match the story and life cycle of the product within. So that’s an attractive scenario; we develop this material and then partner with a larger brand that can support our expansion efforts.

MW: That's incredible. I'm sure that will happen in far less than ten years.

JM: [laughs.] We hope!


MW: So I really just have one more question prepared for you. Until Sway steps into the world officially, what can consumers do to reduce their footprint and support the project?

JM: I think the average person is pretty aware that they should choose reusable materials; reusable water bottles, reusable straws and all that. Certainly reduce your plastic consumption, refuse plastics whenever possible. Those are very simple actions that carry a lot of weight. I would also encourage people to be aware and interested in alternative materials. There are tons of alternative materials that have been around for decades that haven't reached commercial scale yet, like mushroom packaging, which is a weird-sounding thing, but actually is a really, really practical replacement for styrofoam. Companies like IKEA are starting to use mushroom packaging to replace their styrofoam. I would encourage people to support companies that are making these bigger steps to scale sustainable materials. Seek them out, because there's a ton of them!

MW: That's phenomenal. Thank you for teaching me so much about seaweed. [laughs.]

JM: Any time. Any time. I am happy to talk about seaweed and sustainable design anytime. [laughs.]

MW: And I honestly did not know that compostable-marked things are only compostable when you put them in the compost, which is so dumb because I take out the compost every other day. I should know how this works!

JM: More discussion on that issue is rising, which is awesome. One of the biggest challenges right now is that the materials that will actually solve the plastics problem are not on the market yet. The current system still requires the consumer to do a lot of work in making sure that the materials they use go in the right waste receptacles. It’s another reason that we want to accelerate the timeline, because these increasingly ubiquitous and ambiguously titled “plant-based” bioplastics might degrade if you put them in the trash, but most likely not.

MW: Yeah, no, that's so interesting. And I actually did have another question, and I'm not sure exactly how complicated this question is, but when you're in talks trying to produce a material that's so ocean-based, are micro plastics a concern? Is that something that you have to think about or is that not necessarily in the equation because seaweed is so flexible and adaptable?

JM: Microplastics are always an issue. That’s a whole other component of the challenges facing bioplastics right now. Most are not, "marine-safe" or "marine degradable." If corn bioplastic ends up in the ocean, it's going to do just about as much harm as a normal plastic would. For Sway to succeed, we have to create a material that is nutritious, rather than life-threatening, if it were to end up in the ocean.

MW: Right.

JM: Which ideally it doesn't. There are some companies that have supposedly achieved this, but it's even a faux pas to say that something is "marine-safe" because we don't know the long-term effects.

MW: Is there any legislation in the works that might ensure the use of marine-safe plastics or plastic replacements? JJM: It’s starting to happen. It definitely various state by state. Even in a coastal state where the water crisis is more on the radar, like California, the process for creating anti-plastic legislation is slow. And it's because the alternatives to plastic currently on the market are just not good enough yet.

MW: Yeah.

JM: But there's good news, which is that a lot of these larger companies have already made public commitments, like “By 2025, all of our products will be packaged in reusable, recyclable or compostable materials,” which is awesome, a great goal. But compostable, truly home-compostable, materials are definitely at the bottom of the totem pole in terms of how advanced the technology is.

MW: In cases where legislation takes this long, I guess we're dependent on companies taking stances like that.

JM: That's what I believe. Yes, the average person can do their part, but ultimately innovators have to get inside of these giant corporate machines, understand how they work on a complex level, and then solve the specific problems within that machine. For Sway to succeed, we can't create a material that requires all of these giant manufacturing facilities to change their equipment. We’re not trying to overhaul the entire system, we're just trying to fix the parts that need fixing.

MW: Totally.

JM: That has to be the approach. But you can be reassured by the fact that there are a lot of biomaterial companies who are working on tackling this. It just takes time!

MW: You're such an optimist and so hopeful and, yeah. You're the future!

JM: Oh, thanks, Madeline R. Warner!

MW: Thank you so much for talking to me, I so appreciate it. You are a valued part of this project, and I'm so happy we got to chat.

JM: Thank you. I'm very, very happy to spread the good word. We’ll be on the road to Argentina very soon. If you want to follow along, we're going to be visiting all sorts of seaweed farms and innovators along the way, and sharing our attempt at living with a low-waste and low-carbon footprint on the road. So if that's interesting to you, we'll be sharing everything on the Sway Instagram account @hellosway, YouTube channel, and blog.

MW: We'll be following you, Julia J. Marsh.

[End of interview] 

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