Zerocircle

Start your week with a great read! While most startup stories get told after everything's worked out, CanDid Volume 2 is a little different. It captures the messy middle, the experiments, the uncertainty, and the years spent building before anyone is paying attention. Honoured to have Zerocircle's journey featured in its pages. #candid2.0 #zerocircle #feature #journey

Being part of Startup Policy Forum’s #100DesiDeepTech cohort is a strong reminder of how far Zerocircle has come. From a single idea to building one of Asia’s leading material innovation companies, this journey has always been about proving that better packaging systems can scale globally. Thank you to 3one4 Capital for believing in that vision early.

Paper food packaging has built a reputation for itself. It can hold oily food for hours while keeping your hands clean and mess-free. But a lot of that performance came from a thin plastic layer nobody really talked about. Invisible enough to ignore. Useful enough to become standard. And eventually, an expensive to question. So we questioned it. And, scaled it. Till the material replacing plastic was no longer a premium idea. It became the obvious one. #zerocircle #seematter #seaweed #foodpackaging #innovation Neha J. | Devparna A | Angad Menon

✨ New member announcement: Zerocircle Zerocircle develops natural alternatives to the plastic that is hidden inside everyday paper packaging, using seaweed and other natural polymers. These coatings perform like conventional barriers but are designed to safely return to natural systems instead of breaking down into microplastics. Sports venues are among the few places where packaging decisions happen at truly visible scale, across takeaway formats used in the thousands, in a single day. As fans rethink what they eat, wear, and carry into these spaces, packaging becomes part of that conversation too. This collaboration is a step toward making better material choices easier to adopt across the experiences people share together. 👉 Learn more about Zerocircle: https://www.zerocircle.in/

The real shift isn’t replacing one material with another. It’s about creating a systemic change where materials are safe for our bodies, safe for ecosystems and designed for entirely different end-of-life outcomes. #seematter #seaweed #innovation #materials [Neha J.]

What “home compostable paper packaging” doesn’t tell you. “Home compostable” does not necessarily mean plastic-free. That thin compostable layer sitting on paper could still contain synthetic coating chemistry, and most people are never told what it actually is. A lot of PE-free papers today use aqueous coatings. But “water-based” only describes how the coating is applied, not what the chemistry actually is underneath. 8 out 10 producers use a coating made from copolymers of acrylates and polystyrene. Doesn't sound very plastic-free, does it? What we also don’t talk enough about: What happens when these coatings enter recycling streams? What happens in wastewater? Does the dissolved polymer get removed? What’s the sludge fate? What happens to repulp quality? Reducing plastic content alone does not automatically solve recyclability or end-of-life concerns. Even PVOH, often positioned as biodegradable, is still debated by researchers when it comes to real-world environmental degradation conditions. And the conversation shouldn’t just be about percentages either. Even small amounts of highly persistent fluorochemicals (PFAS) have raised serious environmental and health concerns globally, which is why many are already banned or being phased out. Certification merely evaluates the final article under controlled test conditions, not necessarily every real-world disposal scenario.

When Zerocircle first started, a lot of people told us packaging was already a “solved” industry. But the more we looked closer, the more we realised how many invisible material problems still existed around us. Especially in the things we use every single day and barely think about twice. Watching Neha J. spend years studying those invisible layers, asking difficult questions, and pushing through challenges most people would simply accept as “industry standard” has been one of the biggest reasons Zerocircle exists the way it does today. Seeing her named a finalist for the Women in Packaging Excellence Awards 2026, under Innovative Materials Leader category feels incredibly special to all of us. Not just because of the recognition. But because of everything that came before it. Congratulations, Neha #WIPEA26 #award #finalist #zerocircle #materials #innovation 

A very important signal for where the future packaging conversation is heading in the EU! The recognition of natural polymers as a distinct material category reflects a much larger shift happening globally around how packaging materials are evaluated, regulated and scaled. As policies increasingly move toward material composition, biological circularity and end of life realities, conversations like these become critical for helping truly sustainable material systems grow beyond just pilot stage adoption. This is really encouraging progress for the broader natural polymers ecosystem. You can explore our natural polymer based material formats we’re building at zerocircle.in🌱 #eu #policy #sustainability #materials #polymers