The 8th Era in Human History: The New Materials Age

00:00:18:13 - 00:00:47:18 Host: Kelly W. Thank you for listening in on the first episode of the Earthfeed podcast, from Soil to shelf. That's a podcast really about about materials of the future for packaging. So with me today, I have three distinguished, folks from the technology development side, the, the, the real molecule benders of of the future of packaging I have with me today, and I'm so excited to have them here. 00:00:47:20 - 00:01:15:14 Host: Kelly W. So let me introduce them. So first we have Doctor Peter Ciesielski. He's a senior research scientist and distinguished member of the research staff at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Also known as NREL in Golden, Colorado. He's a chemical engineer with a PhD in materials science over 15 years developing bio based fuels, chemicals and materials has over 120 scientific publications and leads multiple projects funded by the Department of Energy. 00:01:15:16 - 00:01:43:22 Host: Kelly W. Then we have Doctor Emma Master, Professor of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry at the University of Toronto. Associate director of Bio Zone center for Applied Bioscience and Bioengineering with which where they design and test enzymes that can customize natural materials such as cellulosics and hemi cellulose. Since 2011, she has had a research team at the Aalto University in Finland, where I think you are, today. 00:01:43:24 - 00:02:18:15 Host: Kelly W. And to scale up and de-risk promising biotechnologies and then also co-founded YZymes in 2021 to accelerate technology translation and benefits to diversified bio refineries. And we may we may tap into that that topic a little bit as well. And then we have Doctor Jake Miller, research scientist also at NREL, chemical engineer, with over ten years developing bio based fuels, chemicals and materials, more than ten scientific publications and currently leads and contributes to multiple projects funded by the Department of Energy. 00:02:18:17 - 00:02:21:06 Host: Kelly W. So welcome. Thank you for, for joining me. 00:02:21:06 - 00:02:47:11 Host: Kelly W. So what I want to really get from you to share with our audience is just how real we actually are to taking natural materials and valorizing them to do the things that fossil based extractions, catalytic conversions, thermo mechanical manipulations, polymerize ation, all the things that we're doing today, we can actually do those things from natural materials. 00:02:47:13 - 00:03:25:23 Host: Kelly W. We just have to to to unlock it. So I'm going to start this conversation off with something that Peter said to me when I first met him. what Peter going back probably 6 or 7 years, you said to me that after many years of researching how to take nature and break it down to make fuels, that there's a general understanding that you'll never fully recover the value of that intact polymer that was created by nature's preferred monomer, which is CO2, not ethylene, not propylene, not one four butane diol, but CO2. 00:03:25:23 - 00:03:43:23 Guest: Peter C. You know, I arrived at that conclusion basically looking at all the different products you can make from biomass and then also looking at all the different products that nature makes, you know, and that is you mentioned how, you know, our, our society has been really advancing our own polymerization technologies. 00:03:44:00 - 00:04:15:08 Guest: Peter C. But biology is still king of polymerization. I mean, abso lutely king mass producing polymers all the time. And I mean, we're probably sitting on wood desks right now, you know, so the that's that's a biopolymer. You, me, Emma, Jake, we're all made of biopolymers. This plant behind me is biopolymer. And we have really different properties. And so a lot of the, the features of performance, characteristics that we're looking for in these synthetic polymers, biology already offers them in some way. 00:04:15:10 - 00:04:33:12 Guest: Peter C. you know, and the trick is understanding, you know, the slight modifications, maybe that Emma, we'll talk about, you know, we can still rely on some chemical catalysis. Maybe Jake will touch on that to modify these things. to give us the, the performance characteristics that we're after. And, we really, you know, you've used this term before. 00:04:33:12 - 00:04:48:21 Guest: Peter C. Nature does offer you a menu already of things that it's making. And, we can rely on modern biotechnology and catalysis to tune, the menu sees in the menu, if you will, to our own, rotates. So. Yeah, start with that. 00:04:48:23 - 00:05:23:00 Guest: Emma M. Oh, that's really good. I like that one. See some molecule? That's wonderful. Yeah, I feel similarly. You know, there's a lot of, interest in throwing. I at material science. Right. And, and thinking about how to design a material for certain performance attributes or for, you know, multi-purpose use. and then you remember the plant biopolymer, the plant fiber, which has evolved over hundreds of millions of years with parallel processing. 00:05:23:00 - 00:05:44:17 Guest: Emma M. You know, like I said, there's a lot of, innate value there. And the fact that we use it today for lumber and paper and make pellets for burning, you know, that's just reflecting our lack of imagination, not the lack of functionality. That's it's right, really right in front of our faces. 00:05:44:19 - 00:06:07:02 Guest: Jake M. yeah. That's a that's a really good point, Emma. I think to and what you guys have said, I think the first that I have is, you know, I like the way that you describe the situation that we're in right now as biomolecule. Because first thing I thought of is that, you know, if we think about Mary being a swamp, there is an incredible amount of resources that are available in a spot. 00:06:07:04 - 00:06:30:01 Guest: Jake M. You just have to figure out how to use. I mean, there is in terms of the diversity of microbial life that's there, and the types of molecules and most of which are polymers they're building with a ton. but one thing that I think I can add here is that, you know, I was kind of talking about ants, as in, you know, these organisms, but I'm sure that you're more familiar with Kelly. 00:06:30:03 - 00:07:10:05 Guest: Jake M. Our kind plants. that we use to manufacture our synthetic polymers. And, actually just having a conversation with a colleague of mine, general, earlier, Andy Young, where we were talking about how we need to change the feedstock for so many of the, valuable materials that we use for our continuing existence standards. Life as humanity may is, may necessitate us rethinking how we deal with plants and making them a lot smaller to deal with localized resources. 00:07:10:07 - 00:07:31:09 Guest: Jake M. and the reason for that is it's very easy to put crude oil. Not easy, but it's, you know, well-established crude oil on a ship or in a pipeline. And move it thousands and thousands of miles. But it's very much more difficult to do the same thing with, with corn stover, those kinds of things. And because of that, I think we can start really. 00:07:31:11 - 00:07:45:21 Guest: Jake M. There's a lot of space for us in the R&D community to reimagine how conversion facilities look, tapes of unit operations and processes that they use in the sales operator. 00:07:45:23 - 00:08:15:00 Host: Kelly W. I'm really glad you said that, because I feel like we need to start, when people say, but is it scalable? Let's pause that question, because I don't think we understand the word any more. Scale. Does it mean a single plant that does 800 tons a day? Scale means deploy ability. How do I make 50 of them in all the right places to valorize these natural, intact materials, to then manipulate them to do all of these things we need? 00:08:15:02 - 00:08:39:05 Host: Kelly W. So I agree with you, because if you think about the history of packaging and again, this is a packaging oriented, but for me it's about the materials. It's the science of the materials packaging. It is an undeniable important place for those materials because again, you can't support 8 billion people without packaged consumer goods. We can't even design packaging that stays in one piece when we open it, let alone manage the litter for which it causes. 00:08:39:07 - 00:09:04:07 Host: Kelly W. But if you you know that fast forward to to where that is now and like, how do we get here? How do we get to this enormous mountain of plastics waste? It's actually not too hard. It's so easy to. So we people will say, you know, experience in an area is important. But if you're a professional business development person, you don't need to know the market. 00:09:04:07 - 00:09:29:08 Host: Kelly W. You're doing business development and you can learn it. It's hard to argue that, but I'm telling you, if you're trying to predict the future and you're doing it from the current state, your projection is inaccurate because you have to involve the right historical components of information. You have to build history to project forward. That improves your extrapolation and accuracy. 00:09:29:10 - 00:09:52:19 Host: Kelly W. We're not adding that. So let's look at the history of packaging. Sell PVC coated cellophane and glassine coated paper. Allowed the general store to become a grocery store that was packaging. So we developed we discovered polyethylene through free radical polymerization back again when people just explored stuff and tried stuff and we're like, well, what's it good for? Wire and cable? 00:09:52:19 - 00:10:19:13 Host: Kelly W. We needed it for World War Two. So polyethylene had like a very clear fit. But we made ethylene from oil. So when you crack oil to make ethylene, you make a shitload of broccoli. What do you do with propylene? There's a lot of derivatives for propylene. But there were so much of it. Well we can make polypropylene. You can't blow polypropylene but you can you can sheet it and stretch it really fast, really pristinely. 00:10:19:15 - 00:10:49:22 Host: Kelly W. So now we have this material that we can make really thin, super clear, very fast. What's it good for? No oxygen barrier at all. But it has moisture barrier so I can make things that are sensitive to moisture perform. That's when we started to see monolayer blown film. Go to three layer to five layer short stint at five straight to seven, because we had to start putting oxygen barrier in our polyethylene film because cellophane carried oxygen, cellophane got replaced by this pristine plastic. 00:10:49:24 - 00:11:12:03 Host: Kelly W. So what that allowed us to do globally is build these enormously large supply lines. So I could take printed packaging in Germany, send it to San Diego to put frozen seafood in it, and I can sell that frozen seafood in Southeast Asia, Canada, US or back in Germany. And it all works. I don't think that's not decarbonization. That is a carbon dilemma. 00:11:12:05 - 00:11:37:17 Host: Kelly W. And it's a supply chain that's fatigued and vulnerable, and it's only another pandemic climate event, socioeconomic. Those supply lines were the only way to fix it, is to bring it to the source and start to build these materials. And so so I agree with you completely. And then it becomes a little bit more plausible to say how you use enzymatic modification, how do you actually now use. 00:11:37:19 - 00:12:01:11 Host: Kelly W. And I want your thoughts on this to Peter on nano cellulose because now nano cellulose, which is 97% water because it's nano cellulose, you've got to keep water in there. It slaps together and you can't get it apart, but you can't ship 97% water all over the place. But you can make it locally and convert it locally into a new pellet shape that is not paper nor plastic. 00:12:01:13 - 00:12:08:01 Host: Kelly W. It's a pellet that does what it's supposed to do, and it's both recyclable and biodegradable. 00:12:08:03 - 00:12:32:01 Guest: Peter C. Yeah, so there's a lot of a lot of points I want to touch on it, but I think I'll, I'll hit on the first one. So it's circling back to this degree of deconstruction. So you know, but what nature gives you in biomass is really a lot of stored solar energy and sequestered CO2. And every time you break those bonds, polymeric bonds, you're forfeiting a little bit of that energy. 00:12:32:03 - 00:12:51:05 Guest: Peter C. and oftentimes you're forcing a little bit of that carbon as well. So, so really the home run is can you use intact biopolymers in their native form to, to, you know, for the applications that you need? It's hard. If it was easy, we'd be doing it all over the place. you know, so you can just cellulose if you can extract cellulose, which we can't easily. 00:12:51:05 - 00:13:11:13 Guest: Peter C. Now you can go a long way with that, right? Paper is a fantastic product. There's all sorts of great packaging materials that you can make from paperboard and so forth. you know, Lignans great. I mean, cellulose also has its, its applications. But, you know, in some cases we actually need we need drop in replacements or, you know, functional replacements or drop in replacements. 00:13:11:13 - 00:13:32:01 Guest: Peter C. And a lot of times in the current state that requires that we really do polymerize everything back down to monomers, you know, monomeric sugars, you know, lignin monomers and so forth, and then build them back up. And that's inherently less energy efficient than just using, I mean, the best thing you can make out of a piece of wood is a baseball bat, right? 00:13:32:01 - 00:13:53:24 Guest: Peter C. Everything's intact. Right? You don't have to do any any chemical modification. Use the polymers, just to their end. But if we need, you know, certain specialty barrier films, for example, that are hard to access from, you know, native biopolymers in there, you know, in their native state, we've got to we've got to break them down and build them back up the way that we're used to. 00:13:53:24 - 00:14:14:20 Guest: Peter C. I mean, that's, that's and that a lot that's just to handle our own infrastructure. so, you know, that's that's a stepping stone, if you will. I mean, I think the home run is, you know, some of the work that more, like Emma is doing where, you know, maybe you could you could genetically modified, you can genetically modified plants to alter their bio polymeric structure and grow the polymers you need. 00:14:14:22 - 00:14:32:10 Guest: Peter C. But that's, again, that's kind of the limit of, of our biotechnology at this point. There's there's other intermediate steps that much closer to where, you have a bio polymer and you need to add some functional groups or remove some functional groups. you can design an enzyme to do that. so maybe that's where I should pass to Emma and then let her. 00:14:32:12 - 00:14:34:02 Guest: Peter C. Yeah, yeah. 00:14:34:02 - 00:15:09:03 Guest: Emma M. That's okay. I, I agree with you, Peter, that, you know, there's been a lot learned through the deconstruct to reconstruct paradigm, you know, and, about how enzymes work on these renewable, renewable materials and how to make them and make them cheaper. but you're right, you know, and, I, I think about it as sort of domesticating the biomass, you know, so you've got one of the challenges to using renewable biomass and materials is the complexity. 00:15:09:05 - 00:15:36:24 Guest: Emma M. That's something, that we know we need to handle. And so the sorts of enzymes, the sorts of biological modifications we do is really to take this complex, heterogeneous, material and, and domesticate it, but domesticated post-harvest because we realize, you know, some of the, the concerns, you know, depending on where you are, with regulatory, considerations around the world that some of the GMO plants might be questionable. 00:15:37:02 - 00:16:09:01 Guest: Emma M. But anyhow, there's also a lot we can do post-harvest, using bio catalysts to add and as you say, remove, selectively remove functional groups to achieve the performance properties that we're looking for, from these intact polymers that, nature is making and some of the advantages that we see with that approach, in parallel with the deconstruction and fermentation and, you know, rebuilding the polymer, that with that paradigm, is the enzyme that the loading of the catalysts we need to use. 00:16:09:02 - 00:16:53:20 Guest: Emma M. So the biological catalyst, of course, is the enzyme. Just want to make sure that that's clear for the audience. the loading of that, of that enzyme is typically much less than what would be required to fully deconstruct that biomass into fermentable sugars. And so there's a cost benefit to that too. So we think about, you know, lower lowering or, you know, think about the economic feasibility through lowering the enzyme loading, keeping it simple and focusing on on tailoring and domesticating these complex starting materials into ones that then have reproducible performance and, and, you know, we can we can we can show it where we, you know, we can demonstrate, 00:16:53:22 - 00:17:03:08 Guest: Emma M. this, this, this approach, can work can work nicely and I'll, I'll go on too long with too many examples. but we can get the fact there. 00:17:03:10 - 00:17:33:17 Host: Kelly W. Well, and and I'm going I'm going to circle back with a question on on enzymatic modification, but and, Jake, I think you bring a great, side of this from the thermo thermal chemical side of manipulation of these biomass is to valorize them and to do places. And, and I think some of the thing I'm curious if you agree or disagree, but it seems like a lot of what we're seeing today, the technology pathway we knew 40 years ago or longer, like the old is the new new. 00:17:33:19 - 00:17:47:09 Host: Kelly W. Right. So some of these things we knew how to do it before wasn't an incentive to do it. like turning off pathways to maximize the efficiency of a certain yield that you're looking for. So I'm curious, your thoughts on on that side. 00:17:47:11 - 00:18:15:00 Guest: Jake M. Yeah. I couldn't agree more. I will give a little plug for a, a funny application that actually myself, Peter and Kelly were on. Unfortunately, we didn't get funding, you know, and now I go through, and that's okay. but the concept is kind of what you were. You're saying where, you can take sugars. So first, when we're talking about sugar, that's, you know, a single memory unit of, cellulose, which is what we were talking about before. 00:18:15:02 - 00:18:35:17 Guest: Jake M. and we can process them microbially to make a molecule come out. And Lactic acid is kind of seen everywhere. You know, it's in a lot of food products. when our now is even when our muscles and, there when I guess when I, when we get tired we're doing cardiovascular activity. We start to generate a lot of lactic acid. 00:18:35:17 - 00:19:05:17 Guest: Jake M. And in that case, it's actually a bad, painful thing. but it's very well established how to take microbes and have them eat sugar and poop out. I guess it, and they can do this in very nice, very efficient way. They can turn percent of the carbon in the street into like, acid. And it's just so turns out that lactic acid is three atoms away from like acid, which is, of course, base material, the base monomer for any acrylate polymer that you could make. 00:19:05:18 - 00:19:40:23 Guest: Jake M. And of course, this is extremely relevant packaging. so what we trying to do is partner with a company that already has an established process to take sugars and turn them into lactic acid, and then engineer a into the I would say the word thermochemical. So what I mean by that is non-biological, pathway to take your acid and transform it into, like I said, and once again, Kelly, as you were saying, this has been around this idea around for 40 years because it's easy to look at that point of, oh, well, if we take out this molecule of water, it's acrylic acid. 00:19:41:00 - 00:19:51:11 Guest: Jake M. And there are plenty of other folks in industry working on this. and I'm very confident that this type of a root will become commercially relevant sooner rather than later. 00:19:51:13 - 00:20:15:15 Host: Kelly W. I, I'm glad you mentioned lactic acid because, you know, lactic acid is is a combination of of of of all of these things. Right. It is a fermented molecule. It is a nature derived fermentation product that we can use to make polylactic acid. We can use it to make acrylic acid and from acrylic acid, a lot of your adhesives, a lot of your coatings are acrylic chemistry. 00:20:15:17 - 00:20:43:14 Host: Kelly W. So there's there's a lot in packaging that that little really important circularity of lactic acid in nature and in our human body. Lactic acid has a lot of really cool little loops in it. And we just tap into that loop and we keep turning it back and loop. Lactic acid becomes more sun sustainable because you can you can have it's multiple ways that you in which you can use it. 00:20:43:16 - 00:21:03:19 Host: Kelly W. now, so, so now I'm coming to you, and I say, okay, I get it now I want to take a cellulosic chain and put a specific type of functionality on it. How would you can you design that for me? You can you can you can you how how do you make that for me. 00:21:07:11 - 00:21:42:00 Guest: Emma M. Not easily. and the reason now anyhow, the reason being we've as both Jake and Peter know. Well we've learned a lot about what, which enzymes microorganisms have evolved to grow on and consume. biomass through, projects focused on, you know, biomass to energy or, commodity chemicals. We've learned a lot about, how microbes have evolved to do that. 00:21:42:02 - 00:22:07:15 Guest: Emma M. And so now we've got a library, an enormous, genomic library. that we can tap into and produce the corresponding enzymes and, and apply them in ways they weren't necessarily evolved for. But that we can imagine using them for. And so that's, that's what what we do, we, we are using, the enzymes in a different way. 00:22:07:17 - 00:22:40:08 Guest: Emma M. we learn how, how, microbes have leveraged their activity and we think, oh, that's that's pretty cool. And, you know, I can take that enzyme out of the microbial system and just use it in isolation as any other catalyst and have it introduce, specific targeted new chemical functionalities into cellulose hemi cellulose structures. as, as you might know, the chemist, the chemist at the chemical level, cellulose is this. 00:22:40:10 - 00:23:08:16 Guest: Emma M. Well, won't say simple, but there's a lot of repeated units. Right. Very similar repeated units. And so the interest in using an enzyme to add new functionality is that it can, with all that apparently very similar chemistry, still target a specific position and introduce a functional groups in a, in a highly targeted way. And that's what's so important to achieving the performance, like reproducible performance attributes at the end, with the materials. 00:23:08:18 - 00:23:38:12 Guest: Emma M. So we've we've just to add on to that, why why we can do this now, why the timing is it's, it's good to think about enzymes not only for, for degrading biomass, but also upgrading biomass is because we know much more about, the toolkit. And, because of real advances in material science and surface analysis methods that help us characterize the products we're making. 00:23:38:14 - 00:23:43:07 Guest: Emma M. That was really tough before. and, and so this has been enabling for us as well. 00:23:43:09 - 00:24:00:12 Host: Kelly W. I kind of feel like that maybe some of the scare from the larger chemical companies that now have to go into nature to find their new molecules is that if you if you gave them a jar of something, they don't know how to analyze it because it's not what they analyze today. So I think characterization is, is a is an important part. 00:24:00:14 - 00:24:15:19 Host: Kelly W. And I think I want Peter's thoughts on the same topic and Jake's. But then, then I want to go into, how does I space now allow us to move even faster? I'm curious your thoughts on on that. 00:24:15:21 - 00:24:41:04 Guest: Peter C. That's a can of worms, Kelly. That will open up in a minute, but I just want to. I'm a, you know, kind of got me excited about, you know, enzymes and cellulose and so forth. And, and you mentioned nanoscience. So I want to circle back to that really quick. So nano cellulose, in my opinion, is kind of a happy medium between complete deconstruction, you know, which is taken all the way down to monomeric sugars, which in my opinion is too far in many cases and, and no deconstruction at all. 00:24:41:04 - 00:25:02:07 Guest: Peter C. Right. So and I'll take one step back. So if you look at the way you can make money from biomass now, the big moneymakers are like pulp and paper, cotton fibers, construction lumber. these are the big ones that I'm thinking of. If there's another one, please shout it out. But that's those are the lignin cellulosic products that make money. 00:25:02:09 - 00:25:22:00 Guest: Peter C. And if you look at the ways that don't make money, they're basically biofuels. So they're like, you know, it's a great the a great way to lose money. And, you know, it's been proven that it's to take a bunch of biomass and, do you know, do polymerize it all the way down to sugars and do fermentation to ethanol and try to sell that ethanol. 00:25:22:02 - 00:25:44:04 Guest: Peter C. That's a great way to lose a whole bunch of money and taxpayer money and everyone else's money. So, so, so there's there's a happy medium. I think nano sales might sit right there. I mean, it's it's it can do really cool things. And it preserves a lot of that, you know, it's energy efficient and in the sense that the polymeric bonds that were initially constructed via sunlight are still there. 00:25:44:06 - 00:26:03:02 Guest: Peter C. So it's, you know, you still have the energy efficiency and the properties are really cool. I mean, you can make really transparent, like nice transparent films from nano cellulose that look, a lot like, you know, a polypropylene film. then they have much better oxygen. Beer. I'm sorry. Much? Yes, much, much better. Oxygen barrier. Poor, poor water barrier. 00:26:03:02 - 00:26:21:03 Guest: Peter C. But you could imagine, you know, coupling them to something that's more hydrophobic. Maybe a lignin coupling or something could help. you know, the surface area is fantastic if you want to make foams and, you know, people have made all sorts of, you know, catalysts and things from nanoscale supports just taking advantage of the nanoscale properties. 00:26:21:05 - 00:26:40:10 Guest: Peter C. And you can make them with enzymes, too. The other thing I wanted to touch on like, so the same enzymes that that will take cellulose all the way down to glucose, if you just back up a little bit, don't don't hit it so hard as Emma was suggesting. you end up with, you know, the crystalline regions being preserved and, then you have cellulose nanocrystals and there's a bunch of cool stuff you can do with it. 00:26:40:15 - 00:27:13:07 Guest: Peter C. You know, I think it's we're we're right on the cusp of seeing big time commercial products. I don't think there's really it's a chicken and egg scenario. There's not a big market poll. You know, there's not a nanoscale product on the shelves at Walmart yet. When that happens, then you know when someone's like, oh man, we really need nano sales to make this thing that everybody wants, then you're going to see, you know, maybe the pulp and paper companies who are, you know, the most change averse companies in the world will say, okay, I'm thinking they can start making NSA less in term quantities today if they wanted to. 00:27:13:09 - 00:27:24:23 Host: Kelly W. actually, I'm going to challenge you a little bit on that. I think we we all we started this whole all of this started with data silos and it's called cellophane and cellulose acetate. 00:27:25:00 - 00:27:25:19 Guest: Peter C. Yeah. Because. 00:27:25:21 - 00:27:43:11 Host: Kelly W. Because because you're dissolving the cellulose such that each strand is individually soluble lies. And then you're controlling it's recombination. So you're controlling horn ification and the bringing together. Yeah. So it's chains. So packaging started in nano cellulose. So why are we so. 00:27:43:13 - 00:28:02:24 Guest: Peter C. Push back a little bit. So my you you're 100% right about that Kelly. But the definition of nano at least my definition implies some some degree of aggregation. So you have instead of individual chains you actually have nano particles that are, you know, maybe dozens of chains still still stuck together. So yeah. Yeah. But that no, you're right. 00:28:02:24 - 00:28:16:24 Guest: Peter C. I mean that's and cellophane for the viewers. Listeners. You don't know cellophane is still awesome. It's still out there. It's still great product. So let's not forget it. Let's not forget about that. Okay? I said in a take, do you respond any less. 00:28:17:01 - 00:28:41:16 Guest: Jake M. Yeah. Yeah. No, this is a great discussion. I think I'll, I'll add one thing and I think it kind of, goes off of what you and, Kelly were just talking about Peter, where, you know, you're saying distinction between different types of nano cellulose, you know, breaking these things down, the difficulty of something you said earlier, Kelly, where you said the thing that a lot of companies are scared of right now, they don't know how to deal with science and have a point. 00:28:41:17 - 00:29:13:09 Guest: Jake M. And so Peter said earlier, you know, the best thing to I very much agree with the best thing you can do with this word is make a baseball bat. and part of the reason why that's so efficient is because you don't have to break your wood into its constituent monomers and molecules, because when that starts to happen, unlike with, say, crude oil, which is something that we have figured out how to engineer over the last 100 years, wood and other pieces, other sources are extremely complex. 00:29:13:09 - 00:29:39:02 Guest: Jake M. Just because they have so many more. It's molecules and atoms and so crude oil, the balance, you know, you've got a couple percentages of things that aren't mostly hydrogen and carbon. but when you start there and mess up again, and not only is that just a third type atom that we all have to keep track of, but also when you process it down and try to get down to their scale, you end up creating a lot of things that you need to create. 00:29:39:04 - 00:30:05:01 Guest: Jake M. there's, a fellow at NREL who, always refers to these things as marbles. but you essentially don't know what to do with us further. And that really not only hampers your ability to but process because you can't place where all of your mass is flowing, but it also, much more pragmatically, starts to come up your equipment in ways that more traditional hydrocarbon feedstocks. 00:30:05:03 - 00:30:20:16 Guest: Jake M. So hydrocarbons being sourced, royal natural gas, those types of things, you don't do that as much. So it's kind of, requires a step change in how we deal with and unknown stuff. 00:30:20:17 - 00:30:44:12 Guest: Emma M. Yeah. But I, you know, I would say there has been real advances in selective extraction. Right? So the fractionation of lignin, cellulosic biomass into, into simpler component parts. But you're right. That's all. You know, what you're saying is, when we think about I think, Kelly, you put it like, what are what are people. If we could have the two things. 00:30:44:12 - 00:31:11:01 Guest: Emma M. One is new chemistry. I don't I'm not sure it's particularly more complex, but it's new. And so there's a learning curve. and, what we've but we've learned a lot, and we have tools that can help, tailor, you know, tailor the complexity, reduce the complexity. And that, that is an area of interest for us. So the other, I don't know if we want to go in this direction, but I have heard that in particular. 00:31:11:01 - 00:31:37:14 Guest: Emma M. I've understood another, concern is feedstock supply. And this is if we start to then invest in biological, feedstocks. And here again is another chicken and egg. I think the feedstock suppliers like the forest sector, sector as well, are unsure if where who gets the benefit. and so there's some still some questions around that. 00:31:37:16 - 00:32:09:23 Guest: Emma M. But I would say that, at least thinking about the forest sector in Canada, and I'm sitting here in Nordic Europe, there's some, commonality here, too. There's an interest to diversify because the traditional products just aren't the markets aren't there. So there is feedstock in waiting. And part of, mindful land use is to use, in a sustainable way. 00:32:10:00 - 00:32:33:23 Guest: Emma M. the, the, the forest resources and, and, and again, to say they're, they're waiting. But I think some decisions, some clarity around who get the benefit, you know, from, from the collection, and, and the initial processing and using all of that, you know, also hundreds of years of knowledge around how to fractionated lignin, cellulosic material. That's what a pulp mill does. 00:32:33:23 - 00:32:43:13 Guest: Emma M. You know, they're experts at it. How to kind of, reconfigure that understanding for new applications. This is an area of interest for them. 00:32:43:19 - 00:33:04:17 Host: Kelly W. And you mentioned pulp mill, so I think it's worth this is a great conversation for that. So 93% of the world's pulp comes from the kraft process. The kraft process uses trees when we know there's more cellulose in plants than in trees. Why do we use trees? Because the kraft process has to amortize the sins of the process, and we know they've gotten cleaner. 00:33:04:17 - 00:33:28:24 Host: Kelly W. They burn stuff to create their own energy. But still the first step is, is don't screw up the lignin. Don't cross-linked the lignin. So black liquor is because you thermally cross-linked the lignin. You have to separate the biomass in a cleaner, greener way into it's bits and pieces. So then you can valorize them. So I think part of it too is the fact that that's our experience. 00:33:29:01 - 00:33:37:11 Host: Kelly W. We're not used to say, well, what do we do with the liquid extractions from the kraft process? Oh, you feed the black liquor that we can't do anything with it. No. You get a whole. 00:33:37:14 - 00:33:40:22 Guest: Emma M. Separate for energy. Yeah, exactly. 00:33:40:24 - 00:34:06:06 Host: Kelly W. And, and and I feel like there's a, there's, there's going to take time before these, these large global chemical companies start realizing to start recruiting, you know, biochemical engineers and biology majors out of school, not chemistry majors and chemical engineers. So that's going to take some time. So how do we help them in the interim? I think a big part of that is realizing that you got to redefine scale first, start small. 00:34:06:08 - 00:34:26:18 Host: Kelly W. I want to give you a quick, quick little example. So recently I met with Montgomery County, Ohio, which is where Dayton, Ohio is. And I went there because there's a compost facility there. That was part of a recent study. And and it started with that county realizing that they have 180,000 family food shortage, and they want to protect those 80, 180,000 families. 00:34:26:18 - 00:34:44:19 Host: Kelly W. So it started with a food bank making sure that grocery store produce doesn't get wasted. Then they started growing food. Then they started composting, and consumers participate in the program. They drop off their bucket to compost five bucks a month, get a new bucket, and every year they get that much compost back for their home. Home gardening. All beautiful quick cool little story, right? 00:34:44:24 - 00:35:04:10 Host: Kelly W. But it's a county that's representing itself like it's it's own country and it needs to protect its own people. I think that's a big step. But they also are public sector. They don't have the funding. They don't have the resources they did pre-pandemic. So they're not going to take on anything that's going to cause them pain or conflict, because that's where they're at. 00:35:04:12 - 00:35:31:16 Host: Kelly W. But this one county has the second, maybe the largest transfer station in the country. 600,000 tons of waste goes into this one transfer facility. That's 1.2 billion pounds, of which 12 to 18% is food waste using 30 to 60% carbohydrate content. And we say 50%. That's 90 million pounds of lactic acid, carbon negative lactic acid that I can make polymer with. 00:35:31:18 - 00:35:59:07 Host: Kelly W. I can make lactic acid derivatives with. So I think I think it's all there. But somebody has to be willing to do it. And I think we're underestimating that. Governments around the world want to do a few things. Decarbonize industry. They want to get food waste out of landfills. And we know that composters want food waste. I believe compost, compost demand is inevitable because it's our fastest way to turn dirt back into soil. 00:35:59:07 - 00:36:04:17 Host: Kelly W. We're we are officially in the eighth era in human history called the New Materials Age. 00:36:04:19 - 00:36:12:13 Host: Kelly W. The plastics era was the last one. We realized that we you we can't continue to operate that way. 00:36:12:13 - 00:36:16:20 Host: Kelly W. Then that lactic acid circularity starts to run and you can start to build off of that. 00:36:16:20 - 00:36:30:13 Guest: Peter C. You know, in terms of scalability and, you know, circularity plants got it figured out, man. And there's so much we can learn from them, you know, and they you scalability shouldn't even come into question. 00:36:30:13 - 00:36:39:18 Guest: Peter C. I mean, cellulose synthesis is by far the most abundant polymeric process. You can't turn it off. It's. 00:36:39:18 - 00:36:43:12 Host: Kelly W. So I could take you into my backyard and show you that you can't. 00:36:43:14 - 00:37:06:00 Guest: Peter C. Yeah. No kidding. But it's it's crazy efficient and and, you know, in terms of, you know, we're talking about localized production, right? Plants are so good, so energy efficient, so material efficient. They don't move trees just like that. Sit there. They're good. They don't need to move things. Right? I mean, maybe they need to get water from their roots to their leaves and so on. 00:37:06:00 - 00:37:29:04 Guest: Peter C. But that's it. They don't have to ship things around the country like there. And so I mean, there's so much we can learn, about, you know, circular production of the materials that we need, you know, for plants. And they make fantastic materials. I mean, they're robust. We've been using them since humans have been around. We're still using them, you know, they still outperform a lot of the polymers and stuff that we can make. 00:37:29:04 - 00:37:41:24 Guest: Peter C. So I, I really think I really like the, the, the metaphor I get, or maybe it's just a fact that we are moving into a new materials age and hopefully it's hopefully it's bio based materials. 00:37:42:01 - 00:37:44:21 Host: Kelly W. If it's not sun stable it's not sustainable. 00:37:44:23 - 00:37:47:00 Guest: Peter C. That's right man. 00:37:47:02 - 00:37:56:18 Host: Kelly W. Use those intact polymers. Well look, this was a lot of fun, guys. For my first podcast, of this this new series, I couldn't be happier to to share that with you. 00:37:56:18 - 00:38:01:12 Host: Kelly W. So thank you so much for, for joining me. It was a pleasure. 00:38:01:12 - 00:38:04:12 Host: Kelly W. Hopefully we'll do another one real soon. 00:38:04:14 - 00:38:05:12 Guest: Jake M. Appreciate Thanks Kelly. 00:38:05:14 - 00:38:08:20 Guest: Emma M. Thank you Kelly. Thanks. Good to see you Jake and Peter. 00:38:08:22 - 00:38:10:08 Guest: Peter C. And thanks everybody.