Michael P Shaver

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. Another 2024 study published in Nature Communications developed methods for quantifying and tracking the chemical degradation of high-density polyethylene (HDPE) through mechanical recycling cycling. A further topic has been developing methods to quantify the proportion of recycled content in plastic products and packaging.

Shaver and his group have also worked on chemical recycling, which breaks down polymer chains back to their monomer constituents for re-polymerisation.

Michael Shaver has been an active contributor to plastics policy in the UK and internationally.

Honours and recognition Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC), elected 2017

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.