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How is Glue Changing Recycling? Podcast With Geisys Ventures
57 Plays4 months ago
Recycling and sustainability are big challenges today, especially with plastics and materials science. Our recycling systems are flawed, and many people aren't aware of the issues, making environmental problems worse. Dr. Kristoffer Stokes and his team at Geisys Ventures are tackling these problems head-on with innovative solutions for plastics and manufacturing.
Their cutting-edge technology, D-glue, makes it easier to recycle and repair products made from mixed materials. In this episode, we talk about the hurdles in recycling, how Geisys Ventures is addressing them, and the importance of reducing consumption and fixing products. Dr. Stokes also shares success stories and advises anyone wanting to make a positive impact on the environment.
Guest: Dr. Kristoffer Stokes, Principal Scientist at Geisys Ventures
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Transcript
Introduction and Topic Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello friends, you are watching a brand new episode of the Green New Perspective podcast, a place we created with the hope to get you interested in learning more about technologies or products that are being developed with the aim of combating climate change. The focus of today's episode is on recycling and reusing. My guest today is Dr. Christopher Stokes, who developed an innovative adhesive that could definitely help in ramping up recycling rates and promoting circular economy. Enjoy!
Guest Introduction and Background
00:00:37
Speaker
Hi, Chris, and welcome to the Green New Perspective podcast. Hi there, thanks for inviting me. So my first question for all of my guests, and we will be the same as well, like, ah can you introduce yourself and tell me and the audience a bit more about your company, Gacy's Venture? Absolutely. So I'm Dr. Chris Stokes. I'm principal scientist at Geisse's Ventures, where we ah do a variety of things really centered around material science. So ah we do R and&D management consulting to help products get moving faster. We do manufacturing process improvements. We also do R and&D product development.
00:01:18
Speaker
So my background is in polymer chemistry. I have a PhD from MIT. I did a startup ah that had an exit in the oil and gas field ah chemical sector. I went on to ah a company manufacturing battery components and as well as an adhesive company where I was global director of product development. And what inspired you to start Geysus Ventures and what specific problems are you aiming to solve
Focusing on Plastics and Sustainability
00:01:45
Speaker
there? Geysus Ventures, I was really focused on trying to solve issues with plastics and plastics manufacturing.
00:01:55
Speaker
the Some of the projects I work on here involve trying to improve sustainable products. um I'm working with a company that's recycling party cups into new fibers. Some currently are not the best. For example, in my town, we have free recycling of plastics, metals, containers of that sort, but nobody really looks at what types of materials are actually allowed. So everything with some sort of plastic number on it gets dumped in because there's no charge for recycling, but you have to pay for trash to be taken away so it's it's both good and bad incentives for recycling the bad part is that this mixed recycling ends up having you know we're only technically supposed to have number one and number two plastics in our in our recycling stream But there's all the plastics gets dumped in as long as it's got a number on it, right? And then the second thing is ah aiming for a circular economy.
Challenges of a Circular Economy
00:02:56
Speaker
We want to be able to reuse, repurpose, and recycle things much easier.
00:03:03
Speaker
And our current manufacturing processes are not really amenable to that in the fact that you know coming from the adhesives world, we use a lot of glue to manufacture things because it reduces labor, it increases the longevity, and it's a light weighting factor. Mm hmm. And do you feel like we need maybe a bit more education when we talk about recycling of plastics? Like you mentioned, people are not reading the label. They think that everything which is made of plastic should just be recycled because it's like all the plastic is the same. um And also how does product design and material selection by manufacturers affect the recyclability of the products? Absolutely.
00:03:46
Speaker
my My go to ah discussion as far as packaging manufacturers and packaging designers is the you know, choosing poorly for plastics is actually the Ferrero Rocher chocolates. I don't know if you're familiar with them, but I usually get them as a gift for you know, during during the holidays and they're delicious but every time i open up one of those packages i get frustrated because each chocolate is individually wrapped in a foil which has a sticker on top of it and then it is placed into a cup that usually has a little dab of hot glue to keep it in the cup.
00:04:24
Speaker
And then each of those cups is packaged into a thermal formed plastic set. And then that thermal form plastic set is placed into a hard plastic yeah that is. probably injection molded, and I think it used to be made out of polystyrene, which is one of the plastics that's really difficult to accept. But I did see recently that they've tried to move to polypropylene ah containers for that that big container, so there's they might be making the roof move in the right direction, but it's sort of my go-to example for
00:04:59
Speaker
non-sustainable packaging in the fact that it's mixed materials, it's the wrong materials, and it's just excessive materials. So do you feel like when when people want to recycle a Ferrero Rocher packaging, they just throw it all out in the same bin? you know while while they People actually don't know that each of these parts should be recycled differently, and some of the parts are actually non-recyclable at all. so yeah And actually, I would probably argue that maybe the foil is is ah is recyclable, but I'm not sure. But basically, the rest of it should probably be be tossed in the trash. Because again, from from my perspective, even my town doesn't accept polypropylene, the big case outside that should get tossed.
00:05:42
Speaker
Yes, you get like a small tasty dessert, but it comes in a lot of unnecessary packaging that is not recyclable and basically ends up in a landfill. Yeah, we should take think about the environment as well while we eat our tasty desserts, right? Absolutely. um You know, we we want to try and have our cake and eat it too. You are working, like you mentioned, in the adhesive industry. So what kind of solutions are you offering to better this situation that we have
Innovation in Recycling Technology
00:06:10
Speaker
at the moment? One of the things when I was working in in the adhesives company was I had a very large customer that continued to come back to me and ask, do you have a defeatable adhesive?
00:06:22
Speaker
And I had to keep saying, no, these things don't exist in the way that you want it. The reason was is that company uses a substantial amount of glue to make low profile electronics. There's fabrics attached to to plastics for speakers. There's um keyboards and cases that have various types of materials all glued together to make sure that it doesn't fall apart when you're using it. And they wanted to be able to pull it apart at the end of the life and reuse or recycle the materials. Because again, in consumer electronics, there's actually a lot of adhesives being used for for manufacturing purposes. In 2020, I was bored because of you know something that happened during that time.
00:07:07
Speaker
And my college ah friend, ah Phil Costanzo, who's currently a professor at ah Cal Poly, was working on some interesting technology um really aimed at rehealable coatings. So if you got a scratch in your car, you could take a blow dryer to it and it would fix itself. I suggested, hey, what if we took this technology and repurposed it? I think that this might be usable for adhesive technology. And so we got to thinking about it and we started doing some work and ah came up with a new glue, calling it D glue. And it is a an adhesive that's meant to be he bonded or defeated at the end of its usable life so that you can recover the but valuable materials inside.
00:07:55
Speaker
Yeah, we mentioned that when you use glue in making a product, for example, we talked about that earlier, like when you're making a shoe or a sneaker, a lot of these parts are actually glued together, which maybe the answer doesn't know about. And you cannot unglue them and you cannot recycle that, let's say shoe, because the glue is not recyclable. So what you're doing is basically making a product that is enabling other manufacturers to recycle their products, right? Absolutely. And one of the things is it's not just about recyclability. It's about manufacturing rework. So if you're manufacturing something and you need to fix it, if it's glued together, you can't really easily pull it apart and redo it. You have to start all over again and trash that component. um It's about repair. Right to repair is a huge area that's just starting out and it's it's estimated to be a $1 trillion dollar market once we get it in place, producing so many jobs for individual countries and the world.
00:08:58
Speaker
And then there's the recycling, right? Because we use mixed materials. And so mixed materials are the bane of recycling. We have to use them because individual materials have drawbacks. So we use composites to take advantage of of different types of properties. But this is a way to unlock all of those pathways. If we go back to the story about the recycling, how significant is the role of the consumer behavior in recycling? And what do you think, what strategies can be employed to encourage more effective recycling habits? The consumer is is really important, right? And our behavior that has been trained over the last probably 50 plus years has been more or less you you take it in, you use it, and you toss it.
00:09:47
Speaker
We now know that that's really probably not the right way to handle things. So by being more aware of repairable materials, repairable products, I think increasing the longevity of the products that we are actually using and enabling us to do that, asking for legislation, asking, are you know, demanding it from the companies that are producing these. I want to make sure that I can fix my product before I toss it in the trash.
Impact of Government Policies
00:10:21
Speaker
I think that has to happen. And it's it's on the consumer because at the end of the day, everybody, you know, every company wants to sell you more of their widget.
00:10:29
Speaker
What impact do you think that government policies and incentives have on recycling rates? So I think in the course of government regulation, it's it's where it's going to have to come down to. You know, Europe has been leading the the charge on all of these sustainability efforts for years. The US gets dragged along more or less unwillingly because of the shifts in the the market that happened in Europe. Some of the economic incentives for using recycled materials are not quite appropriate. So for example, recycled polyester, it there's a 30% markup on it, right? It costs 30% more to use or to buy recycled polyester resin to make fibers out of than it does to to buy virgin materials. So there's an economic incentive to not use recycled materials. um And then there's also the additional property impact from
00:11:24
Speaker
you know, mechanically recycled ah ah polyester. There's some chemical recycling methods available where you can sort of get the properties of um virgin materials out of recycled materials, but those processes are are still scaling up and it's difficult to to get the raw materials to put into that that recycling process. And recycling rates vary between different countries or regions. So what do you think, which lessons can be learned from areas with high recycling rates?
Reusing vs. Recycling
00:11:57
Speaker
We keep talking about recycling and I just want to i just want to reintroduce the word reuse.
00:12:04
Speaker
We just gloss over the word reuse because it's immediate recycle. When I lived in Denmark in 2000, one of the things that struck me was the reuse of the bottles, right? Every beer bottle had a, you know, it was a very nice thick bottle and you put it back in the container and you you buy your bottles and they were plastic at the time and ah you could see scuff marks on it. We have we as consumers have to be accepting of defects that are cosmetic in nature, you know, certainly not, you you know, leaking bottles or bottles that are leaching out ah chemicals. That's horrible. But there's something to be said for reusing.
00:12:47
Speaker
And can you tell me, do you have some success stories to share regarding Gacy's ventures that contributed to the client's journey towards sustainability?
Success Stories in Recycling
00:12:56
Speaker
I've been working with the new norm fabrics and trying to navigate the the difficulty of recycling materials. Lauren Choi is fantastic. She's been doing a really great job at pushing her recycled party cup textiles. And um she came to me with some technical expertise questions and I've been helping her out. She's got in enthusiasm for sustainable solutions. She's got some things in the pipeline for, you know, she's She's not a one-trick pony. She's got a lot of other things in the pipeline. We have been working together for ah for a year now, and she just launched her shop that has party cup-infused textiles. So a pair of beanies, sweaters. Yeah, like accessories brand.
00:13:43
Speaker
Yeah, so this is how she's she's starting out, is is trying to make some apparel, get some revenue from that, and then um push the recycled solution more broadly. And it's ah it's working out really well. And as an entrepreneur in a niche and challenging field, what advice would you give to other entrepreneur entrepreneurs who want to start a business like yours, focused on sustainability, repair, recycling, circular economy? Persistence. um you know it's ah You have to ride the roller coaster, especially in the sustainable world. There's a lot of ah starts and stops. My colleague Phil and I, we keep applying for new sources of funding ah for government grants. Some are denied, some are not denied, um but we keep persisting. And we've been doing this for almost four years now. And this isn't software.
00:14:43
Speaker
right I can't sit there with a computer for six months and come out with another social media app. This is hard goods technology, right? this is This is something that takes time. It takes effort. And there's a little, maybe a lot of luck involved in timing. So keep at it. You're doing the right thing. What is the role of marketing in this process? Because you have to explain what you're doing to people who are probably not you know introduced to the solutions that you're offering to them. So how do you feel that presenting those solutions and the actual the actual words that you're using are important in this process? Especially when you're talking about getting you know money for funding projects.
00:15:26
Speaker
You have to boil it down to sort of the simplest use case. um And then the other marketing component is have a really compelling demo. We're still working on a really compelling demo. Right now, we're you know we've been bonding fabrics together. We've been bonding aluminum together with some success. But trying to to get people's attention, you know maybe with sort of the TikTok factor associated with it would be extremely valuable. But boil the technology down. to its core essential and no further. ahha So that everyone can understand it. how How difficult it is for you as a professor to do that.
00:16:07
Speaker
um So for me, I've been doing it long enough that people usually are are pretty impressed with their ability to grasp things. But with my my friend who's an academic professor, you know, I sometimes have to say, all right, we got to we got to dial it back. Even I haven't done this chemistry in a long period of time. So I know what you're talking about, but I'm not quite with you yet. So let's back it off. It's it's a fun dynamic. So if it's too complicated, even for you. Absolutely. um You spend a little time out of the lab and and sometimes you lose more than you'd like.
00:16:40
Speaker
While working in the field of sustainability for such a long time can be a source of demotivation. All of us to have experienced that sort of thing. So what personally motivates you to continue working in this field? You know, my startup company was i involved in the oil and gas field kind ah chemicals industry. The approach was for enhanced oil recovery. We had some technology you know that was also applicable to fracking. There's part of me that feels a little guilty for profiting off of, you know, fracking industry. I have four kids, right? And so I came into the polymer world when it was everything's new, everything could be solved with polymers. And I've seen sort of now this vilification of plastics, of these sorts of things. And I do think that there still are technical solutions out there that can help us. But I do feel a little sense of paying for my my past sins of contributing to the fracking industry. I mean, we still need oil and gas. where We have not moved to a completely clean energy environment. So the reality is is that if we can make that greener, great. But I do feel some sense of of ah ownership over trying to make things better. So you're moving into the right direction, right? Trying to.
00:18:04
Speaker
trying to. yeah so and what we We mentioned a lot about repairment, recycling.
Environmental Advice and Personal Insights
00:18:10
Speaker
so how can What advice would you give to everyday people who want to be like you and want to make a positive change and to make more environmentally conscious choices, what should they do when it comes to repairs or recycling, when we talk about plastics and textiles because we were focusing on those today? I think number one thing that I i tell people is reduce your consumption. Try to figure out how not to consume so much. You know, I'm guilty of it. I try to be aware of my various types of consumption um and I try to reduce it as much as I can. The other thing is repair your stuff.
00:18:49
Speaker
you know, keep it maintained, keep it keep it in good working order and it will last a long period of time. My son is actually really excited about these sorts of things. He's 15 years old, you know, his Xbox controller was broken. So I said, guess what? YouTube's an amazing invention. Let's go on YouTube, see how to fix it. So he actually has torn apart ah several Xbox controllers, desoldered sticks, put them back in. And so teaching him to take care of things when they're broken, repair them if you can. It's increasingly difficult to do that. And that's why we're trying to get this this adhesive ah concept out, this adhesive platform out.
00:19:32
Speaker
but repair your stuff. Don't let it be destined for the trash. no That's true. How can people find
Closing Remarks and Guest Contact Info
00:19:38
Speaker
you? Can they find you on social media? Where can they get informed on what you're doing and what your company is doing? Where can they get some more research on DGLU? Yep, absolutely. So I'm on LinkedIn, Chris Stokes and gysusventures.com is the best place to get a hold of Gysus Ventures and see what we're about, what we have as far as capabilities.
00:20:03
Speaker
And then dglue is d-glue.com. It's kind of a holder page right now, but um it's got a link to our granted patent. I'm excited to to continue working with with people on this. Well, Chris, thank you for being, I guess, on the Green New Perspective podcast. And I wish you all the luck on funding and launching the glue. Dunya, thank you so much for your time. I really enjoyed the conversation.
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:20:34
Speaker
Hello lovely people! If you're watching our podcast, then you know the drill! This is the end of this episode and the perfect time for me to introduce you to our sponsor New Perspective, a Boston-based marketing agency working with clean tech clients only. They provide digital services and help clean tech businesses to grow. If you're interested to learn What they offer, click on the links in the description of this episode. And if you want to support our efforts here in promoting clean tech companies and giving them a voice, consider subscribing to our podcast on your favorite streaming platform. We are all over the place. If you want to watch us, you can do that on YouTube. If you want to give us a lesson, you can do that on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or wherever you stream your podcast. Well, thank you for tuning in and hopefully I'll see you in in the next one. Bye!