Walk the buffet line at any environmental conference these days and you’ll notice something. The printed programs are gone, replaced by QR codes. The goodie bags have disappeared, and at the food stations, the plastic forks and knives have given way to wooden ones, bamboo plates stacked in place of plastic. It’s the same story among the more eco-conscious hosts you know: paper straws in the drinks, wooden cutlery fanned out beside the napkins.
We all know how this goes though. The wooden knife bends before it cuts. The fork leaves a faint taste of timber. The bamboo plate, if you’re unlucky, catches your thumb on a rough edge. We accept this as the price of doing the right thing. It’s a small sacrifice for a cleaner planet.
What makes the problem harder is that the plastic we can see is only part of it. Paper cups are lined on the inside with a thin polyethylene film, the layer that keeps hot liquid from seeping through. Cardboard food containers that look recyclable often carry a similar lining that disqualifies them from most recycling streams. The plastic embedded in materials that present as something else is, in many cases, harder to address than the fork on the table.
Except, according to Dillon Baxter, Founder and CEO of PlantSwitch, it may not actually be doing the right thing. Many of those alternatives aren’t genuinely more sustainable. Some aren’t biodegradable in any practical sense. The infrastructure required to compost the ones that technically qualify, (i.e. industrial composting facilities) is so sparse that most of it ends up in the same landfill as everything else. “We live in an imperfect world,” Baxter says. “What kind of products are we creating that help solve the imperfect world that we live in?”
That question sits at the center of what PlantSwitch is building. The company’s CompostZero material is designed to close the gap that Baxter spent years watching the industry fail to close: something that performs like plastic, is as cost-efficient as plastic, and actually breaks down when it enters the environment, without leaving microplastics behind.
The stakes for getting this right are rising. Of all the plastic ever produced, only about 9% has been recycled, while around 79% has accumulated in landfills, dumps, or the natural environment. Single-use items are the hardest part of that equation, moving through too many hands too quickly to be reliably collected.
Meanwhile, the health picture is getting harder to look away from. A 2025 review published in the journal Microplastics found that common plastic polymers can cause inflammation in the respiratory and gastrointestinal systems, compromise immune function, and raise the risk of cardiovascular disease and neurotoxicity. Causation for specific diseases is still being established, but the presence of microplastic particles in blood, lung tissue, and placental tissue is now documented across multiple peer-reviewed studies.
Baxter watched this evidence accumulate before deciding the materials problem was the one worth solving. “It went from, oh, a plastic straw is bad, to, oh wow, plastic is really harming us,” he says. “We need to figure out a way to get plastic out of our food supply for the future generations quickly, because this is going to have some really negative outcomes.”
Waste Not, Want Not
CompostZero starts with upcycled rice husks, sourced from rice producers who generate them as a large-volume byproduct with few good disposal options. At PlantSwitch’s vertically integrated facility, bacteria fed on that material produce a polymer naturally, a process that occurs in nature that the company has scaled commercially. The resin is compatible with existing plastic manufacturing machinery, which means customers don’t need to retool to adopt it.
The biodegradable resin handles like conventional plastic. Baxter says it’s actually stronger and breaks down when exposed to microorganisms in soil, water, or a home compost bin. “Our CompostZero™ resin made from plants comes from the ground, and gets eaten by the ground when the user is done with it,” he says. “It’s true circular economics.”
The company has moved well past proof of concept. PlantSwitch’s customer list includes Walmart’s Taylor Farms brand, Live Nation concerts, SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, the Toronto Blue Jays at Rogers Centre and Wonder. Across those accounts, the company supplies compostable forks, spoons, knives, straws, hot cups and lids, bowls, and food packaging shells. To support that scale, PlantSwitch recently expanded from a 50,000 square foot manufacturing facility to 300,000 square feet. A $17 million Series A raise brings the company’s total funding to $28 million.
On the production side, PlantSwitch is now producing CompostZero resin at meaningful commercial volume, with Baxter describing a roughly five-times growth trajectory for the current year.
Baxter argues that PlantSwitch is the first plastic alternative to reach this combination of scale, cost parity, and corporate adoption, a claim that points to a specific structural advantage: because CompostZero resin runs on the same equipment as conventional plastic, it doesn’t ask manufacturers or food-service operators to absorb switching costs. “Solving our global plastic crisis isn’t about cutting down on plastic use or recycling efforts, which have largely failed,” he says. “The solution is changing what our plastic is made of.”
Regulation advancing systems-level change
Two regulatory currents are running in the company’s favor. Single-use plastic restrictions are spreading across U.S. cities and states unevenly, sometimes city by city, sometimes county by county, creating compliance pressure on food-service procurement regardless of corporate sustainability commitments.
The larger policy conversation is around Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), which shifts end-of-life costs onto manufacturers. EPR frameworks under development include eco-modulation provisions that would reduce a producer’s fee for using materials less costly to collect or process, though timing for those provisions to come into effect remains uncertain.
A broader shift in how we think about materials
PlantSwitch is one piece of a growing field that starts from the same premise: we already have the feedstocks we need. The question is whether we’re using them effectively.
The waste-to-materials approach extends well beyond packaging and single-use items. Household mixed waste is being converted into a substitute for virgin plastic in durable goods. Scrap tires are being broken down and reformed into rubber surfaces for playgrounds and athletic tracks. Oyster shells, a byproduct of shellfish farming that accumulates in enormous volumes along coastlines, are being processed into materials for textiles, including swimwear and lingerie. In each case, a waste stream that previously represented a disposal problem becomes a raw material.
The logic behind all of it becomes harder to ignore when you consider the scale of what’s coming. A century ago, the world held roughly 2 billion people. Today the number is over 8 billion, and the UN projects a peak of around 10.4 billion before the end of this century. More people means more resource consumption, more food packaging, more single-use items, that is, unless the materials from which those items are made stop requiring the extraction of new resources to produce them.
Change at the system level
There is a persistent assumption embedded in much of the sustainability conversation: that the consumer has to do something different. Choose the compostable option. Pay the premium. Seek out the certified product. Accept the inferior fork.
Consumer willingness to pay for sustainable alternatives exists, but it runs directly into cost in an economy where discretionary spending is under pressure. Behavior change at the margins does not move systems.
What PlantSwitch is demonstrating, and what the broader waste-to-materials field is working toward, is a different model. If the alternative performs the same, costs the same, and simply replaces what’s already on the shelf, the consumer doesn’t have to decide anything. The sustainable option becomes the default option.
The responsibility shifts upstream, where it belongs: to manufacturers, procurement teams, and the regulatory frameworks that shape which materials reach the market in the first place.
That is also where EPR legislation is pushing. When producers bear the cost of end-of-life, and when eco-modulation discounts reward materials that don’t create disposal burdens, the business case for switching starts to close.
Baxter is clear-eyed about what makes this model work: “Everyone hates paper straws, no one wants wooden forks, and pretty much every alternative is either a huge drop off in quality, or many times it’s not even more sustainable, or way more expensive.”
The point of CompostZero is that none of those objections should apply. The product should simply be there, doing what plastic does, without what plastic leaves behind.
