Episode 58 Transcript: A cookbook for making plastics, textiles, and other materials from nature

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

Welcome to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast where we dive deep into the innovative solutions and the brilliant minds who are tackling the climate crisis head-on, I'm Molly Wood.

This week, we’re coming back to the topic of materials and plastics. You may recall I talked to Sway in episode 44 about making plastic replacements from seaweed, and Natural Fiber Welding in episode 45 about replacing rubber and textiles. These are major emitters of greenhouse gases and pollution and a growing need for petroleum-based plastic means less and less ability to wean ourselves off of oil

Alright well this week, instead of a company that’s making and selling replacement materials, let’s talk with someone who wants to make it possible for anyone to make and sell replacement materials.

Because the key to solving big problems in big ways,  a lot of times, comes down to information.

Alysia Garmulewicz:

My name's Alysia Garmulewicz. I'm co-founder and co -CEO of Materiom. We founded Materiom in 2018 with the purpose of accelerating the biomaterial sector. So materials that are alternatives to petroleum plastics that are a hundred percent bio, a hundred percent compostable. And so we are providing tools to expedite work in that sector and lift basically be a tide that raises all boats.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

Back in April, Materiom got a grant from Google.org to join its AI accelerator program and expand its tools.

Alysia Garmulewicz:

So we have two main offerings.

One that we are publicly launching this year, which is an open database of biomaterial recipes. So think about a cookbook of how to make these materials. And we've been building that up over the past few years with a community that is supporting that recipe database so people can actively contribute and use those for free.

And so the idea of that open access database is to provide entrepreneurs and innovators everywhere with the starting seeds of information they need to make a new material that could be the next bio-based textile or the next bio-based packaging or coding or what have you. So that's been our product that we've been developing and is ready now to launch. And then we've been supported again, Google .org supported us in the early years and we've continued to have their support to now integrate generative AI into that platform. And so what we're doing is building, and this is very current right now, building a tool that can help, again, startups specifically to create novel biomaterial formulations and optimize their materials for market needs and just basically shorten the R &D cycle so that we can get more of these materials to scale in the market.

Molly Wood:

Let's take these kind of concepts one at a time. First, we've covered biomaterials a little bit on the show, but I would love to just have you sort of summarize and brief, like, what is the importance of developing these types of materials in the context of climate?

Alysia Garmulewicz:

Absolutely. So these materials, we call them regenerative materials or bio -based regenerative materials. These are a hundred percent bio-based. And that means that they are sourced from renewable biomass. So that's number one. And second of all, a hundred percent compostable. So that means that they biodegrade under specific conditions that allow them to be turned into nutrients. And those nutrients could nourish soil ecosystems. They can also be often cycled back, so recycled back into high-quality materials again and again. But that's our kind of two main criteria. And regenerative, we also think of in a broader systems lens.

So a lot of people think about these materials just, you know, when you have them in your hand, but obviously they have an impact that traces all the way back to the biomass that goes into them. And so the regenerative aspect also includes how you grow and cultivate and source biomass. So here we focus a lot on food waste, for instance, unavoidable food waste, specifically the kind of coffee grounds, the banana peels that are often either incinerated or go into landfills and have methane emissions attached or CO2 emissions embedded in those practices.

And so by creating, using those as a feedstock for making materials, you can have a drastic impact on reducing climate emissions and then that also includes other types of biomass that don't compete for arable land for food. So for instance, seaweed is a really good example of a big sequester of CO2 and also is a very regenerative source of biomass that can be used for making alternatives to plastics. So we broadly look at biomass as being really regenerative.

And then in the making of a material, we also really focus on being aligned with green chemistry principles. So that means really being inspired by how nature makes materials and the kind of chemical methods that are used in order to make sure those materials are non -toxic and biodegrade after end of life. So there's a few principles that we put in place when we talk about which materials we want to support and develop under the banner of regenerative.

Molly Wood:

Right. And then let's get a little more specific about those materials, which tell me about the types of materials that you are hoping to replace.

Alysia Garmulewicz:

Absolutely. So the types of materials, we're looking at a couple of main sectors that have huge amount of impact potential. So principally packaging and textiles. And in those sectors, the fast moving consumer goods sector. So the fast fashion polyesters are in need of replacement as well as the single use plastics are our number one candidate.

Alysia Garmulewicz:

So in the seaweed space, two bright lights are Sway, Sway the Future, and Notpla. These two companies, Sway is in California and Notpla is in the UK, and they are developing thin film plastics, bags, coatings from regeneratively sourced seaweed. So they're really leading in that space. We have also in the packaging as well, solutions like Biome, which are providing mycelium-based based. They're more in the home construction sector.

And then also Ecovative does mycelium-based packaging. So that's, you know, the from mushrooms, the fruiting body is the mushroom, but then the mycelium is the root structure and you can mold and create amazing packaging materials from that. In the food waste space, there's really interesting examples coming from, for instance, you can make PHAs, a microbial -based thermoplastic, from food waste. So full -psycho -bioplastics is an example there. And that's a really emerging, interesting area where you can ferment and create these PHAs from food waste. And then there's also the leather-like materials that are coming out of different sources of agricultural byproducts often.

So here an example in India is Banoffee leather, they use the byproducts of banana plantations, so the kind of stalks and leaves that are discarded and usually burnt with the emissions associated. And they're creating a beautiful leather-like material that can be made into bags or shoes or what have you. And there's also other leather-like substitutes like Dessertu in Mexico, where they're using cactus, cactus leather. There's grape leather from Italy, where they're using the byproducts of wine production. And then Pinotex as well is the byproduct of pineapple growing. So it's just a, it's a beautiful array of materials that are cropping up and growing. And we want to support those leading lights and see more of them.

Molly Wood:

Right. And so then that brings us perfectly to your approach or one of the two approaches. Let's talk about the open database, the kind of like, as you said it, I was like, Wikipedia for natural materials creation. But talk about that approach. So it sounds like you're meant to be sort of a platform, like a Genentech for this, as opposed to making materials yourself.

Alysia Garmulewicz:

Yes. So the idea is to provide this open repository of information that can support everyone globally, no matter where they are. And there are two aspects of that are important to surface. One is just that access to basic information about how to make these materials. And in order to get to scale, what we're doing is we're, we're extracting recipes and data. So data, meaning the properties and performance of these materials from the open access scientific literature and we're collating them and putting that in one place where it's easy to browse and easy to understand. And we have a graphical interface where you can see how these materials shape up against other petrochemical plastics on the market. And so that's one aspect of it. And another aspect is the community. What we're doing is we're taking inspiration and best practice from...

Molly Wood:

Yeah.

Alysia Garmulewicz:

what we've seen in open source software and hardware communities where people come together with a kind of collective motivation, but with the kind of scaffolding of the platform architecture helps people come together and actually collaborate and move together in terms of developing whatever it is, if it's a piece of code, or in our case, it would be a recipe. And they can do that collectively because we have integrated features into recipe contribution that allows people to contribute in a modular fashion.

So for instance, if you have one recipe for a food waste-based bioplastic bag, for instance, you could contribute the main recipe and then someone else can be like, well, I didn't know that you, what are the barrier properties of that? Maybe you didn't measure that. So I'm going to do the barrier property measurements and contribute that chunk of data to the recipe and the whole collective benefits when that happens. And so you can fork and remix and add different parts of information to a recipe to allow it to evolve faster over time. So those are the two main features is one, just the data and then to this community contribution aspect that allows collaboration to happen at pace.

Molly Wood:

Yeah. I want to do a brief, when you say the barrier properties, you mean like how leaky or not leaky it is?

Alysia Garmulewicz:

So barrier properties in terms of water and gas barrier is usually so how, you know, if you take a shopping bag out in the rain or if you want to make sure that, you know, any kind of good that needs to be protected from water has a certain barrier to that. And then gas is usually, for instance, like a migration of CO2 or oxygen that can spoil.

Molly Wood:

Yeah.

Alysia Garmulewicz:

a food product, et cetera. Food packaging is where it really comes into its own in terms of water and gas barriers. Yeah. Yeah.

Molly Wood:

Right. OK, cool. I just wanted to geek out on that for a minute. And then how hard is it to get? How much information is publicly available? How hard is it to get access to kind of that? Did you have to seed this with some initial recipes that you developed and then kind of added to over time? Talk to me about the kind of data chunk.

Alysia Garmulewicz:

Yes. The data chunk is there's a lot of information out there, but it's very disaggregated. The world of biomaterial development is very siloed, indifferent and fragmented. So for instance, there's really interesting research, but it's in design communities as opposed to material science communities, as opposed to, you know, engineering. So there's lots of different disciplines that all intersect with this world.

And so partly our effort has been to collect information across those different disciplines and then harmonize it in a way that everyone can benefit and utilize it. And then the other component in terms of how we built it to begin with was very much seeding it with our network of folks that we've, you know, we launched this with. So, we had some really great designers and innovators in the biomaterial space that did provide those first recipes.

I mean, we got going in a very kind of bootstrapped way. And over time, we've been able to attract, we started with, I don't know, like a handful of people that we just knew contributing recipes to our database and then to our library. And then now we're over 10 ,000 users that have just organically joined over time. So it's been really wonderful to see that collective interest and growth of a community that really cares about lifting up this sector and helping that happen.

Molly Wood:

Yeah. Give me the, let's stop here and give me the origin story before we really geek out on AI, which I'm excited about.

Alysia Garmulewicz:

Sure. Well, the origin story goes back to around 2016, 2017. My co-founder and I, Liz Corbin, we met when we were doing our PhDs, and we both did our PhDs in the worlds of the intersection between natural materials and digital fabrication. And what my entry point into that world was I come from a sustainability background and the growing interest in more decentralized models of production really provided this interesting lens of what if we could create a world where supply chains were more regional and that could allow us to tap into more regional natural materials that are not part of our palette today.

And so that was my jumping off point for the PhD. And what I found is that there just isn't access to information about these materials if we wanted to integrate them into this novel forms of production at a regional level, what have you. It's just very, very locked up still and very underdeveloped as well. There is a lot of information out there, but we also have to invent a lot. If we're gonna compete with 100 years of petrochemical plastics R &D, we need a massive effort on the R &D side within a decade to get ahead of the curve when it comes or bend the curve when it comes to plastics pollution and climate.

So that was the inspiration was, well, what if we, you know, we just need information about this world to be out there for everybody. And so that was the genesis of Materiom. And Liz Corbin, my co -founder had a similar realization through her PhD years. And when we got together, we just realized that we had the same vision for what needs to happen in the world, and we had complementary skills to action it. So it was a really, really exciting thing to embark on together and has been ever since.

Molly Wood:

And then who is the, who's kind of the target off-taker for this data? When you talk about like decentralized manufacturing, is it for, you talked about entrepreneurs and startups, it's like them not Nestle.

Alysia Garmulewicz:

Mm. Mm -hmm.

Alysia Garmulewicz:

Well, yeah, that's a really good question. So when you think of the biomaterial sector, there are people at different stages of development. So at the beginning of the R &D phase, there's often scientists and designers and people that are starting to ideate on novel materials and discovering new properties. And they're often the ones that are contributing to our open repository of information. Our Materiom Commons is what we're is what we call it.

That is the beginning of the kind of journey when it comes to biomaterials development and then eventual commercialization. Often what we see is those kernels of innovation that are in research labs and designers, that gets professionalized into a startup. And so a startup will then take a promising material and then develop it at a pilot scale and then have a commercial partnership that then helps that pilot get to scale through the supply chain of that brand or develop some sort of commercial partnership that helps that get to scale.

So what we do is we have our open database services, both the kind of ideation community that is happy to both use and contribute, as well as startups who at our later stage of development that nonetheless still need to keep abreast of the latest and greatest information coming from the scientific community and can use that to continually iterate on their material portfolio. And where the AI piece comes in is then we're focusing on how these startups can optimize those materials that they have in response to very particular market applications so that their R &D cycles shrink radically so that they can get to scale and get to market faster.

So the important thing, it sounds like two separate products, but what we're actually doing is priming the pump when it comes to getting more actors in the market faster by creating this open repository of information that seeds innovation everywhere and then helping those innovators when they've got.

Molly Wood:

Right.

Alysia Garmulewicz:

a good material that they would then want to commercialize and get to scale with, help optimize that and help their R &D cycle shrink with our AI offering. So we see it as a kind of nice progression where those tools can help the market mature and accelerate.

Molly Wood:

Right, because for people who don't know, if you're a startup who has taken venture capital funding, there is pressure for you. I mean, there's pressure no matter what, right? You want to get to commercialization as fast as possible because you want to have a successful company that has impact in the world. You're also going to have a hard time raising money if you're sort of recreate if you're doing the science over and over and over.

Alysia Garmulewicz:

Absolutely.

Alysia Garmulewicz:

Absolutely. And what you see in today's world is that we're using, the change is happening, but there's a lot of still very manual trial and error, benchtop kind of is the bottleneck of these very physical tests that are happening. And that's still important. We can't shortcut that and magically invent materials without really doing physical testing. But what we're doing is we're aiming to just shrink down the number of candidates that need to be tested. So we're looking at going from, okay, well, maybe one of these 100 is what we're looking at. Well, with AI, we can focus on maybe identify the top 10 a lot faster, and then those can then go into R &D trials. So it's really an efficiency gains to be had there by using the intelligence that we can harness with today's tech.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

Time for a quick break. When we come back, time to talk AI and how the thing that it’s in fact, pretty good at, is taking let’s say a huge open repository of information about alternative materials development and organizing it and making it interactive and usable. More on that after this.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. We’re talking with Alysia Garmulewicz, founder and co-CEO of Materiom, about its AI tool for helping companies who want to create bio-based alternatives to plastic, textiles, and other materials. Here’s Alysia about how it works.

Alysia Garmulewicz:

So what we're building is two versions of our tool. The first version is we're just making, just as a funny, but the idea is we're making a tool that allows innovators in startups to quickly summarize the world's information when it comes to biomaterials and provide insights in terms of what are the pathways to modifying their material that they may consider.

So it's basically a dialogue with a very useful kind of lab assistant or PI that can help steer them in the direction of what next steps to do and then provide that kind of real interactivity with the world's information that's relevant for them. And so that version is going to be integrated into our platform where you can easily interact with the recipe data that's already on Materium. And we're looking at also being able to interact with your own personal data as a startup. So that's one version.

And another version that we have in development is going to be, in many ways, more sophisticated when it comes to modifications, suggestions for your recipe. So the idea is that providing much more rigorous guidance on different ingredients, different process pathways, and all guided by a performance goal of interest. So once again, it's that kind of insightful lab partner that can help you navigate the world of so many variables when it comes to material modification and performance. For instance, just like cooking, you add a little bit of this or you change the temperature of your cooking. It just radically changes the outcome. And so navigating those choices is where this smart assistant can come in.

Molly Wood:

Mm -hmm.

Molly Wood:

Right, because it is trained on this specific. I think people still don't understand how these models are being built. It's trained on this universe of data that you're contributing to all the time. But it's like, hey, somebody else tried this just so much faster than a human could. Somebody else tried this. I infer that this could potentially improve your outcome. What about that? Yeah.

Alysia Garmulewicz:

That's right.

Alysia Garmulewicz:

Exactly.

Alysia Garmulewicz:

Exactly, exactly, exactly. And we're playing with all these different ways in which to optimize that performance, for sure.

Molly Wood:

And then give me a sense, if you would, about the size of this space. I think this sort of gets lumped. I am doing my best to help people understand how much fossil fuel use is a part of materials production. But please help us quantify that and why you think this is such an important space to try to build a network of entrepreneurs to tackle.

Alysia Garmulewicz:

Absolutely. So when you're talking about climate, 45 % of emissions is related to the production of goods. So the other is energy, you know, on the other side. But in terms of the materials economy, it underpins everything in terms of the embodied energy that's in all of the goods that we use. And so that's a large part of it. It's also important to think from a life cycle's perspective of understanding how materials production and end of life relates to climate.

So for instance, in, let's just take petrochemical plastics, when you produce plastic, you're obviously digging up fossil fuels. It's from the beginning, plastics production and energy production from fossil fuels were linked at the, you know, were completely joined at the hip because it's the byproduct of refining oil for energy, which created this big boom of polymers that could be, or monomers that could be then polymerized for petrochemical plastics.

So there's one climate story, which is just understanding the structural linkages in the market between plastics and oil-based energy. And so if we're going to decarbonize our economy, we can't just do it on the energy side. We have to do it on the material side as well. And so that's one aspect. And then the other aspect is I was starting to say is that, you know, thinking about the life cycle is that producing plastic emits CO2. And then at the end of life, often these materials are burned or just go into microplastics and all of the linkages that that has in terms of pollution and ecosystems.

And there's also another story in terms of thinking about the way in which we use biomass today, which has a lot of climate emissions associated. So when you landfill organic waste that emits methane, for instance, and that's something that can be addressed by biobased solutions. So when you are creating biomaterials from food waste, you can sequester or use that or avoid those emissions in the first place. And not to mention that, you know, materials can actually be carbon negative if you use feedstock like, yeah, food waste or seaweed. So there's a lot of different kind of points at which climate touches materials, both the sourcing as well as the kind of structural linkages. And then after end of life,

Molly Wood:

Yep.

Alysia Garmulewicz:

You also have the ability to nurture soil by virtue of returning nutrients in the form of compost to agricultural areas that can then help those soils store carbon and have a positive impact on drawing down carbon in the climate there. So part of our work, for instance, has been looking at the linkage between regenerative agriculture practices and biomaterials and understanding where you can get feedstock from byproducts and waste from farming, but then after end of life, how biomaterials can go back and nurture the soil and help that store lock in carbon and draw it down. So there's some really interesting system linkages that helps materials be a positive part of the climate story.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

That is Alysia Garmulewicz of Materiom. If you are a materials science type or an entrepreneur in this space or want to contribute or participate in this big wonderful data-sharing project, find their database and community platform at Materiom, m-a-t-e-r-i-o-m dot com slash commons.

And that’s it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool. Thank you so much for listening.

Email me your thoughts and suggestions to in at everybody in the pool dot com and find all the latest episodes and more at everybody in the pool dot com, the website. And if you want to become a subscriber and get an ad-free version of the show, hit the link in the description in your podcast app of choice. Thank you to those of you who already have. See you next week.