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Mimbly's Isabella Palmgren on how we can tackle microplastics in our water
74 Plays1 year ago
Mike and Karthik catch up on the news, from rain in Dubai to new nuclear power. Isabella Palmgren, co-founder of Mimbly, joins to discuss their efforts to scale up solutions to microplastic pollution.
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Transcript
Introduction to Cloud Seeding and Weather Events
00:00:10
Speaker
All right. Welcome everyone to the Innovation Matters podcast where we are always judicious about our use of cloud seeding.
00:00:23
Speaker
You might have seen the pictures last week from Dubai, where they got basically as much rain in the days they usually get in a year, which really overwhelmed the infrastructure and led to quite a bit of flooding. Though, unfortunately, it seems like it probably is not due as some of the initial reports.
00:00:47
Speaker
might have had it to cloud seeding.
Effectiveness and Controversies of Cloud Seeding
00:00:50
Speaker
They do do cloud seeding in the Emirates to try to get a little extra rain, but it seems like cloud seeding either doesn't actually work at all or only has a pretty marginal impact. So I don't think we can blame this massive storm on excessive cloud seeding, though that would have been sort of funny.
00:01:09
Speaker
Yeah, but they do say that there are conspiracy theories going around. Oh, yeah. Outseeding probably changed the microclimate, you know, over a period of time. And this is what led to the floods. But I don't think that's the case. I think it was just a one off event.
00:01:23
Speaker
There's definitely some conspiracy stuff around cloud seeding. So for instance, I think there's been a couple, at least one, I think in Tennessee and maybe a couple of state legislatures in the US that have banned the practice because they don't, you know, they don't want the government controlling our weather or update like that.
Dubai Storm's Impact and Social Media Attention
00:01:43
Speaker
But I think, you know, unfortunately, the evidence seems to be actually that effective.
00:01:49
Speaker
And it's it's it's actually I mean, I don't want to make too much too much light of it because I'm sure as much as it is a little bit comical to see like, you know, the
00:01:58
Speaker
waterfalls in the hotel bar of this swank luxury hotel in Dubai or something like that. It probably is genuinely hardship for a lot of the migrant workers and things that are there. But it was interesting also, it's not an entirely unprecedented event in Dubai. There was a similarly large storm like four or five years ago, but this one happened to come when there was a big crypto convention in town.
00:02:24
Speaker
And those people are all very, very online, right? So a lot more of it made it on to Western anyway, social media than it probably did previously.
Microsoft's Investment in UAE: Geopolitical Implications
00:02:36
Speaker
But it was also a good opening because we do have some other kind of real innovation news to talk about out of the Emirates where Microsoft has invested $1.4 billion in, $1.5 billion
00:02:55
Speaker
into an AI company in the UAE, this company called G42, which as everything in the UAE is very closely tied in to the government there. And there seems to be every indication that this is a very sort of geopolitically driven deal. Significant part of it is that as a part of the deal or as a precondition for it, basically,
00:03:23
Speaker
G42 has agreed to stop using equipment from China, Huawei in particular, which is probably a fair concern on the part of the US government if they are going to be letting, if the US firms are going to be working very closely with them because some of the principles of the company of G42 seem to be, previously worked for spyware companies.
00:03:52
Speaker
and things like that. But I thought this was a really, really interesting development. And yes, we were talking about this before Karthik. There obviously is that geopolitical element. I'm not sure sort of which is the tail and which is the dog here as far as, is this a deal that Microsoft just really wanted to do for business reasons, right? It's a big, the golf, the Arab world, that
00:04:22
Speaker
the Arabic-speaking world in particular is a big market opportunity. There's a lot of big companies, a lot of wealth in that region.
00:04:31
Speaker
and Microsoft wants to have access to it, this was a great way to do it. And the US government said, okay, if you're going to do this, we'll go after you. If you don't make sure we clean up the geopolitical side of it as far as the G42s ties to China, we'll block the deal. Or if it was, as some of the commentary has implied, if it was actually was
00:04:53
Speaker
geopolitically driven, like the US government was kind of encouraging Microsoft to make this sort of deal exactly for the purpose of making sure that AI development in the Gulf, in the Arab-speaking world, was more closely tied to the US than to China. And probably it's some of both. I mean, the rationale from the perspective of both the US government and Microsoft
00:05:22
Speaker
for business reasons, I think makes sense. But how did you, what was your reaction when you saw this? I think the headline of that New York Times article that actually got our attention kind of said it all, like it's how US is boxing out China. That's the headline.
00:05:38
Speaker
So you can clearly see that the angle that you think of the very first time, like you mentioned, is the geopolitical side. And this is something they mentioned in the article as well. So why G42? I'm sure there are so many other AI companies there that they could have invested in.
00:05:54
Speaker
that are also doing great things in the region, given that, like you said, there's a lot of wealth, there's a lot of room for innovation in the Middle East and they're willing to spend all that wealth that they gain mostly from oil and gas sales into innovation. Then the question becomes, why G42? And I think that's where the AI capabilities
00:06:13
Speaker
of the software maybe comes into the picture Microsoft people who run Microsoft on duds and they would know when they're investing in a company they're investing in something really good pretty convinced that g42 is doing something great in the AI world and that's the reason why they acquired g42 apart from the geopolitical side of things and it's also interesting because i think now Microsoft is going to develop chips that can use as your the AI
00:06:39
Speaker
that G42 is developing and G42 would then add Microsoft Azure to its software suite. So I think that's kind of where it's going for Microsoft in terms of expanding its own market footprint in the Middle East.
AI in the Oil Industry and Global Competition
00:06:53
Speaker
But I think that from an outsider looking in, I think G42's AI capabilities must be pretty good for Microsoft to go and get in touch with them and invest in them.
00:07:02
Speaker
Well, it's interesting because the other article that caught my eye last week was about Adnox, the national oil company in
00:07:13
Speaker
in Abu Dhabi announced, and he actually does say in the announcement they were working with G42, they said that they've received, they've, they've achieved, generated $500 million in value by deploying AI solutions in, in, in 2023, which was a little skeptical of it, you know, looking at first just given how, you know, sort of
00:07:33
Speaker
Obviously, there are IA applications, things like predictive maintenance or sort of machine learning that are relatively mature. I was a little skeptical of it, but then looking into it, I mean, ad-noc, it's actually a little hard for me to figure out what their revenue story said as this unusual corporate structure and the different subsidiaries are.
00:07:50
Speaker
reporting their revenues individually. But it seems like across the group, it's comfortably a $50 billion or more revenue company. So could they save 1% using even sort of in the early innings of AI deployment doesn't seem totally implausible. I mean, if you dig into it, there's probably some
00:08:12
Speaker
If you were able to dig into it, there's probably some generous assumptions that might've been made about how impactful various deployments are. But yeah, it makes sense that there's, and certainly fits with that thesis, that there's a lot of opportunity in that region. I think it's also interesting you mentioned Adnoc because I think as an oil and gas company, I think AI could play a big role in terms of emissions tracking and things like that, not just in terms of revenue.
00:08:37
Speaker
So even for the other, on the what I would say is the operational side of things, not just from revenue standpoint, where you could use AI and digital tools to determine what your emissions are in your processes and curb them and things like that and potential savings thereof.
00:08:56
Speaker
I think that's quite interesting to look at as well because G42 has this footprint and like you said I think those numbers are you know maybe not completely accurate but even if so you know they are going to have some kind of impact in their operations.
00:09:09
Speaker
Yeah, and I think it's an interesting harbinger of, or maybe not even harbinger, because I think that in a lot of ways this trend is already here, of countries wanting to have their own, I think maybe more so than in any other recent technology in AI, countries really wanting to have their own national champions.
00:09:34
Speaker
And we've seen this with Mistral. This is the French AI company that was a little bit of a crazy story because they got multi-billion dollar valuation basically like a month after the company was founded because investors, companies, and I'm sure also governments in Europe decided they really wanted to have a European AI national champion. So I think you're going to see, we've talked a lot about
00:10:04
Speaker
the kind of fragmentation and things of supply chains and the geopolitical conflict around a lot of the resources that go into climate technologies, things like lithium and cobalt and rare earths and all of that.
00:10:20
Speaker
And you're very much going to see that happening with AI at the level of the models. And there's a natural reason for that to happen also because these are large language models. And while they can be quite good at translation, like a model that's been trained basically mostly on English language content is not going to be great for Chinese users or Arabic speaking users to the point like G42. That's one of the things that they've
00:10:48
Speaker
they've done is develop the Arabic LLM. So I think there's this kind of, and then on top of that, like the whole hawk, there is a physical resource with the hardware, the availability of these AI chips is right now a limiting sort of resource factor in almost the same way that lithium or crude oil or
00:11:08
Speaker
natural resources can be because there isn't enough of these chips to keep up with the demand. That's what gives Microsoft the levers. They've got a lot of chips. They've got a lot of this compute capacity that everybody needs access to. I was just curious and maybe thinking about this from what would these mean for other countries, for example, who are developing. You mentioned Mistral and what's going on in France, right?
00:11:35
Speaker
If, and this again, this incident was, if we assume very geopolitically driven, then wouldn't it make sense for Microsoft to invest in a company within the US, for example, rather than go to the Middle East? Or are we going to now see an influx of, because you have a lot of room for innovation and R&D in the Middle East and they're pushing the boundaries or the envelope, if you will?
00:11:59
Speaker
Do you see a lot of investments flowing into the region for AI? Or do you still think it's going to be like Mr. AI where we have investments in India for an Indian company, investments in the US for a US company, and so on? Yeah, I think the national champion's argument is the relevant one. I think most major
00:12:21
Speaker
geopolitical players or geopolitical blocks, as in the case of the EU, for instance, are going to want to, and probably for good reasons, have their own AIs. Obviously, that's already the case with China as a whole.
00:12:43
Speaker
own ecosystem of AI and LLM type of systems there. So I think, but because of the compute being a constraint on these opportunities, I think we probably will see the players that have that cloud computing capacity, which are mostly, it's Microsoft, it's Google, it's Amazon, making more of these types of deals, which are inevitably going to be very,
00:13:11
Speaker
geopolitically driven or influenced or what have you. Especially when we think about digital tools and data transfer and privacy and who's handling our data and things like that, I think it makes sense to be geopolitically driven.
Japan's Energy Strategy: Nuclear vs Renewable
00:13:25
Speaker
So another, of course, energy is still a big geopolitical issue in itself. And one of the things that you pulled up this week was around the development in Japan around hydrogen production.
00:13:39
Speaker
And we've been looking at and talking about, it was just editing a piece for our monthly highlights around, you know, hydrogen carrier, ammonia is a hydrogen carrier. And that's, you know, something that Japan's been very involved with because of the idea of using hydrogen as to import renewable energy, low carbon energy.
00:14:00
Speaker
But you flagged another story from Japan around domestic production using nuclear. So the Japan Atomic Energy Agency, the JAEA, so they're developing what they call the high temperature engineering test reactor. It's a high temperature gas cooled reactor and it produces temperatures as in the coolant is heated to about 850 degrees Celsius and they're going to use this high temperature gas cooled reactor to produce hydrogen.
00:14:27
Speaker
So the electricity that is produced and the heat of course can be used to power an electrolyzer and then you can produce power as in you can produce power and hydrogen at the same time. And the hydrogen of course will be pink hydrogen in this instance because that's the color that denotes in the various. Everybody's got to have a color. Exactly. It's a colorful world. So hydrogen, the hydrogen that will be produced will be produced from a 30 megawatt electric reactor and they plan to have this
00:14:56
Speaker
operational by 2028. So this is very quick, especially given that it takes very long to build nuclear power plants, and we are right now in 2024. So within the next four years, they'll have to finish construction, licensing, so many different things. I'm quite surprised. Yeah, it's a 30 megawatt rat, which is pretty small, right? This would be a small modular reactor type of design. Would it fit into that category? Yes, it would be a micro reactor. Micro reactor. Okay.
00:15:23
Speaker
Why I say I'm quite skeptical about the timeline is because regulatory agencies in general do not have an idea of how to deal with the safety standards of these designs. Not that they aren't scientifically, you know, knowledgeable to do it, but the reference reactors that are typically used are water cooled reactors. So when you go to non-water based designs.
00:15:44
Speaker
It usually leads to a lot of back and forth, a lot of understanding what the safety features are going to be, especially given their inherent safety features. So the next question then becomes, oh, do we need other passive instruments as add-on safety features in case the inherent safety feature doesn't work, something like that. So that's why I'm quite skeptical about the 2028 deadline.
00:16:05
Speaker
Again, given Japan, it's a land-constrained region, so very hard to deploy solar and wind, and even if you want to think about offshore wind.
00:16:15
Speaker
You have tsunamis and it's an earthquake-prone zone. Nuclear is something they've deployed in the past. They have a lot of expertise. In that way, it makes a lot of sense to deploy this for even using hydrogen, not just for transportation, but perhaps as an energy carrier for long duration storage and things like that. Yeah. I mean, nuclear is a really good fit for Japan. I mean, the whole challenge is they don't have a lot of domestic energy resources either in the form of fossil fuels or a lot of green.
00:16:45
Speaker
opportunities for, you know, because of the land limitations basically for wind and solar and other renewables. So having that type of, you know, compact and at least doesn't energy source, clean energy source that doesn't depend at least on as large a volume of, you know, they still need to import the uranium or whatever the fuel is for this reactor type I'm sure, but it's not, you know,
00:17:11
Speaker
massive tanker ships full of gas or whatever, or of ammonia in the event that they'd have to be bringing in. So it makes a lot of sense for Japan if they can get over these timing and construction hurdles and obviously address the safety issues. Is there a benefit for hydrogen production for this being a high temperature reactor? Because I mean, the hydrogen is just being made by electrolysis, right?
00:17:38
Speaker
And I think when you have those high temperatures, there is a lot of the things that you can do with the heat as far as high temperature steam for industry and things like that. Actually, I guess it was all the way back in 2010 or something like that. I heard a talk from this guy at General Automics who was really talking up at some, I think it was an ACS conference or something like that, was really talking up the potential for nuclear and the synergy with industry because of the ability to produce hydrogen, the ability to produce this really high temperature steam and all of that.
00:18:09
Speaker
And now you see a lot of that sort of thing actually happening. But the fact that it's a high temperature reactor, is that sort of specifically beneficial for hydrogen production somehow? Or is it just that's just kind of the name of the design that they're using for this microreactor? So the high temperature reactor, the first thing that comes to mind, whether you produce hydrogen or not, is the efficiency. The higher coolant temperature means that the thermal efficiency for a
00:18:33
Speaker
high-temperature gas-cooled reactor would be around 40% to 45%, while if you look at a typical reactor, it's about 30% to 35%. So you make that pure efficiency gain, which is, of course, one aspect. The second aspect of a HDGR, or the high-temperature gas reactor, is that the fuel that you use is what you call as a Treso particle.
00:18:55
Speaker
It's kind of like a pebble of uranium fuel. It's very different to the typical form factor of uranium fuel, which is like pellets of uranium dioxide. So what it allows you to do is have online refueling, something which I think is beneficial for something like hydrogen production because you don't have any down times when it comes to refueling. Typically with uranium refueling, you take about three to four months to refuel it every two years. So you don't have that kind of stop gap.
00:19:23
Speaker
And then, of course, the high temperature also means that the waste heat that you get from after, you know, your producer electricity can be used for heating up something like a solid oxide fuel cell, for example. And now, of course, the solid oxide, I mean, solid oxide electrolyser. A solid oxide electrolyser again requires about 850 degrees Celsius, 1000 degrees Celsius of heat. So I'm not sure if, you know, you would have to reroute the entire heat.
00:19:47
Speaker
the electrolyzer and you can't use it for this thing, but at least you could use a higher efficiency combined heat power electrolyzer, if you will. I think that's where the benefits come from. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, the great thing about nuclear, of course, is that it's baseload power, right? And it doesn't have the reliability or the intermittency issues.
00:20:10
Speaker
that most renewables have. I'm not sure that's as necessary because one of the benefits for hydrogen is that it doesn't, unlike electricity, it doesn't need to be produced simultaneously with
00:20:25
Speaker
with when it's being used. So intermittent sources are sort of fine for hydrogen production. Like we talked about a couple of weeks ago around the 45V rules in the US for the hydrogen tax credits under the IRA. People are building whole wind and solar farms that are completely off the grid, just dedicated to electricalizers for
00:20:52
Speaker
producing hydrogen and that works fine because the hydrogen doesn't need to be produced at any particular time.
00:20:59
Speaker
So, in that sense, I think nuclear is probably a little, you know, part of what you get from the additional expense of nuclear is that steady reliability, that ability to deliver reliable base load, but that's sort of less necessary for hydrogen. So, I think outside of the context of somewhere like Japan that doesn't have
00:21:24
Speaker
as many options in terms of the actual renewable resources. Nuclear pink hydrogen is probably not as compelling to me, but I think this is a case where I can see it making sense. But I was also maybe thinking about this and I think if you... Technically, I don't think there's an issue with having intermittent sources powering an electrolyzer, but I think it's more so down to the economics of it.
00:21:51
Speaker
because electrolyzers and fuel cells do not last long enough. So you want to produce as much hydrogen as you can in the tank. So even if you have solar or wind, typically if you have a solar plus wind farm without an energy storage system, then you're playing on the fact that solar and wind are kind of complimentary. So you have wind blowing the night, you have sun in the day, so you know, it kind of matches out that way. But the cheapest option today would be to have a hybrid renewable energy system with some form of battery backup or energy storage system.
00:22:21
Speaker
that provides you reliable power rather than hydrogen. But again, that's only in those places where you have enough solar and wind, right? Yeah. Yeah, though I think at the end of the day, from an economic standpoint, obviously, if you can get a higher utilization of your electrolyzers, that's better. You amortize the capex cost across more kilowatt hours or more kilograms of hydrogen.
00:22:43
Speaker
produced, but really it's the cost of electricity is a much bigger driver of the cost of the hydrogen than the cost of the electrolyzer is. So hydrogen produced using cheap renewables is going to be cheaper than hydrogen produced using expensive nuclear, even allowing for the better capex utilization in the latter
00:23:07
Speaker
I think the best option would be to have a hybrid model where you basically have an electrolyzer backup. So if you're powering with nuclear, let's say you have too much solar and wind produced at the same time, then you could just reroute some of the electricity from the nuclear to produce hydrogen. I think that's the best option to go if you are to use nuclear.
00:23:26
Speaker
So it shouldn't be a standalone source for hydrogen production. Well, speaking of solar, one of the other stories that I was kind
Innovations in Agrivoltaics and Precision Agriculture
00:23:32
Speaker
of... This is a little bit of a fun one, but it sparked an interesting, I think meaningful internal discussion here on the Lux Research Slack, which is about sheep.
00:23:45
Speaker
and sheep, solar sheep, not solar powered sheep, but sheep that are being deployed to graze underneath solar panels. And so you basically save the money on the mowing that you would otherwise have to do to keep the grass and weeds and whatever underneath the solar panels from getting in the way and interfering with the operations blocking any of the panels or things.
00:24:13
Speaker
things like that and how this has become a big trend for some of the solar investors, some of these big Wall Street firms are having to go out and do when they invest in these solar power projects. And they have to go out so you get this sort of funny image of Wall Street bankers walking around and trying to recruit farmers to let them have their sheep graze under the solar panels.
00:24:42
Speaker
But you commented that this is basically the agri-voltaics, right? This is that combination of agriculture using land for solar and
00:24:56
Speaker
and agriculture, using the same land for solar and agriculture simultaneously. And you did a report, I don't know, it was a year, a couple of years ago even, that looked into this. And there's a lot of ways in which it is a good synergy is a bit of a...
00:25:14
Speaker
a jargony term, but I think it actually applies to some of the benefits you get out of agri-voltaics. But you said there's some good opportunities there, but you've been kind of disappointed in the reception for that. There just hasn't been as much interest or engagement around agri-voltaics as maybe we might have thought from the value we see in it. So I was curious your take on that and why you think that might be the case.
00:25:39
Speaker
Yeah, so when I first started off with, you know, covering agriculture as a topic. So this makes a lot of sense, especially in regions like Southeast Asia, for example, where you have a good amount of solar potential, but you don't have enough land to deploy, but you also need to look at food security, water security. So you can have this kind of food, water, energy nexus where you have the same piece of land taking care of, you know, agricultural
00:26:03
Speaker
produce as well as energy production. So that's how we started looking into it. And, you know, at Lux, of course, we mostly look at power gen innovations also in agri-voltage, not just the implementation side of things. And there was a lot of innovation going on in terms of using these next generation dye-sensitized solar cells for greenhouses, perovskite solar cells and thin film solar cells for, you know, spectrum selectivity and things like that. There was a lot of optical optimization going on there.
00:26:32
Speaker
And I was like, wow, this is super interesting, right? But unfortunately, the biggest issue with agri-voltage is the regulations and how regulatory authorities view agri-voltage. So there's an interesting paper from the Fraunhofer Institute that has this interview with some farmers who have adopted a pilot agri-voltage system.
00:26:52
Speaker
to understand produce of potatoes that have been grown under a set of solar panels. And the biggest issue that they faced was that regulators don't understand the dual use of land and they lose agricultural subsidies the moment they put solar panels on top. So because regulators don't understand what's the primary use case of this land, like are you producing energy and food on the site or are you producing food and then energy on the site?
00:27:20
Speaker
You try to have that optimization game and that fine balance and they don't have that formally regulated. So that becomes a problem. And typically, also, if you are a farmer and you want to have an agri-voltage system even over, let's say, land for grazing, either you need to have a large piece of land where you have enough gap between the panels so the row spacing is quite high enough to let them graze, or you need to have solar panels installed
00:27:48
Speaker
tall, very high. Vertically, yeah. Yeah, very vertically so that you can have harvesters go through them or you have enough space for sheep and other animals to graze. So that adds to the capital cost of your system, which means your levelized costs go up.
00:28:02
Speaker
And people are not interested in the capital. I think it costs about 25% or 30% more to have an agri-voltage system versus a fixed tilt, you know, plane solar panel system. So farmers are also kind of like regulators don't give us subsidies. We are also paying more money on top of this. So it's kind of...
00:28:33
Speaker
boring low-tech solution in a lot of ways. It's like you just get some sheep and you let them graze among the solar panels. Exactly. There's not a technology innovation there necessarily. Now you get into some of the other things like you're saying with dye-sensitized cells and optical, whatever, and there can be cases where there is. But probably the lowest-hanging fruit, so to speak, for agro-voltaics is these pretty low-tech versions of it.
00:28:45
Speaker
you know, a deal breaker.
00:29:00
Speaker
And it's interesting that I think part of the value proposition, I mean, from the Financial Times article about this, is also that it's kind of vibes-based, right? Where in some of these rural communities, which being a farming community and being farmers growing food is kind of a big part of the self-image and the values of the community.
00:29:26
Speaker
switching to installing a bunch of solar panels over farms isn't something that the residents are as open to or feel as good about. And if it can be combined more with the agriculture that they associate more with their community and feel more connected to, then that kind of helps to make the solar go down a little bit easier. And I actually see this, I mean, obviously not in New York City, but we travel
00:29:56
Speaker
travel to upstate New York, you see there's signs like solar saves farms versus stop the solar farm from being put in here. And there's real concerns about the broader runoff from solar farms and things and what that does to waterways and all of that. So it's not just
00:30:14
Speaker
vibes-based, so to speak, the opposition to it. But it's kind of a squishier non-economic value proposition to it, which sometimes is a little harder for companies to figure out how to build the business case around.
00:30:36
Speaker
I think with agri-voltage, the most interesting aspect that a lot of people miss is, and this is something that I discussed with Josh Haslin, who's our Senior Director at Research for Ag Businesses, and we discussed this. What we came up or thought about was,
00:30:59
Speaker
how agri-voltage can pave the way for digitalized agriculture. We are looking at emissions reductions, not just on the farm, but we're also thinking about things like drones for precision agriculture, harvesters that are being powered by batteries that are being powered by the solar panels themselves. So many different things that you can do with agri-voltage, and maybe this ties to our AI news from the first half of the segment.
00:31:24
Speaker
So like looking at what can AI and digital tools locally help a farmer become completely off-grid and avoid the need to have a grid connection, pay hefty fees to utilities as electricity prices are going up. So I think that's the interesting angle to look at. And I'm sure there are so many innovations that we could do in this space, even though it may seem just an implementation problem where you think of, oh, where do I have space to put solar panels that are available today? And it's as straightforward as that.
00:31:54
Speaker
But I think there's more to it. Yeah, for sure. And Josh and our other colleague, Deepesh, just recently did a webinar, I think, about digital in agriculture. So that's another plug, putting put in another plug for that as well.
00:32:10
Speaker
But yeah, I think that's probably good for this week. But thanks, Karthik, for joining us. Our intrepid host, Anthony Skiavo, is off this week, but he'll be back next week. So anybody who's been missing him, be reassured. But yeah, thanks for the time, and we'll now get into the interview.
00:32:39
Speaker
All right. Welcome, welcome back, everyone. And we're excited to have for our guest today, Isabelle Pongren of Mimbly. So this was an interesting interview for us because I think, you know, we've been seeing at Lux a lot of growing interest in water and water treatment, water issues, you know, climate
Mimbly's Water-Saving Technology: Challenges and Expansion
00:33:02
Speaker
and plastic waste. And some of these issues have been a big focus for
00:33:05
Speaker
for a lot of companies for some time. But now water is another issue that's been of growing interest. And we came across Membly, thought it was a really interesting company to talk to on touching on some of those issues as well as some other hot topics, I think, as we'll get into. But Isabella, welcome. Thanks for joining us. Thank you so much for having me.
00:33:31
Speaker
Yeah. So first, I mean, to kick off, I'll let you explain to us about Mimbly, what it is you do, and then, you know, kind of how that came about, right? How you got the idea and the impetus to start this organization and get into this water space. Yeah, sure. So my name is Isabella Pongren, where I run the company called Mimbly, and we're based in Sweden, so on the west coast of Sweden, and founded this company back in 2017.
00:34:00
Speaker
started as part of my master thesis. So I was studying biotech engineering at Chalmers University of Technology. And then I did a master's within entrepreneurship and business design. And during the second year, you start your own venture. So then I started Mimbly and in the beginning didn't really know exactly within what type of water I wanted to save, but I knew that I wanted to work in the water space.
00:34:26
Speaker
So that's when me and my classmates are looking into how we use our water today, how do we prioritize the water that we use in our everyday life. And looking at laundry, it kind of comes on priority number three of how much water we use. And a laundry machine uses up to 40% of the water in every household, but there's no kind of new radical innovations in that space.
00:34:50
Speaker
So then we started kind of digging deeper into that and then found kind of a space where there's not that much new innovation, but there's a lot of resources being used. And we started focusing on professional laundry and saving water and microplastics and professional laundry. So that's kind of how it started. And the reason why we chose water is because I've lived in a lot of different countries where water has always been a problem and like a focus.
00:35:19
Speaker
And you think about it a lot and it affects everyone that lives in those countries a lot. And in Sweden we have a lot of water, so here you don't really think about it. You have potable water in your toilets, you flush the drain. When you brush your teeth, you use 20 liters of water that's just running because you don't even turn off the tap.
00:35:41
Speaker
So we use our water in a very unsustainable way. So that's kind of when the company was born and the idea was thought out. So can you explain a little bit about what exactly you do at Mimbli, right? You mentioned you're targeting these sort of professional laundries. What is the service or the product that they're getting from you? Yeah, of course. So we have developed a product that we call the Mimbox.
00:36:05
Speaker
which is an add-on water recycling system for professional laundry machines. So it recycles up to 70% of the water, it saves up to 30% of the energy, and then we capture microplastics that are released from your wash. And one single wash can release up to 9 million of these tiny fibers, and they usually go through the treatment plants and end up in the oceans.
00:36:25
Speaker
they bind into different toxins and pesticides, and we find them in plants, then fish in us and everywhere, basically. Yeah, so I'm really curious to dig into, I know there's more to it in terms of the water and energy savings and things, but I am curious how you've been seeing that issue around microplastics changing as far as, you know, as a driver for maybe for interest in your company and just in general, because I think it's certainly one that's been getting
00:36:56
Speaker
more and more attention in the press and potentially more regulatory attention, something that I think a lot of many of our clients are in the chemicals or plastics industry. A company's making this. It's something that they're, I think, appropriately growing or concerned about. So how are you seeing that issue kind of grow and change in terms of how it's affecting the perception and the need for this type of solution?
00:37:22
Speaker
changed a lot. So I would say since we started the company seven years ago, in the beginning, microplastics wasn't even on the agenda, more or less. So nobody was talking about it in the same degree. We didn't really know that it was a problem when we started the company either.
00:37:37
Speaker
And then the more years we've gone on, the higher up on the agenda microplastics are, and especially in the laundry space, because looking at microfibers, a big portion of them in the oceans and in our environment actually comes from washing textiles. So there are a lot of regulations that are pretty high up on the agenda for filters on laundry machines, and that there are regulations that it's mandatory to have different types of filters when you buy a new laundry machine.
00:38:06
Speaker
So yeah, just curious to know from your side because you know with microplastics now the general definition if you look it up I think is any plastic fiber that's less than five millimeters in length or something like that. So how small are the particles that you're able to refine in terms of like the smallest and at the end of it you collect so much microplastic. So where does that go and what do you do with that?
00:38:30
Speaker
No, of course. And I think the definition of microplastics, there is no clear definition, as you say. It is that everything over five millimeters is considered macroplastic and everything below is considered microplastics. And then there is kind of where does the line go until it's nano plastics.
00:38:48
Speaker
And then, so we've been looking into like, what are the usually the lengths of the microplastics released from textiles? And they're usually between like 100 and 150 micrometers from the tests that we've done. So then we're trying to adapt the filter after that. And the filter that we have now we filter down to 50 micrometers, we could potentially go down smaller as well. But then, then you would capture most of the plastics that are
00:39:17
Speaker
that are above that, at least. But then they also get entangled, so you do capture smaller fibers as well. But then it depends on how small you want to go and what is the aim for that filter, I would say. I mean, I was curious to see if you could put, you know, even sort of roughly a figure out, I mean, what sort of share of your sales, your customer conversations are kind of being driven by microplastics now as opposed to what it would have been five years ago.
00:39:46
Speaker
I would say some of our customers buy only for the microplastic issue and then that they save money and water and energy. It's on the plus side. So we have some customers that work in facility management where they do mops and they wash a lot of cloths and everything is made out of microfibers. So there for them, they have a really high push and it's
00:40:09
Speaker
big initiative to go microplastic free, but it's really, it's a long journey for them. So then they have won some contracts with having them in books and their sales pitch when they sell it to their customers. And then also looking at kind of the laundry facilities where they do a laundry for other companies. There they can get different types of like certifications and different types of like echo branding. And then if they do initiatives focusing on microplastics. So then we have some sales that are mainly microplastic focused.
00:40:39
Speaker
And I'm curious, Isabella, in these conversations that you have with such potential customers, do you get questions on what happens to the microfiber that is collected? So I was just curious to know what happens to it. Who are your off-takers for that? Yeah, of course. And I think this also differs from country to country, depending on how
00:41:02
Speaker
kind of your trash and recycling system works in the different countries. In Sweden, we do a lot of recycling when it comes to different types of materials and then everything else we burn and we use for like biogas and biomass. So here we can throw kind of this mix. It's a mix of microplastics, cellulose, dirt and hair. A really gross mix that we collect and then you throw it in the burnable trash.
00:41:29
Speaker
But that is not something that would work if we go to a country that uses landfills, for example. So then we have our own kind of trash cans where you can throw the microplastic in after you've emptied the min box. And then that is getting sent back to us or to a partner that we have.
00:41:45
Speaker
So yeah, I think it gets into, I mean, another question I had is sort of what is the value proposition or driver for this? And I think it was interesting what you were saying is you are seeing, because, you know, we always have these conversations about sustainable materials or processes alternatives. And, you know, there's always a cost associated with that. So you get into this question that goes that are a green premium for that people are willing to pay for these.
00:42:06
Speaker
And it seems like in your case, actually, sometimes it is for these commercial laundries because they can actually differentiate themselves when business, when market share, essentially by being able to say that they address this, for instance, microplastics issue.
00:42:25
Speaker
But I think it sounds like there's also some potentially financial payback from the energy savings. Maybe in some regions, there's also a regulatory driver. What do you see as the key value propositions for customers in adopting this? Exactly. I would say the financial return is the highest up on most of our customers' agenda. They want to have a payback period.
00:42:48
Speaker
kind of five to seven years is an okay ROI for their case. So then if they save on average 50% of the water and they save maybe on average 30% of the energy or 20% of the energy, then they kind of reach those targets. This all depends on where you live and which city or which country you're based in.
00:43:07
Speaker
Sweden has really, really cheap water. So here ROI is pretty tough, I have to admit. And then we have some customers in the cruise ships industry. There there are regulatory reasons. They're not allowed to release microplastic water in certain areas. So there it could be mainly regulatory that they buy a product as well.
00:43:27
Speaker
Yeah, really interesting. Yeah, and that gets into that. I mean, one of the other things that I think has been, is interesting about water, but also can be challenging for companies looking to build, and I think historically has been, I mean, this is a topic at Lux. We've even back in 2007, 2008 sort of timeframe, we were doing research around some of these water innovations and it's always been, interest has kind of come in waves, but it's been harder, I think, for a lot of companies to build sustainable businesses.
00:43:57
Speaker
around it because, as you said, many places water is very cheap, so it can be harder to show a financial return. And it's also very regional though. I mean, like you said, Sweden has very abundant water and it's a real contrast from climate issues where a ton of CO2 emitted
00:44:16
Speaker
anywhere in the world is more or less equally bad for the climate. But water, a cubic meter of water that's used in Sweden would be very different than a cubic meter of water that's used in Arizona and the US or in Egypt or something like that perhaps. It is very regional and it may also be the case that the places that have greater water stress might not be in the
00:44:47
Speaker
the regions that are the best positioned to adapt or to pay for these type of solutions. So where do you see the, for this type of industrial commercial water savings benefit, where do you see the most fertile areas for that being?
00:45:06
Speaker
I think that's a very interesting topic that we were discussing today as well. That is that a lot of the areas that have high problems with water or no water, they usually have pretty cheap water as well. So it doesn't really, it doesn't make sense. Looking at like Spain, for example, they announced last week that Barcelona has no water left and then the water is still
00:45:28
Speaker
like two euros per cubic and the same now I read that Colombia doesn't have any water left in Bogota so there's there's a lot of places where water there is no water they're using their water for other things and they've used all of their groundwater or they've used their water reservoir but still water prices are not kind of matching
00:45:49
Speaker
the usage. And I would say some areas do, like California has a pretty low amount of water, but they have high water prices, which kind of becomes an area that would be... For consumers, right. And for agriculture, maybe not so much. That's a whole other kettle of fish. No, exactly. And that also then differs. And I think that's also an interesting topic that you mentioned that you can save water on site because usually you save maybe
00:46:15
Speaker
somewhere else and where you're based. And this is kind of the main thought of the product as well, was to be able to save water locally where you place it.
00:46:25
Speaker
because it is very hard to save water kind of in your household or in every building if you don't take extremely short showers or if you really change behaviors. And historically, people don't want to change their behaviors. So that was kind of the key aspect to creating a product where you just wash completely as normal, use your own detergent, softener, whatever you want to use. And you shouldn't even notice that the product is there and kind of not affecting and changing behavior.
00:46:53
Speaker
But I think there's a lot of markets that are really interesting, even though water is cheaper in Spain. I think Spain is very interesting. South Africa is really interesting. Australia, California.
00:47:05
Speaker
different parts of Europe. Like Germany has pretty high water prices as well and has drought in some areas. Middle East is really interesting. Their water is really expensive. They don't have that much water. There's a lot of different markets there. Pretty interesting. And it's a pretty broad customer base as well. We sell to a lot of real estate owners that have shared laundry rooms. It's cleaning companies, hotels.
00:47:30
Speaker
we have some like restaurants, we have elderly care schools, there's a lot of different segments. Yeah, so where do you sort of see that? What's the path for growth and for scale for this in the long term? Because as I sort of understood it right now, you're kind of contracting and working with a lot of these type of players in, you know, laundries, commercial or hotel or whatever it is. And
00:47:58
Speaker
But do you see a longer term path where this becomes, you know, sort of a whole product category that the people are buying, or maybe it gets integrated into the machines and, you know, Mimbly gets acquired by Whirlpool or whomever, right? One of the equipment manufacturers. How do you, are you partnering, perhaps licensing to working with one of those types of organizations? What do you see as the path to scale for this kind of solution?
00:48:26
Speaker
I think it's a mix of both, both having our own products, but then also licensing and partnering up with different actors. I would love to see our technology inside of other laundry machines or other appliances that use water. We have today seven different patent families of the product. So we've patented we have our own sensors, our own filters and so on, so that we can and it's not locked to laundry. So we could use it in other applications, we could scale it down or scale it up. So I think that's
00:48:55
Speaker
to go global fast and have an impact fast, it would make sense to partner up with a big player or with several bigger players. Yeah, just curious to know as well because you mentioned the different markets. Are you also looking at maybe selling your solution to wastewater treatment facilities where you could just use it as a filtration option for the downstream rather than just this one? And if so,
00:49:21
Speaker
would the product require so many changes because you have harsher chemicals, harsher maybe solid wastes, and then you have a mixture. So you may have to have different filtration steps before you get to just recycling water and perhaps just filter out microplastics. So how do you see that evolution if you have to target that side of the spectrum?
00:49:41
Speaker
I think going to the wastewater plants, the water to treat there is very different. So now we recycle gray water from the households, but when you go to the treatment plants, they usually mix the gray water with the black water, and it kind of becomes this sludge where microplastics are also kind of mixed in with all these other materials.
00:50:00
Speaker
And then you would have to develop the tech quite a lot. So now we're looking into kind of other industries like textile industry when you prewash the textiles or prewash even the fibers before you produce textiles. But and also looking at other areas where you do use a lot of water, there's a lot of
00:50:17
Speaker
possibilities in a lot of different industries. I think agriculture that you mentioned before as well is an area where you wash a lot of different produce or there's other types of industry, car wash industry, use a lot of water, a lot of chemicals they don't want to release or potentially maybe have to send the water to a specific company for
00:50:40
Speaker
I forget the English word for it, but to kind of recycle it in another plant so you're not allowed to release the water into the sewer main stream. Yeah, I think it's something, I mean, we've been seeing, as I kind of mentioned at the top, a lot of interest in that, you know, in companies and industry, food and beverage and textile and apparel and, you know, even chemicals and other industrials kind of moving towards zero liquid discharge as a goal for there.
00:51:08
Speaker
for their operations and being able to deliver that and achieve that. There's a lot of questions about how much do you focus on.
00:51:20
Speaker
Just tools like water reduction, and I know that's a big focus for innovation, even in the laundry industry. Some of this is just machines that inherently use less water per load. More advanced machines use more modern laundry machines, you know better than I, but they use quite a bit less water than the ones that you would have bought 20 years ago, right? So there's a sort of water reduction in addition to how you can handle water treatment and reuse.
00:51:48
Speaker
Um, so where do you see, I mean, what is the, um, if you could give a little, like look into the future, where would you see this, this, this kind of solution going, going next beyond laundry? What do you think is the next sort of most promising market potentially for, for it? I think first it would expand more in the laundry space, like going to the smaller machines and potentially the bigger machines, because the scope is pretty wide.
00:52:13
Speaker
But then after that, I think textile industry is really interesting. There's so much water being used in the textile industry, both in the pre-washing of the fibers and then when you also wash all the fabrics before you produce everything. So there's a lot of
00:52:30
Speaker
And those like plants are usually in areas that pollutes our environments a lot. And maybe in countries where there's not enough regulations towards those types of actors, but where it's really needed to do something differently. And we're using all the groundwater in certain areas for this type of production. And we're using so much more textiles now than we did before.
00:52:56
Speaker
and with this kind of ultra fast fashion that is being very popular right now, we're gonna use so much resources for it that we don't have, basically.
00:53:09
Speaker
Yeah, the fast fashion issues, we've touched on it in previous episodes of the podcast here. Definitely one that I think is attracting a lot more attention from that environmental impact, not least of which is the water usage and microplastics sort of issues.
00:53:29
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. And I think like before fast fashion kind of were these bigger brands that were selling pretty cheap alternatives that were in every country, but now this ultra fast fashion that sells it for even less and they sell so much and there's so many discounts and then you buy potentially people buy so much more than they did before even, which is very scary.
00:53:53
Speaker
Yeah, one thing I also noticed with the Mimbox is that it also has a digital tool that your customers can use to understand how much they're saving in terms of energy, in terms of water and stuff. But from a development perspective, I'm also guessing you're trying to develop this using AI.
00:54:10
Speaker
So just curious to hear your take on the role of AI in this kind of a product. Like, are you looking at things like, oh, this is the range within which of sizes that we are collecting microplastics. So we should focus development of a microplastic filter that's, you know, collecting this size more than the rest or and things like that. So how do you see the role of AI in all of this? Yeah, I think the software side is extremely interesting because now we have
00:54:37
Speaker
A bit over 130 systems installed in four different countries where we gather a lot of data from the different sites, mostly for the product to work. So it's recycling data, so water, energy, microplastics, just as you said.
00:54:51
Speaker
But then with all the sensors that we have, we also have to analyze the water quality, how dirty it is, so how dirty all the washes are, if they're dirty enough to wash, if they overdose on detergent, which type of detergent they use, powder versus liquid, and then which types of washes you do. Do you use a 40 degree wash or do you do 95 degree wash? And then depending on kind of how dirty the clothes are.
00:55:14
Speaker
And so there's a lot of kind of behavioral data that we want to use to make more sustainable products and also kind of to guide these developing actors that do these types of laundry machines so that they can also make better products for those customer cases that we have. So I think there's a lot of things now that we're implementing with all the data that we gather for it to kind of learn itself how, what they wash and how it washes. And then the membooks can also adapt to that specific case.
00:55:43
Speaker
We can also set our parameters different depending on which type of customer it is.
00:55:47
Speaker
So now we have really low parameters. We don't want any discoloration. We don't want anything to be kind of affecting the result of the wash. But if it is a cleaning company that wash gray mops, maybe they don't care if the mops get a bit grayer. So then potentially we could change the parameters. And then the min books would kind of know that instantly when you plug it, and then you do a couple of washes and then it would know. So there's, there's a lot of interesting things on the data side. And with AI can go a lot faster now that we have a lot of data sets.
00:56:16
Speaker
I think it'll be really interesting to follow. And I imagine, and I would expect, there's going to continue to be growing interest in this. As I mentioned, the microplastics issue is growing in prominence and something that we're seeing a lot of interest in from our clients. And
00:56:40
Speaker
out there in the world. So I maybe will have the chance to have you back on sometime to talk more about it as that continues to grow and develop. But I really appreciate you taking the time to come on and join us. And it was a really interesting conversation. Yeah, of course. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.
00:56:58
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 the latest news, opinions, and articles.