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Ourobio's Alec Brewer on what synthetic biology can bring to the plastics industry
145 Plays1 year ago
Mike, Karthik, and Anthony catch up on the news - including the UN, wind energy, and the eternal Yankees vs Mets debate, and then are joined by Ourobio's co-founder Alec Brewer to dig into the opportunities for synthetic biology in the circular economy of plastics.
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Transcript
Reunion and New York Baseball Talk
00:00:11
Speaker
Hello and welcome to another episode of Innovation Matters. It is the sustainable innovation podcast brought to you by Lux Research. It's the sustainable innovation podcast that is held together with hopes and dreams, just like the Nike produced baseball uniforms, which are also only held together with hopes and dreams.
00:00:35
Speaker
That's a really topical reference. I feel like people were posting about it like months and months ago. But you know what? We're here. We're doing it. It's Anthony. And for the first time in a while, all three of us are together. I've got Karthik and Mike here in the studio, the virtual studio. Karthik, how's it going?
00:00:55
Speaker
Yeah, things are good. Last week was very nice. The sun is out again. I went to see the tulips and I got a Yankees baseball cap. So very topical, very topical. It was a gift I don't follow baseball. I hated New York Yankees. Well, maybe. I don't know anything about them. So apart from the fact that Jay-Z sang about them in the song. It's like if it's good enough for Jay-Z, it's good enough for me. That's honestly the most legitimate reason to
00:01:23
Speaker
to wear an article of Yankees affiliated clothing. It's like, I'm a Jay-Z fan. Mike, as a resident New Yorker, what's your status on the Yankees? It'd be very anti-Yankees, and anti-Mets too, honestly. I grew up in Cincinnati, so I'm a Reds fan. That's what I'm an equal opportunity hater here. Sticking with my loyalty there, yeah. That's understandable.
UN Plastic Waste Treaty Progress
00:01:44
Speaker
That's understandable.
00:01:45
Speaker
I do feel like, and I'm curious for your opinion, if you see someone in New York City wearing either a Yankees cap or a Mets cap, which one do you think is more likely to cause a problem on the subway or just be a jerk?
00:02:00
Speaker
Because to me, it's always the Yankees, guys from New Jersey, in New York City who are like the most obnoxious. You know what I mean? It's like, you're from Yonkers. You're not a New Yorker. You're here in the city. You're wearing a Yankees cap.
00:02:19
Speaker
And you're talking extremely loudly into my ear on the subway or whatever, like, why are you doing this? I mean, I live uptown in like West Harlem. So it's, you know, by proximity, it's pretty much all Yankees fans there. And it's a lot of like, you know, people from the Dominican Republic and stuff like that are like pretty hardcore baseball fans. And I feel like
00:02:40
Speaker
Most of the Yankees fans around me come by it pretty honestly and I really have problems with them. You always got to watch out for the jersey transplants. I guess I'm just displaying my bias here. My dad's from Queens, so we were real Mets fans. Mets fan household growing up. That's just where I'm at.
00:03:03
Speaker
the righteous Mets versus the horrible, the horrible, the brave New York Yankees. But yeah, we've got, you know, we've got some news. We've got a lot of interesting news. Two things in particular we wanted to flag up and I'll actually just take a crack at the first one, which is United Nations fourth Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee meeting in Ottawa, Canada.
00:03:25
Speaker
our great neighbor to the north. And what a meeting it was for the listeners who are not aware or maybe haven't been following this ultra-rivening news story as closely as we have here at the Innovation Matters global headquarters. The United Nations in 22
00:03:41
Speaker
signed a resolution to create a binding legal instrument on plastic waste. And we are pretty deep into the process of negotiating that international treaty now. It's supposed to get done by the end of the year. We have another meeting set for November in Busan.
00:03:56
Speaker
South Korea. And yeah, we had this meeting in Ottawa. I think the biggest thing that I would take away from it or the thing that was good was that we actually got some real momentum on negotiating the actual text of the document.
00:04:11
Speaker
which we basically had not really been doing up until this point. We had been putting a lot of comments on there and getting a lot of statements from all these different nations, but we actually had delegates sitting down and discussing what should, and most importantly, what shouldn't be in the text of the document. We actually made some progress towards an agreement, but we're still pretty far away from
00:04:37
Speaker
actually meeting our deadline, the deadline of 2024. I say our deadline, like I'm involved in this process. As a citizen of Earth. In the same way I'm involved in the New York Mets like 2024 baseball season, I'm also involved in the U.N. process here, which is to say I have a lot of opinions about it, but not particularly actionable sort of impact on it.
00:04:59
Speaker
sitting on the sideline wearing your your UN cap and I really hope both sides negotiate hard. God, I would rock a UN like baseball cap like a UN in a governmental negotiating committee on plastic waste and also in the marine environment just like increasingly like peacekeeper helmet blue.
00:05:18
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. Corporate lobbyists fear me. Fish love me. Plastic waste in the marine environment fears me. You know, small island nations love me. It's just like increasingly smaller text. But yeah, this event, this conference has been a little bit of
00:05:45
Speaker
It's a little funky to talk about, and Anthony, I recorded a webinar on this, which you can, I think, find on the Lux site. It's been consequential on the process level, as you were saying, Anthony, but there's not really a lot of news to talk about on sort of the content or substance level. Like, none of the key questions were settled or got all that much
00:06:11
Speaker
closer to being settled. So I think there's going to be a lot of important, important stuff. I don't know. Maybe I think they got closer to being settled, but not in like a substance way in like a process and the timeline ticking type. Yeah, I guess it didn't become any more or less clear what the outcome is like. It didn't become any more.
00:06:33
Speaker
I do sense this is one of those things where the pressure ramps up and ramps up and ramps up, and then you have ... The work does not get done in a linear fashion, right? They're really taking a page out of the Anthony Johns Guiavo report writing process of basically leaving it all for the last minute. College student writing a term paper here, it's like, oh shit, this thing's too late, I really got to get her.
00:06:58
Speaker
Yeah. Or it's doing six months now, right? It's supposed to be done in November. It's doing basically six months now. But yeah, the interesting thing, you know, substantively is that we hopefully will get some sharper definitions. That was one of the takeaways of the intersessional work is do a lot of work on the definitions. And that's really important because without that, you basically can't actually do meaningful negotiation, right?
00:07:23
Speaker
because everyone is just saying, oh, what is the full life cycle of plastics? This is one of the points of contention. Does that include production of plastics? So it's like, OK, we need to define these terms at a very basic level, and then we can get involved in some of the more substantive negotiations.
00:07:38
Speaker
Yeah, I think they're going to have the legally binding global agreement by 2024. I think the end of 2024. So it'll be pretty exciting to see what they bring about in terms of legislation to end plastic waste. But I think apart from subtly dropping your middle name there, Anthony, for our listeners who don't know, I think it'll be very interesting.
Plastic Waste Legislation Approaches
00:08:02
Speaker
I'm sure all of our listeners know by now what my middle name is. Come on. The listeners know.
00:08:07
Speaker
It's all over the fan pages and our subreddit and everything that people are posting all over. Whoever starts the Innovation Matters subreddit is forever, forever goaded in my book as far as I'm concerned. Go ahead, Karthik.
00:08:22
Speaker
Yeah, so I was just thinking how much we have spoken about plastic waste, plastic demand, as well as how we're going to go about plastic waste management in this podcast. So I think it would be very interesting to see how the legislation comes about in terms of maybe shifting plastic waste, plastic demand, or maybe opening opportunities for new ways to improve plastic waste recycling or waste management, sorting and efforts in that respect. So I'm quite excited for that.
00:08:52
Speaker
Yeah, I think the ways this will be impactful will be really subtle. A good example, there's so much focus, especially from our clients and the corporate lobbying set, on specific pro recycling types of policies.
00:09:07
Speaker
Oh, we need a content target, we need a mandate, we need X and Y, we need funding for it. But just something like improving waste management practices in the developing economies, like, hey, let's ban illegal burning. If we can make substantive progress on that, there is a lot of
00:09:28
Speaker
You know, the amount of plastic waste that gets recycled is only about 10 million tons, and there's probably about 20 million tons of waste generated in a year. So the opportunity to improve the supply of waste or just increase the supply of waste is really
00:09:45
Speaker
substantive, and it's really tilted not towards America, even, or certainly not Europe, where things are working pretty well already, but it's really in the developing economies. And so much of what this... And we were talking about this on the webinar, Mike, but a big part of what the UN theoretically and ideally serves to function as is a way for these developing countries and island nations and stuff
00:10:10
Speaker
to have a voice and create policy in a way that they're moderately co-equal with the first world powers. They're not really, kind of, but they have a lot more sway at the UN than they do in basically any other forum.
00:10:26
Speaker
Yeah, it's like, you know, like Micronesia and the Cook Islands and stuff are like some of the major drivers of the discussion at this. Yeah, because I mean, they're being harmed, like legitimate, like, you know, there is a legitimate harm that they're trying to address here. And the process reflects that in a lot of ways, which is which is good. But, you know, those impacts, I think, are not being fully
00:10:52
Speaker
I don't know, a calculated for at this point, I guess I would say, or, you know, the focus from the corporate set is kind of elsewhere. And I think that stuff is going to be really well. Well, the focus on the corporate set was it was much more as the other thing I think was notable about this session, the science is that the corporate set would seem to be a lot more present and a lot more engaged. And you saw, you know, companies like Dow put out a big statement and Dow Chemical put out a big
00:11:17
Speaker
statement about the INC, which, you know, kind of to your point, I thought was interesting, is very, very focused on the waste management infrastructure. Because they're sort of like, we're happy to recycle this stuff, like we're doing advances in paralysis and all this stuff. But like, somebody's got to figure out, like, please figure out this like collection and sorting stuff.
00:11:41
Speaker
And so that's kind of a bit of the tension here, as you're saying at the value chain, that there's a question of like, are we going to deal with plastic waste by getting better at recycling plastic? Or are we going to deal with it by just producing less plastic in the first place? And obviously, the industry view is much more the first side. They want to create the circular economy with plastic and find ways to process it better.
00:12:10
Speaker
a lot of the island nations and then some of these other drivers in the High Ambition Coalition, the faction that's been pushing for more aggressive action at this conference is more on trying to cut back on actual plastic production. That's the big question. Are we actually going to cut back on plastic production or not, and to what extent? I think probably not. Yeah.
00:12:40
Speaker
you know, the composition of the other is given the vibe. Yeah, the plastics
Wooden Wind Turbine Blades: Possibilities and Challenges
00:12:44
Speaker
producing nations. And we talked about this in more detail in the webinar, but like, it's got to be a consensus based mechanism. So you basically need everybody to agree. So it's just very the way the whole decision making process is set up makes it very, very unlikely that we're going to get plastic bands or things that that really meaningfully reduce plastic production, because there's just not enough people that there's too many people that really don't don't want that.
00:13:08
Speaker
I think there's a role for restricting certain types of single-use plastics, getting rid of straws or whatever. It could be a sensible policy or restricting. As we've seen and talked about in some areas, getting rid of polystyrene disposable containers and things like that in favor of materials that are easier to recycle. Those kinds of things, I think, could and in a lot of places will play a role.
00:13:37
Speaker
you know, in sort of addressing the plastic waste issue, but it's probably not going to come predominantly from major reductions in plastic volume. Yeah, I mean, that's the interesting question is, I think it's entirely possible we do get a significant slowdown, if not an outright decrease in primary plastic production over the next 20 to 30 years. Oh, yeah. In primary, right, because we're using, if we're doing more recycling. Because we're shifting to recycling. Yeah, exactly.
00:14:02
Speaker
But yeah, I don't know if it's going to be because of mandates. I think it's more likely the market forces. At some point, if you look at almost any other primary material, we recycle those at rates 50% plus. Paper, metals, glass. The glass recycling is pretty low quality, but we still recycle it. Even stuff like building materials gets recycled a fair bit.
00:14:25
Speaker
Plastic is really an outlier in terms of how non circular it is like compared to most other materials. But as you say, I think it's much easier to take care of plastic recycling given there are so many ways to access the value chain. For example, do you want to introduce
00:14:41
Speaker
reusable packaging? Do you want to reuse reusable cups as we have seen with Club Zero and what they do? What do you do in terms of demand for plastics? But I think this is something we again discussed earlier in one of our podcast episodes, which was when we are going to kind of hit peak plastic production. I think I don't think we're going to see that in time before the 2030s, right? Where we're going to have like reduction in plastic demand.
00:15:11
Speaker
I mean, or reduction in plastic production. So if it depends on how fast mechanical recycling can scale up, it's probably the 2030s. Right. Um, and I think particularly if we get a very strong UN treaty and we get a lot more global like waste collection, then you could really see it happen by the end of this decade, I think. Right. But, uh, but it just sort of depends.
00:15:37
Speaker
But I still think that it will be legislation that would drive this ultimately. I mean, legislation will be the driver because the whole waste collection infrastructure is really legislation driven, right? It's just, are we going to create this situation via direct bans on plastics production and limits or, you know, market mechanisms that create recycling, right? And much more likely to be the latter.
00:16:00
Speaker
I think we could have a combination of both, isn't it? Because you don't have to completely ban plastics. At the same time, you can also introduce advanced recycling methods and monetize the entire recycling process for people to incentivize scaling up recycling capacity.
00:16:14
Speaker
But the direct caps are just really politically like you could do both. But like the direct caps on plastic production are politically like challenging. You know what I mean? You know, even even climate Stalin over here recognizes that that's a pretty pretty big ask a lot of different countries to make, especially at the U.N. level. But speaking of ways to reduce plastic. Kartik, you flagged up our second story, which is wooden.
00:16:42
Speaker
wind turbine blades installed. And I think it's funny because they are described as the world's first wooden wind turbine blades, which is, I get what they mean. Somebody hasn't been to the Netherlands. Yeah, but it's really patently untrue, right? Yeah. Maybe they're talking about the world's first installation for power production because the wind turbines in the Netherlands are windmills, so they were used for milling wheat.
00:17:09
Speaker
But they start up in Germany called wooden blades. It's V-O-O-D-I-N, wooden blades. Very nice wordplay there. So they have introduced a wooden wind turbine blade that's 19.3 meters long. So it's not as long as the ones that you typically see in an offshore wind farm, for example.
00:17:28
Speaker
that could, you know, wingspan could be as long as those of the A380s and things like that. So not the largest or the longest wind turbine plates, I should say. And they say that it's much more easier to recycle because it's wood-based and they use laminated veneer lumber and they say it has minimal carbon footprint.
00:17:49
Speaker
Now, for me, why this is, I mean, if you want to think about this, like you said, wooden wind turbines or blades are not a new innovation. These are things that I've been trying in the past. But the reason why we have moved on to an epoxy based composite based wind blade is because they are structurally more sound.
00:18:11
Speaker
and they last longer, you can make them larger and so you can produce more power and they're more stiffer exactly and in terms of brittleness and stuff wood is too brittle so you know if it breaks it's not gonna you know like bend it's gonna break break which again can be damaging
00:18:29
Speaker
to a lot of the components. But I'm curious to hear your thoughts because we have the material science boys here. What do you think in terms of coatings and performance side of the wind blade? I'm quite skeptical as a mechanical engineer thinking about this. I'm skeptical for a lot of reasons. I think what's interesting, there's a couple of things I would call out. One is just any type of laminated lumber product, I'm really sketchy about moisture, right?
00:18:58
Speaker
I'm always worried about moisture. That's why all the five over ones that we build here in America, I'm convinced they're all going to collapse in the next 50 years, just because once moisture gets into them.
00:19:12
Speaker
And those are definitely made with lower quality. I'm sure they're using a very high quality lumber product here in this wind blade. But it's still susceptible to moisture in a meaningful way. These wind blades have a 20 year service life. We'll see how durable this ends up being. But macro level, I don't think it makes a ton of sense, obviously.
00:19:37
Speaker
What's interesting is the advantage or the real driver here is recyclability. That's kind of the headline thing they call out.
00:19:46
Speaker
They talk about the carbon footprint. I think that's legit, certainly. But they're really focused on recyclability. And they make the point that, yeah, these wind turbine blades are not recyclable, or they're just becoming more recyclable. And the infrastructure is there, still developing. And that these laminated lumber blades will be a lot more recyclable, which is true.
00:20:12
Speaker
And it's, I mean, like recyclable, isn't it? It's recyclable into what? I mean, it's wood. You're going to like, it's going to become plywood or is it? Yeah.
00:20:24
Speaker
Yeah, so it's recyclable in the sense that you could turn into like sawdust and like, you know, put it back into some other engineered lumber product, I guess. It's also presumably easier to manage just from a like, because one of the big challenges with recycling wind blades, probably the biggest challenge with recycling wind blades is that they're
00:20:44
Speaker
you know, even these are small wind blades and they're still 20 meters long. Like that's a really big and really like awkwardly shaped. So if you can like cut them more easily, if you can manage them more easily with like equipment on site, then they become a lot more recyclable as a pure matter of logistics. Right. But I agree with you in the sense that you're not going to be turning this into like
00:21:13
Speaker
It's going to be down cycled for sure. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. But the point. Because so we have our we have our forum in Boston next week at this point, by the time you listener hearing this, it'll be the pride of the day before we will probably put this out on that Monday and that's on the Tuesday next the deal. One of the one of the talks that we're giving in there is with my colleague Cheryl, who we've had on the podcast actually in the past and
00:21:44
Speaker
We do this whole section on wind because the question we're asking is like, we want to scale up climate tech in the Northeast, and there's all this community resistance to clean energy or any type of new project, even though, generally speaking, everyone likes clean energy. People, you know, sustainability, renewable energy is broadly favorable in the population. And, you know, we wanted to look in this issue, like, what's the deal? And what we found is that
00:22:14
Speaker
there are these specific complaints and specific points of resistance. And one was like wind turbine noise. And for me, I was like, oh, this is like just like a fake NIMBY conspiracy theory, kind of like bullshit, right? But then I actually did the research. And what I found is in the 80s, like wind turbine noise was actually a pretty significant issue. And
00:22:41
Speaker
Not only was it significant in the sense that they were a lot louder than they are today,
00:22:48
Speaker
it could cause resonance with a house. So you could have like wind turbines near a community and like 20 people out of a community of 3000 would actually be legitimately like intensely affected by this, right? Because their house would like resonate at the frequency of like the turbulence caused by the wind turbines. And like their whole- Like the width of your bedroom was just right that it would, yeah. Yeah, like your whole house is basically humming all the time, right?
00:23:15
Speaker
And all your neighbors, they're completely unaffected. But you just happen to be in the perfect spot. And so you have these complaints in the 80s around wind turbine noise and the effects it has. If your house is vibrating all the time, people are like, I can't sleep. It's impacting my health. All that is true.
00:23:36
Speaker
Now, today, and even by the 90s, in the early 2000s, completely a solved problem. Wind turbines have gotten much larger, which actually reduces their noise because they're rotating much more slowly.
00:23:53
Speaker
They've gotten much bigger, but they're also a lot further away from communities, right? We've moved away from these small little turbines near people's houses to these really massive turbines out in the middle of nowhere or offshore, right? And it's just like these issues have basically been completely solved. But today in the community sentiment and the community knowledge, like population consensus around wind turbines, noise and the
00:24:17
Speaker
potential discomfort caused by noise is still an issue in people's minds, right? And so the point is like, hey, once you
00:24:27
Speaker
this understanding, it's really hard to unform. It's really hard to break that negative association, even though it's no longer factually legitimate. And so you see these recycling efforts for wind blades. It's like, is recyclability a problem? No, not really. And certainly in the context of clean energy, the benefits of clean wind energy are far, far outweighing any negative drawbacks caused by the amount of waste produced from them.
00:24:57
Speaker
the amount of waste produced is still pretty small by wind turbines. But if I think there is this recognition now in the wind industry, and they're being very proactive about it, every manufacturer has these big recyclability initiatives. They're completely changing the types of materials that are made out of the blade. Even on the resin side, all the major Siemens games say like Vestas, they're all introducing these recyclable resins.
00:25:23
Speaker
I think in a completely proactive way, right? Like just to head off the creation of this potential negative association. And you know, so it's just interesting to see like this industry be so proactive about it. And then like, you look at like the plastics industry, like Dow recycling or whatever, and it's like, they're not, you know, doing that type of productivity at all.
00:25:45
Speaker
Yeah, there was this funny video going around on Twitter or social media a couple of weeks ago about the kind of thing you're talking about, this promotional like, oh, we're doing this. I forget who it was from. We're doing this great wind turbine blade recycling. And it was like a minute and a half long video. And the whole thing is walking you through all the steps that they do to brush red and process and refine the waste of these turbine blades. And then in the last five seconds, it's like,
00:26:11
Speaker
Yeah. And then we burned it in a cement plant. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So that might be the fate for the wind turbine blades at an end of life also. But, you know, I don't know. I mean, incineration is obviously not the optimal end of life solution, but it's, you know, depending on what you're displacing, if you're getting some energy out of it, it's not maybe not the worst thing in the world, but it was kind of funny.
00:26:37
Speaker
But in terms of being proactive, I think if you look at while we were doing research on wind blade recycling, the one thing we noticed was that Bloomberg and all these major news articles have these very catchy headlines stating wind turbines aren't green. This is where they go at the end of life. You know, these clickbait articles that show you what they do in terms of landfilling. We are already having issues with landfilling.
00:26:59
Speaker
And when blade management is going to be very difficult in the future, especially given we need about 630 gigawatts of annual edition starting 2030 or something like that, according to the IEA's Net Zero roadmap. So we do need a lot of wind. And so I'm not surprised that they're doing this proactive thing, but maybe getting back to the wooden blade here. And I'm curious to play devil's advocate in terms of the moisture part. If you play a barrier, I mean, if you have like a barrier coating,
00:27:28
Speaker
on this wind blade content prevent moisture going through but where it could have a problem is in the recyclability of it because the barrier coating would then pose a problem in what you do. That's the number one rule of engineering. Everything leaks, right? Everything leaks eventually.
00:27:46
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, everything leaks a lot sooner than eventually, frankly, as far as I'm concerned. This is kind of a diversion, but my sister used to be the house manager at Bard College, their opera house. And their opera house is this big- I've been there. It's a good opera.
00:28:09
Speaker
It's a Frank Gehry. Frank Gehry. It basically looks like this big ball of tinfoil. It has this huge, incredible, sloped, curvaceous aluminum roof. And it's a piece of shit. It leaks constantly. In the winter, they have to cover it in scaffolds because if it snows, it can't support its own weight.
00:28:29
Speaker
And it's diversion but the point I'm making here is that is that everything leaks right water gets in everywhere and especially wind turbines They're subject to a lot of abrasion right leading edge abrasion is a major cause or a major pain point among You know in the wind turbine blades, right? So just like you know You can put a barrier coating on it and I'm sure they do but like you just can't stop water water gets in everywhere eventually as far as I'm concerned
00:28:54
Speaker
And so they want to now expand on this design and make it an 80 meter wind blade in the future, which I really don't see happening. You just, I just don't think what is that stiff, man? Like you need a carbon fiber spar, you know, to hit that level of stiffness, I think. I'm not sold on the structural aspects of this design. Let's put it that way.
00:29:15
Speaker
All right. Well, if you want to hear more about wind turbines, people being mad at wind turbines and a bunch of other really good stuff, you can join us, uh, tomorrow, by the time you're hearing this at our, our Lux Forum, Boston. You know, we'd love to
Interview with Alec Brewer on Bioplastics
00:29:30
Speaker
see you all there. You can like and subscribe if you like this podcast and you can share it. It does help us out. We really appreciate it.
00:29:43
Speaker
All right, we are back and talking to Alec Brewer, who is the founder and CEO of Orobio. Really interesting company in the bioplastics, synthetic biology sort of space. And yeah, so welcome, Alec. Thanks for joining us here on Innovation Matters.
00:30:02
Speaker
Yeah, thanks for thanks for having me guys. Appreciate the opportunity. Absolutely. So I thought just to start, I'd be interested to hear a little bit about your background and how you know how you got the entrepreneurship bug how you got into to starting or a bio. Yeah, I appreciate you asking and I think a great place to start.
00:30:22
Speaker
Um, at this point it's, it's a bit of a long story. Uh, it's been about eight or so years now that I've been kind of working in the small business and startups space. I think, uh, I guess formally or officially, uh, for about five years now with Oro Bio and a few years prior to that, just in getting involved in different projects that I was excited about and trying to solve problems, uh, or, or I guess needs that
00:30:52
Speaker
myself and friends had had.
00:30:55
Speaker
Um, actually, I guess the very first moment or kind of startup experience that I'd had and, uh, actually wasn't one that I quite realized was really entrepreneurial or a startup at all. Uh, it goes back to high school when I was, uh, buying and reselling sneakers in hopes of, uh, cashing in on the, the sneaker rush or, or, uh, or, or speaker heads. Yeah. Yeah. My own interest and, and, uh,
00:31:25
Speaker
and I guess partaking in sneakerhead culture. I was buying and reselling sneakers and I guess eventually had to put that down. Didn't do terribly well, but found my way back into entrepreneurship, I guess more formally pretty early on in college. When exploring my interests in engineering and biology,
00:31:50
Speaker
and being very fortunate to just become introduced and worked into the startup community at UVA fairly early on in my entrepreneurial journey and in my college career. So yeah, with that, and to make a long story a little bit shorter, I got introduced to one of the mentors who was really seeing up the startup community at UVA.
00:32:20
Speaker
I got very, very excited about the work that he was doing and the work of the couple of startups that he was using to get people excited about startups, particularly some in med tech and ag tech.
00:32:34
Speaker
And with that, I shortly after just found myself again, trying to solve problems and fortunate to be working amongst entrepreneurs that had what they called, and what I was very proud to call a startup and my first role role at a startup.
00:32:53
Speaker
Um, I guess to, to share a little bit about the Orobio story, um, that, that same actually very first meeting I'd had with that mentor and, uh, and that, that connection that we formed is actually what led me to the research project and the opportunity that we eventually spun out. And now is what we know as Orobio today. Um, that is, uh, again, I was very passionate about biology. I was starting to get more involved in startups and, uh, this mentor of mine, Alex Soretta.
00:33:23
Speaker
uh, pointed me towards iGEM. I don't know if you guys are familiar with iGEM or if any listeners will be, but iGEM is a really great organization, gives students the opportunity to solve world problems using synthetic biology. Essentially that's the prompt for the organization and the annual competition.
00:33:42
Speaker
And, well, I didn't make it my first time around I didn't make the team, I was fortunate to be selected the second time, have my very first chance at simulating a startup experience and to be working on a project that
00:33:56
Speaker
uh, had real world impact potential and gave us the, again, the, the Orobio opportunity and platform. Yeah. So what was to talk a little bit about the, the technology that, that, that you, you landed on through this, the side gem project that, that, that came into Orobio. Cause I think there's, you know, there's a lot of companies out there that are making
00:34:15
Speaker
you know, PHAs and other types of types of bio-based plastics, but you guys definitely have a little bit of a unique spin on it. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. There are a number of companies working in the in the PHA and the bioplastics space that I think sitting here, we recognize the importance of the work and I think the variety of different approaches that are being taken to manufacturing and then use of the variety of
00:34:46
Speaker
bioplastics and even specifically the variety of PHAs that exist. So we can dig deeper on PHAs if we'd like to later. I think that's a cool topic. But to focus in on the technology itself, we're a synthetic biology, a genetic engineering company. So our technology is based around engineered microbes and fermentation.
00:35:08
Speaker
which basically means that like brewing beer, we use microbes to produce targeted products. And as you pointed out there, Mike, the first kind of target product that we'd had going all the way back to iGEM and kind of is most core to our vision is PHAs, biodegradable plastic resins.
00:35:32
Speaker
first kind of sharing a little bit of the journey and how the technology has changed as well here. When we started with iGEM, we were actually known as Transfome. You might still see that around. Yeah, I saw that when I was doing some background research there. Yeah. Yeah, so that stuck around a little bit, but really that's kind of in the past now is that's indicative of really where we started in the first technology that we were developing.
00:35:58
Speaker
And that transformed technology was oriented around trying to use polystyrene waste to produce PHAs, to create a beginning and end of life solution to plastic pollution, and to specifically incentivize the recycling and the upcycling of polystyrene waste, which is otherwise really difficult. Right. Yeah, yeah.
00:36:20
Speaker
So we got started on that technology. We did fairly well in iGEM. And that's actually what gave us, again, the opportunity to and encouragement from the UVA ecosystem to move forward. So we started off as transphome. But we did realize fairly early on that while that technology was great for making people aware of the problems we were trying to solve, it was going to be pretty tough to solve them in any sort of significant scale because of the difficulty in collection and processing.
00:36:49
Speaker
a bunch of other factors that made that technology complicated. But fortunately, along the way, while we were researching it and looking for new directions, we made somewhat of a happy accident in the lab, which led itself to the oral bio technology, is that we found a way to co-produce PHAs, again, a biodegradable plastic resin,
00:37:12
Speaker
and a thermostable bio-based pigment, which can be used in and alongside the PHA. It is really important because right now, as the bioplastics industry is growing, there's a need for more bioplastics resins. Specifically, there's a need for more affordable bioplastics resins. And we need materials that have a greater consumer appeal as well, which can really only be.
00:37:42
Speaker
unlocked in using more sustainable additives and specifically, in the case of marketability, pigments. I was curious about this aspect of the technology that you co-produced the dye in the indigo-type dye essentially with the PHAs.
00:38:03
Speaker
And maybe you hinted to that earlier as sort of an accident. You discovered the microbial strain you're using was producing this colored product. And instead of saying, oh, no, we've got to get rid of the color. Or you're like, oh, can we make something? Or can we make a virtue of this and find applications that suit it? Or was it something you actually set out to design a system that was going to be colored and to have that dye in it?
00:38:25
Speaker
No, I appreciate you asking just as you did there. The former is pretty much exactly how it went. It was a big happy accident where as we were trying to increase PHA production, improve the efficiency of our process with that original transform technology, we had to find a way to measure PHA production. It's a little difficult to do, especially in a basement lab.
00:38:52
Speaker
The way that we devised doing so was using a visual cue, a color readout to basically cue how much PHA was present in the cells in the culture. Basically, as we collected data, we found that there was way more colorant, specifically way more indigo present in the cells than there should have been, way more pigment than PHA.
00:39:22
Speaker
And the reason for this was that there was a side reaction happening that was not only producing the VHA then, but producing the pigment as well. And well, at first, again, as you said, Mike, we took a big step back. We didn't know what was happening. We didn't know what to do with this.
00:39:40
Speaker
knowing that we were looking for new directions, having, I think, a pretty strong background in entrepreneurship and market discovery and all those practices. We took a step back. We went out and did our literature dives and our market discovery. And after, I think, three or four months, we found there was actually an opportunity in producing both products.
00:40:04
Speaker
And it was at that point and maybe after another month or two of discussion that we decided to make the pivot and move forward in this direction. And I can tell you a little bit more about how it's gone since if you'd like to hear.
00:40:18
Speaker
Yeah, just wanted to ask you, Alec, and of course, I would also be curious to know your take on Trump's golden sneakers, sometimes limited edition ones, because you said you were a sneakerhead. But just sticking to the color aspect that you mentioned, right, the reaction started producing indigo. At that stage, I was just curious to know about your mindset, because when you saw that happening, and you realized, okay, this reaction is producing indigo as well as PHA,
00:40:46
Speaker
Did you kind of think of the indigo being restrictive to the target markets you wanted to hit as in we're gonna produce something that is pigmented, it's not gonna work out everywhere? Or did you kind of think of it as, okay, this is gonna be an additional revenue stream that is gonna help us grow more, it's gonna help us grow our brand. So what was your mindset when that kind of thing happened?
00:41:06
Speaker
Yeah, that's a really excellent question. I'd say for us, it was always a bit more positive or a bit more optimistic in that we always saw it at least after validating with the market as an opportunity, as a co-product.
00:41:24
Speaker
Now, I guess from the technical standpoint, if there weren't value in it, I guess we didn't see others also now out and trying to ferment pigment and ferment indigo.
00:41:40
Speaker
then there would always have been the option just to wash it out with solvents or whatever other extraction method we use because it is molecularly different from VHA. That could have always been the case. But again, in the market discovery that we did, I think we validated it pretty early on as a co-product.
00:42:08
Speaker
Actually, just given the nature of those two industries, indigo and pigments, generally speaking, have a much higher market value than PHAs, than plastics. And so for us even, and maybe this is part of the answer, is we saw a potential for it to be really a cost driver or a driver of value that we could create from the process, and we've always treated it as such.
00:42:35
Speaker
So how did you go about, I mean, maybe to skip ahead a little bit in the story, one of the things that you've done that I thought was an interesting approach to try to
00:42:45
Speaker
kind of develop or find a market opportunity for this is not just produce the material itself, but you're actually moving downstream and producing a consumer product or a, you know, a consumer product. I don't know. It's a pet toy. Anyway, you can maybe talk a little bit about it. And, you know, what was the journey that led you to trying to
00:43:10
Speaker
you know, to take that step of actually becoming, you know, going more direct to consumer with a final product, not just the material. Yeah, I really appreciate you asking. It's been one of the main things, I guess strategically as we've shaped what Orobio is and our focus areas, it's been a huge
00:43:33
Speaker
huge topic of conversation for us internally and of course with investors as well. Yeah, I think there are so many reasons in terms of I think just our knowledge and know-how, the market,
00:43:51
Speaker
And I think the trajectory and success cases of others before us and others working in the space right now. I guess to start with that point, breaking into the market as an early stage deep tech company of any sort is never easy. It's been a challenge for all of us and all of those to come, I'd have to assume.
00:44:19
Speaker
And with that, you need to be very creative in how you prove product market fit and how you get your first product to the market, especially when there are typically very large volume requirements.
00:44:34
Speaker
One thing that I will kind of stipulate that one with and kind of go back to answering Karthik's last question with a little bit about is in co-producing PHA and pigment, we think we can actually get to market sooner because the pigment, unlike the polymer, can be sold and can be used at
00:44:55
Speaker
much smaller quantities, much smaller production volumes than the PHA can. I guess, Karthik, going back to your question, we see that as actually helping to give us a little bit of momentum or shorten the go-to market as well, which has been great.
00:45:12
Speaker
Sorry, going back to the bigger picture here about deep tech and commercialization, again, creativity I think is the most important thing. And we've, I think, done a number of things in doing our best to prove the market, to start to realize the demand and interest that over the four or five years now that we've been in this space that we've observed or we've run into through our market discovery,
00:45:39
Speaker
And with that also to build a small revenue stream that will not at this point sustain us, but help to extend our runway and also to generate the pipelines or the supply chains that we will move our material into as we scale up and as we produce larger volumes.
00:46:01
Speaker
So I guess just to run back through them, maybe we found ourselves involved in distribution, helping again, work with plastic converters and brands on the customer facing side and actually work with other PHA manufacturers on the supply end and connect those needs and those interests. And then we are working on some of the productization ourselves with pause. So I'm sorry, getting a little,
00:46:30
Speaker
caught up here because it is so many different activities.
00:46:35
Speaker
We've done this again really to prove the market, to create outlets for our material when that time comes. And I think have had to really go a step further in doing so because of where the global markets have been for the last year and a half now. I think especially in the, well, really just in, yeah, global,
00:47:04
Speaker
global markets, investors are looking for more solid traction. They're looking for more sustainable or proven companies. And we do want to be a fast and high growth company, but we realize that we have to grow our roots and have a steady or a solid foundation and
00:47:30
Speaker
Yeah, again, grow our roots in order to be better suited to grow more quickly when the time is right. Sorry to go on for too long here. The last point I'll kind of add in there though, whether we trim it in or just kind of cut it there is, I think we've been very fortunate to, or kind of have been given these opportunities to work in
00:47:56
Speaker
the distribution that we're doing, as well as the couple of different collaborations that we're a part of in the 3D printing, footwear, and pet care space, because of the partnerships and the collaborations that we've been fortunate to form. We're a small team right now, but we've had a tremendous amount of support from our network. And that's helped us to, I think, go a lot further than we would have been able to ourselves and also start to see
00:48:26
Speaker
more interest and more rapid uptake of PHAs than we can accomplish alone.
00:48:33
Speaker
Yeah, so the product is PAWS, P-H-A-W-S, which is a nice touch there. But how did you land on that as a sort of pet toy market as a target for you to kind of get that foothold and start producing some commercial product and getting that initial revenue stream going?
00:48:58
Speaker
Yeah, I can appreciate you asking. I can zoom in on pause there. I'm sorry. I was kind of taking the 30,000 foot and looking at a couple of the other projects that we're involved in too. But yeah, pause has been a more independent and kind of grassroots-ish effort that also kind of came about somewhat incidentally. Going back about a year and a half ago now,
00:49:28
Speaker
in starting to go to conferences and in starting to train better market ourselves and the products that we were starting to prototype with. We started 3D printing different parts, Pokemon silhouettes, fun little toys, all sorts of things that we could just situate on our demo table to show people what the material was capable of, what you can do with it. And one thing that we really wanted to showcase was the durability of the material.
00:49:57
Speaker
And so we'd had this idea to make a dog toy and give it to my dog and, uh, yeah, let him play with it and then show people that this, this stuff held up. It not only didn't dissolve in your hand, but, but could put up, uh, against the 70 pound hound. And, uh, and so we started bringing it around and with that people got really excited about it really quickly. Um, both the concept of the biodegradable plastics and its use in, um, in pet toys, uh, because of the,
00:50:27
Speaker
sustainability factor and because people could clearly see that in using a bioplastic alternative, you could help your pets to stop shedding microplastics around the house and in many cases as they're chewing on their toys, consuming them as well.
00:50:47
Speaker
And so, it just, again, kind of started accidentally and got a lot of interest. And one day while sitting in the car, had a fun name tagged along to it. Again, we're calling it PAWS, P-H-A-W-S, again, to emphasize the use of PHAs and to help educate our audience on, again, what PHAs are capable of, how they're made, and
00:51:16
Speaker
what they have the potential for beyond just pet toys in the future. So that's what's gotten us started. Again, fortunate to have a lot of support from our collaborators as we're now starting to market it and start to prepare for launch, hopefully sometime this year.
00:51:36
Speaker
And maybe the last thing that I'll say about it, because this is somewhat inspiring, and I think a really interesting case study. People have heard me talk about it probably too many times. But part of my own inspiration for it, and again, going back to that last question, I'm really inspired by what Airbnb did back in, I think, 2008, 2009-ish in working on pause.
00:52:04
Speaker
That is, when Airbnb had this great idea, they were actually generating some revenue, had I think their own cots or air mattresses inflated that they were using, but wanted to go bigger, they actually kind of
00:52:20
Speaker
went off on a little bit of a tangent and started a cereal brand. Obama owes, and I think Captain McCain's or McCain crunches, and they did this during the election in the US and did so really just to draw attention to what they were trying to build. They saw an opportunity, that kind of viral potential that their idea had had.
00:52:48
Speaker
With that, we're able to generate revenue and show investors that they knew how to build a successful business. And I don't know that pause will ever be as successful or as viral as Obama's and again, McCain crunches or Captain McCain's, but I love to think about it that way as well as just kind of a fun side project that we're passionate about and it's kind of a new business opportunity to explore.
00:53:14
Speaker
Yeah, so just curious because, and maybe this is a bit going towards the technical or maybe the supply chain side of things as well, right? Because you're taking organic waste, you're fermenting that to create your PHAs and this is something I've seen from personal experience because my dad works with an oil and gas company in India and they try to get a lot of ag waste.
00:53:36
Speaker
that they can use to make biogas or compress biogas. And it turns out it's very hard to convince farmers to give organic waste because they don't think there's enough money there. Some of them end up burning it, which is why you see a lot of the air pollution in India during the harvest season. So just curious to get your thoughts on what you've seen in terms of farmers willing to give ag waste or how has it been that experience for you of collecting
00:54:04
Speaker
organic waste to continue with the fermentation process? Yeah, another great question. Let's see, I'll go broad and then I'll zoom in on our focus being dairy processing byproducts, so slightly different or slight derivative of food nag processing waste. Generally speaking, yeah, you're absolutely correct that it is really difficult to really
00:54:32
Speaker
not just convince the farmer, but organize a inefficient enough supply chain in order to offtake that waste or byproduct and get it to the site or aggregate it at a site where there's a large enough quantity to process. I think
00:54:52
Speaker
people or we're getting more creative just generally, we're getting more creative with different business models and platforms and, uh, collection, uh, schemes, which, which I think are making it more accessible. I think as technology is improving and just becoming more efficient, uh, you're able to implement technologies, um, onsite and at smaller and smaller scales, which are making the argument more, more convincing.
00:55:18
Speaker
Um, and you are seeing, uh, more and more use cases and, uh, yeah, use cases for upcycling and repurposing, uh, all sorts of different, uh, sugars and, uh, and stocks and other byproducts, uh, leaves, uh, other byproducts of, uh, of ag processing. But, um, there are still some technical hurdles as well. So, uh, there's a lot of innovation to, uh, to be done specifically on the processing of that.
00:55:46
Speaker
hardier, uh, stock and, uh, and the lignocellulosic waste. Um, people are familiar with that term, um, as is found in there. So, uh, it's getting more popular. There's work to be done. Um, but I think the, the largest of the food and ag processors and in many cases are already beginning to, or I've already implemented technologies and they're working to find ways to do, do so at their smaller, smaller scales.
00:56:14
Speaker
As it pertains, and I guess specifically, that is really important for biomanufacturing and kind of the second tier as these byproducts, as these waste products are the cheap, relatively accessible and, I guess better word than cheap, affordable sugars that can be used as biomanufacturing feedstocks and help to reduce the cost of production. As it pertains to Orobio,
00:56:42
Speaker
Again, we're using dairy processing byproducts as our primary feedstock right now. And just to give a couple of facts, dairy industry, I think we know its size, but it's particularly large in the US. I don't know the exact scale of cheese and yogurt produced these days, but per capita demand is growing rapidly with that and the primary byproduct being whey.
00:57:11
Speaker
which is lactose and whey protein. There's over 50 million pounds of waste lactose every year, which comes from over 120 billion tons of whey produced around the world again each year.
00:57:28
Speaker
And right now being an accessible and high volume waste sugar, the dairy industry is very actively seeking solutions to find higher value uses for it.
00:57:42
Speaker
There's a couple of reasons in the market for that beyond just the sheer quantity at which it exists. I won't go into right now, but we've been, I think, fairly well received by the dairy industry for this first technology and more than just what we're working on now, really want to work very collaboratively with the dairy industry to find higher value solutions and more holistic solutions for managing not only their way, but other waste streams that are produced on site or
00:58:12
Speaker
within proximity of their plants. Yeah,
AI's Role in Bioplastic Innovation
00:58:18
Speaker
that's certainly that theme of kind of waste valorization in the food industry as well as in a lot of others is a big one that we've looked at. And I think, yeah, there's a lot of interesting opportunities in the waste valorization space in general.
00:58:37
Speaker
One other area sort of opportunity I wanted to ask maybe is a final question here. I know you've done some experimenting with AI, right? You created your own GPT that provides advice about sustainable packaging options, which I thought was a clever use of the technology there. But it'd be interesting if you're experimenting with it and what are the roles that you see for AI in innovation and entrepreneurship?
00:59:07
Speaker
Yeah, great question. And one that I'm probably not the best suited to answer, but I'll do my best, as you pointed to, in playing with a lot of the tools that have been developed and are really coming out on a daily or weekly basis at this point. I guess I'll first talk about OpenAI and chat GPT. I mean, I think we all realize just
00:59:38
Speaker
what an asset and what a tool that has to be as they continue to add new features and functions to it. And that is, you know, just in help with copywriting or being a sounding board for many things to helping brainstorm and come up with new
00:59:56
Speaker
Uh, crazy ideas. Um, and I do truly mean crazy sometimes. Uh, but, but it is just, just in that a really great, um, uh, assistant or, or kind of, uh, tab to tab open and, and we use on a daily basis. Uh, and of course there there's, you know, the kind of base level, uh, chat GPT, but then all of the tools and functions that have, have been built on top of it as well.
01:00:22
Speaker
which has been a really great asset for us, especially as we are now doing a lot more of a forward and consumer facing push with pause, which is very much, very much new to me. So again, it's a, well, I think everybody or many
01:00:45
Speaker
most people have gotten pretty comfortable in using chat GPT and against some of those other tools. One that I'll just kind of give a shout out to because I think it's been really great for us on top of chat has been copy AI. Guys over there developing that tool are
01:01:02
Speaker
Crushing it, um, copy helps to optimize your prompts and feed them into chat GPT helps you get to get to better results more quickly. So I'm a, I'm a big fan of that one. And again, some other layer two tools we'll call them. Um, I should have prefaced in, in saying I'm no expert here, um, in that we are definitely not a AI and biology company. Um, as, as much as I'd love to be just not, not my expertise and not what we are right now.
01:01:32
Speaker
But that doesn't mean that we aren't working with others that are more expert and are helping us actually, or we're working with to help develop and use AI and biotechnology tools. I think many of them have an element of AI built into it. I think just given the size and expanse of biotechnology, the complexity of life, if we'd say,
01:02:01
Speaker
and all of the data that goes into experimental design. One, of course, I think many people have heard of would be alpha fold, but there are many other, yeah, many of others very similar that we put to use on a daily basis. Yeah, and I think there is such an interesting, I mean, there's obviously a lot of
01:02:24
Speaker
materials informatics and use of AI and informatics and microbial design and things like that and the synthetic biology space in particular.
01:02:34
Speaker
But it is interesting as these tools, large language models and things become more accessible. Even for somebody who's not a technical expert in that field, there's a lot of things that, as you mentioned, you can put to clever use even if you're not a, quote unquote, AI expert. So it's interesting to hear about how you're thinking about using some of those items.
01:02:59
Speaker
We're getting a guest appearance on the video from one of your Paul's customers or inspirations there. He's our marketing lead. I wish I could do better on it and I think it's a really important topic. I think
01:03:22
Speaker
you know, we keep a very close eye on what's going on in that space and kind of try and stay, try and leverage the tools which we need on a daily basis. I think to your point, it's also exciting. We haven't even gotten to touch some of the material informatics suites that we want to mess with and will help to inform material innovation and design, but all very exciting stuff.
01:03:48
Speaker
I guess I'll quickly comment on the GPT and say, I really built that just in my own exploration of how these tools work and how they quote unquote think, you know, how you can interact with them in new ways and to give people the chance to do so in an area that is very important to us and growing in interest and popularity.
01:04:14
Speaker
And maybe one area where we're not quite involved yet, but where we, I think we'll start to see ourselves get a little bit more involved is we are actually collaborating with a data engineering, specifically a cloud engineering and platform company with which we are starting to, or trying to start to work with biotech startups developing
01:04:37
Speaker
different tools, databases, and suites, and to get those assets or get those programs into the cloud help to create, I guess, a UI around them or a bit of a community interface to help with its adoption and to get more users and to help
01:05:07
Speaker
get these tools, which again, we're fortunate in some cases to be able to start using early to more people and in front of more researchers and innovators to put to use. So that's been a
Episode Conclusion and Farewell
01:05:21
Speaker
bit of an exciting side project that's come about through one of our collaborators and through one of our partnerships.
01:05:29
Speaker
That's great. Thanks, Alec, for the time today and great to learn about Orobio and your journey and efforts. We appreciate the time and we'll look to be in touch. Thank you so much, guys. I really appreciate the opportunity.
01:05:47
Speaker
Innovation Matters is a production of Lux Research, the leading sustainable innovation research and advisory firm. You can follow this podcast on Apple Music, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you want more, check out www.luxresearchinc.com slash blog for all of the latest news, opinions, and articles.