Michael Shaver

Michael Shaver
Shaver in 2019
Born	Canada
Education	Mount Allison University (BSc) University of British Columbia (PhD) Imperial College London (postdoc)
Awards	Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) (2017) Fellow of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (FIMMM) (2019) Royal Academy of Engineering Research Chair (2023) IOM3 Swinburne Medal (2024)
Scientific career
Fields	Polymer science, Materials science, Sustainability
Institutions	University of Manchester University of Edinburgh University of Prince Edward Island
Website	smihub.ac.uk

Michael Shaver is Professor of Polymer Science in the Department of Materials at the University of Manchester, Director of the Sustainable Materials Innovation (SMI) Hub, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (IOM3). He is a polymer scientist specialising in the sustainability and circularity of plastics, and his research addresses mechanical, chemical and enzymatic recycling of plastics, sustainable polymer design, and systems-level approaches to materials circularity.

Education

Shaver completed his Bachelor of Science in Chemistry at Mount Allison University in 1999. He then earned a PhD in Chemistry from the University of British Columbia in 2005, with a dissertation entitled Small Molecule Activation by Diamidophosphine Complexes of Vanadium, Niobium and Tantalum. He subsequently undertook an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship at Imperial College London.

Career

University of Prince Edward Island

Shaver began his academic career at the University of Prince Edward Island (UPEI), where he was appointed Assistant Professor of Inorganic Chemistry in 2007. He rose to full Research Professor and held the UPEI Research Chair in Green Materials Chemistry from 2009. Here, he also started the Green Materials Laboratory, which eventually became the Sustainable Materials Innovation Hub (SMI Hub).

University of Edinburgh

In 2012, he moved to the University of Edinburgh as a Chancellor's Fellow in the School of Chemistry, a competitively awarded early-career fellowship. He was subsequently promoted, becoming Professor of Polymer Chemistry in August 2017, and during his time at Edinburgh served as Head of the Graduate School in the School of Chemistry from 2014. He continued to lead the Green Materials Laboratory here, before moving it to the University of Manchester.

University of Manchester

He joined the University of Manchester as Professor of Polymer Science in January 2019, based in the Department of Materials within the School of Natural Sciences. He became Director of the Sustainable Materials Innovation Hub (SMI Hub) in July 2020, and was the inaugural Director of Sustainable Futures, the university's platform for interdisciplinary environmental sustainability research, from 2021.

In 2023, he was appointed the Vita Group / Royal Academy of Engineering Research Chair in Sustainable Automotive Polymers, a five-year programme developed in partnership with the polyurethane foam manufacturer Vita Group, focusing on developing sustainable and circular materials design pathways for automotive foams.

Shaver led the University of Manchester's participation in the EPSRC Prosperity Partnership CHaMP (Circularity in Healthcare Materials Provision) in 2025, a collaboration with Bupa aimed at reducing plastic waste and single-use items in medicine. In the same year, he led the university's participation in the EPSRC Manufacturing Research Hub in Sustainable Engineering Plastics (SEP), a £13.6 million national initiative delivered alongside the University of Warwick and University College London, engaging over 60 industry partners including Siemens, Polestar and Biffa.

Research

Shaver's research spans the chemistry and engineering of sustainable materials, with a particular focus on plastics circularity. The SMI Hub, which he leads, brings together polymer chemists, environmental engineers, social scientists, and economists to develop integrated solutions to waste management and material sustainability.

Mechanical recycling and quantification

Part of his research concerns the degradation of plastics during mechanical recycling, where used plastic is sorted, washed, melted and re-formed. A widely cited 2021 review in Macromolecular Rapid Communications, co-authored by Shaver, surveyed the state of mechanical recycling of packaging plastics and suggested improvements to polymer blending.

Another 2024 study published in Nature Communications developed methods for quantifying and tracking the chemical degradation of high-density polyethylene (HDPE) through mechanical recycling cycles, aiming to provide industry with quality-assurance tools for recycled plastic feedstocks.

A further concentration has been developing methods to quantify the proportion of recycled content in plastic products and packaging. Shaver's group developed a technique using fluorescent dye tracers added to recycled materials during manufacturing, enabling product-level verification of recycled content rather than reliance on the contested mass balance accounting method.

To scale the technology, Shaver co-founded ReCon², a not-for-profit University of Manchester spin-out company, which ran pilot trials with packaging manufacturers, brands and recyclers to validate the fluorescent tracer approach in real production environments.

Chemical recycling and Deconstruction

Shaver and his group have also worked on chemical recycling, which breaks down polymer chains back to their monomer constituents for re-polymerisation. He has highlighted the complementary role of chemical recycling alongside mechanical methods, noting that it has particular potential for mixed waste streams where separation is impractical: "If we can convert these materials together, there is real value in the product as we avoid the need to separate things."

Policy and public engagement

Michael Shaver has been an active contributor to plastics policy in the UK and internationally. He co-authored the report "Tackling Household Plastic Waste: Best Practice for a Circular Plastics Economy", a policy report, whose recommendations influenced bodies including the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), Zero Waste Scotland, and the Greater Manchester Combined Authority.

In August 2021, ahead of the UK Plastic Packaging Tax's introduction, he told The Telegraph that a loophole in the government's proposed method could allow manufacturers to mislead regulators and was in discussions with retailers, manufacturers and officials about an alternative calculation method that could instead underpin a consumer-facing trustmark.

In 2023, he published an open letter to the then Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, calling on the city-region to expand its capacity for sorting and mechanically recycling plastic packaging materials, arguing that viable markets for previously unrecyclable plastics had emerged and that infrastructure investment was the key remaining barrier.

Honours and recognition

• Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC), elected 2017
• Fellow of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (FIMMM), elected 2019
• Vita Group / Royal Academy of Engineering Research Chair in Sustainable Automotive Polymers, 2023-2028
• Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining Swinburne Medal, 2024, awarded for outstanding contribution to the advancement and knowledge of the science, engineering or technology of plastics

Selected publications

• Schyns, Z. O. G.; Shaver, M. P. "Mechanical Recycling of Packaging Plastics: A Review." Macromolecular Rapid Communications 2021, 42, 2000415.
• Patel, A. D.; Schyns, Z. O. G.; Franklin, T. W.; Shaver, M. P. "Defining quality by quantifying degradation in the mechanical recycling of polyethylene." Nature Communications 2024, 15, 8733.
• Clark, R. A.; Shaver, M. P. "Depolymerisation within a circular plastics system." Chemical Reviews 2024, 124, 2617.

External links

• Profile at University of Manchester Research Explorer