New Matters

When we first came across Shellworks, what struck us wasn't the science, impressive as it is, but the disposition. Here was a team that had looked at one of the most entrenched problems of our time and refused to accept that solving it meant settling for less. That felt immediately familiar. At Here, we have spent twenty years making the case that beauty and purpose are not in competition. Shellworks, it turns out, has been making the same argument. First in a lab, and now at scale. We sat down with Amir Afshar, one half of the founding duo, to find out what it really means to collaborate with nature rather than just borrow from it.

Amir Afshar will tell you that the paper straw is not the point. Neither is the leaky coffee lid, nor the packaging that looks like it's apologising for existing. These things bother him, not because they're unpleasant, but because they represent a failure of imagination.

"In nature you can have a tree that withstands a whole host of different environmental conditions, completely uncompromising. But that same tree, when it falls, returns completely back to the earth."

High performance when it's needed. Gone when it's done. That, he says, is what true circularity actually looks like. Anything less is a concession we shouldn't be making.

Amir is a designer with a science background who has spent eighteen years working with natural materials. A path that led him, largely self-taught, into the world of biology as a medium for making things. Not biology as a subject to study at arm's length, but biology as something you could genuinely build with: a living toolkit. He co-founded Shellworks in London alongside Insiya Jafferjee, an engineer whose career took her through manufacturing at scale at Apple, Ford, and Bose before she turned her attention to biomaterials. When they met, the ambition was immediate and shared: to bring together design thinking and deep engineering capability to drive real change. Not incremental improvements, but a fundamentally different kind of material.

The result is Vivomer. Grown by microorganisms, it behaves like plastic in use and is broken down completely by bacteria in the soil once it's done. No microplastics. No toxins. Nothing left behind.

The distinction Shellworks draws is between extracting from nature and working with it. Most sustainable alternatives, Amir explains, still follow the logic of the materials they're trying to replace: take something from the earth, process it heavily, shape it into something useful. Vivomer is different in kind. Microorganisms build the polymers themselves, inside their own cells. "Because Vivomer is built by nature, it's also recognised by nature. Bacteria in the soil have the right enzymes to digest and break it down. It leaves nothing behind."

Insiya's background is what makes the leap from laboratory to product line credible. Years spent inside the manufacturing systems of some of the world's most rigorous companies gave her an intimate understanding of what it takes to produce things at scale: not just technically, but operationally. She brought that discipline into Shellworks from the beginning: the knowledge that a brilliant material means nothing if you can't make it reliably, repeatedly, and at a cost the market can absorb.

Amir sees this convergence, biology and engineering, nature and industry, as part of a broader shift. "Biology is the best chemist, the best manufacturer, the best fabricator of things, repeatedly. If we can start to harness that, what we can create is genuinely exciting." Biology, he argues, is moving from a discipline we observe to one we build with. His own trajectory mirrors that shift. A designer who taught himself to work with living systems because the problems he cared about demanded it.

Optimism, in a space as burdened by failed promises as sustainable materials, requires a certain grounding. Amir's is practical. For a hundred and twenty years, we built an extraordinary infrastructure to convert crude oil into the materials that now fill every corner of daily life. What Vivomer offers, he suggests, is something that fits directly into that infrastructure. Without requiring us to rebuild from scratch. "It feels almost like nature saying: here's a material I've had for billions of years. Thanks for catching up."

The scepticism is understandable, he says, and he doesn't dismiss it. "People have been let down by a lot of empty claims. But I think that scepticism is actually useful. It raises the bar. The businesses that can meet it will be the ones that matter." And when the abstract needs to become real, there is a simpler argument: "When you can hand someone a piece of Vivomer that's been sitting in a compost bin and show them what's happened to it, the conversation changes."

What sets the Shellworks approach apart is the insistence that the science is only half the job. This is where Amir's eighteen years with natural materials, and his training as a designer, become central. A material that performs brilliantly in a lab but feels wrong in someone's hand, or looks out of place on a shelf, will not travel. The experience of the end user matters as much as the chemistry. Design, in Amir's view, is not decoration applied after the fact. It is the discipline that asks whether anyone will actually want the thing you've made — and keeps asking that question all the way through, from formulation to shelf.

"Being able to show someone something that functions exactly like plastic but then disappears, and hearing them say, 'why isn't everything made of this?', that really drives our optimism."

There is also the question of communication. Sustainable materials have long suffered from muddled messaging: too technical for consumers, too vague for procurement teams, too earnest for anyone in between. Amir is clear that desirability and clarity are not nice-to-haves; they are strategic necessities. If the material doesn't communicate what it is and why it matters, quickly, intuitively, without a pamphlet, it won't displace the incumbent. Design thinking, applied from the start, is what closes that gap.

The plastic problem, Amir is clear, is no longer only environmental. Microplastics are in the food chain, in the body, in places we are only beginning to understand. The stakes have shifted. "We have a real, viable solution that's been built by nature. If we can scale it, I can truly see a route to not being dependent on persistent petrochemical-derived plastics." That, in the best sense, feels worth building towards.

Shellworks is based in London. Find out more at shellworks.com