In a Perth facility, ocean scientist Dr Julia Reisser and cofounder Michael Kingsbury are brewing something the world has been asking for: a material with all of plastic's talents and none of its afterlife. Their company ULUU ferments red seaweed, using microbes that feed on the seaweed's sugars and grow tiny pearls of a natural polymer inside themselves. The pearls can be moulded like conventional plastic, yet they compost at home and break down harmlessly in the sea, leaving no microplastics at all. The first ULUU made products are already out in the world: since January, surf brand Quiksilver has shipped boardshorts with wax combs made of the seaweed material.
In April the Australian Government backed the idea with 2.1 million dollars from its Industry Growth Program, which ULUU is using to lift production tenfold this year. There is a lovely circularity to who is doing this: Julia spent her research career studying ocean plastic at sea, and now spends it growing the replacement from the ocean's own garden. Seaweed farming needs no fresh water, no farmland and no fertiliser, and the farms themselves give fish somewhere to shelter. The scale is still small, one tonne a year against a world of plastic, but every big material in history started as someone's strange little pilot batch, and this one begins in fields that flower underwater.
Our short take: funding reported by SmartCompany and ULUU, April 2026; company and product detail from Startup Daily. Names: Dr Julia Reisser and Michael Kingsbury, cofounders and joint chief executives.