123. From Gas to Glam: Molly Morse Discusses Mango Materials' Biodegradable Innovations

[00:00:03] Karl: All right, Molly Morris Mango materials. It's so great to have you on the Grow Everything Podcast. Yeah, great to see you. We've known each other for a while. I'm gonna kick it off with a little bit of a provocative question. methane is a greenhouse gas. It's one of the most dangerous greenhouse gases.

[00:00:21] Karl: It causes a fair amount of damage to the environment. and yet. Mango has chosen this to be, one of the fuels for its microbes. We talk a lot about microbes here, grow everything. Why did you guys choose methane and what are you doing with that methane?

[00:00:35] Molly: Yeah. Well, so methane is the carbon that society has essentially, wherever there's people, wherever there's living things on planet earth, there's methane, and I might even mention that there is methane throughout the galaxy. So this is. C one, single carbon C four. This is what methane is. It's all around us and it's what we use as our feedstock to feed bacteria, to transform that methane into an environmentally friendly alternative for plastics.

[00:01:06] Karl: Wow. I can't wait to get into that. how does that work? You Rum, go ahead.

[00:01:12] Erum: So I'm excited to get into that, but before we do, I wanna know a little bit more about your background. I know have a degree in environmental engineering, but what really sparked your passion for science and engineering? What was the thing?

[00:01:24] Molly: Yeah, so when I went to college, I thought I wanted to be a math major. I wasn't familiar with engineering at the time, so I thought I wanted to be math. I was an undergrad, I think it was the first week of college, and I realized that in college, math is actually super theoretical and I loved building things and how things worked.

[00:01:45] Molly: I went to my, academic advisor and was like, I'm not sure if I actually wanna be math after all. I talked to him and he was like, I think you might wanna be an engineer. So this is how I got into engineering. during undergrad, I actually took a class, I think it's called Solid Waste Management, but we called it trash.

[00:02:01] Molly: I've always been interested in just what happens to materials when they're no longer needed. . The fact that something could be on this planet for so long, after we use it like a single use plastic packaging just has always blown my mind. so, I've had a long-term love for science and engineering and just to fast forward the mango trajectory, I ended up going to grad school.

[00:02:23] Molly: It was studying biodegradable building materials for temporary applications, either temporary housing or form work. When you pour concrete, there's structural materials needed there. Became really interested in how we could make new materials that could be biodegraded, but could also have great functional properties, why you needed them.

[00:02:40] Molly: And that transitioned into an interest in how you could make these bio composites where you have natural glues, natural fibers to replace. Plywood then became how do you make these glues, these polymeric materials? and then to make a really long story short, found a love of PHAs, which is this naturally occurring biopolymer produced by nature.

[00:03:00] Molly: And I have two co-founders at Mango. We all have slightly different backgrounds, but there's a lot of parallel in our journey, and we incorporated the company based off of that inspiration.

[00:03:10] Karl: And what was the, , trajectory between, grad school and starting, , mango materials? when was Mango Materials started and how,

[00:03:17] Molly: Very soon after. So we didn't incorporate it while we were grad students and actually me and one of my co-founders, we actually met at an anaerobic digestion conference. Exactly. we love anaerobic digestion. we're both just super passionate about methane and so we met there when we were grad students and, both her and I had other jobs when we graduated with our PhDs.

[00:03:39] Molly: My third co-founder Allison, was I think A year behind in her PhD compared to us. And so we had other jobs. I was consulting and kept thinking back to my PhD work saw a lot of other people in Silicon Valley starting companies with these ideas and I. Our idea, if we should call it was very early, very science intensive, but we knew it could work.

[00:04:02] Molly: We knew you could take methane, feed it to bacteria and make this polymer inside their cell walls We knew that foundational science was part of my PhD work and my co-founder Allison's PhD work, so we knew that was possible. We saw these other people starting companies and we're like, we have the foundational science list.

[00:04:17] Molly: Start a company based off of this. How hard could it be? the three of us consulted for a bit. we all had different things. Alison got her PhD, granted. And then, our very first funding was a grant from the National Science Foundation, an SBAR Grant, small Business Innovation and Research.

[00:04:35] Molly: It was 150,000 US dollars. We thought it was so much money, it was for six months worth of work. that's how we got incorporated. we hired our first employee that was the start. it's been a huge journey since then.

[00:04:47] Erum: Wow.

[00:04:47] Karl: how long has it been, Molly? I mean, just to kind of give

[00:04:50] Karl: people a sense.

[00:04:52] Molly: Alison and I have been working together for almost 20 years, if you consider when we first met as PhD students. , so yeah, we've been working together for two decades. mango materials itself, our very first funding came through in 2012. So it's been more than 10 years. And when we started, we were a science project and now we have a launch facility that's operational at a wastewater treatment plant with operators that run the fermentation system.

[00:05:18] Molly: and when we started, it was me and my two co-founders we're sampling a little tiny bioreactor ourselves and now we have a team that does it.

[00:05:24] Erum: Yeah, I can't wait to hear the specific stories. I mean, it's great that you have all this experience and you have the time to really think about how your company can really have a good impact and see some of the impact by now. and. Meg material. So your process is a carbon negative by manufacturing pro process.

[00:05:43] Erum: could you walk us through how converting methane into PHA sets a new benchmark for sustainable manufacturing?

[00:05:51] Molly: Sure, happy to. So the methane that Mango Materials currently uses is from an anaerobic digester that's part of a municipal wastewater treatment plant. So this is in Vacaville, California. and it's just how, all over the world water is treated. There's an anaerobic digester and part of the byproduct of cleaning water Using anaerobic digestion as a step is the production of methane. It's just what happens to the carbon, and you can use this methane for other things. It's often just flared. So, the methane at the wastewater treatment plant would normally go through a candle flare. Instead of that, we partner with the wastewater treatment plant to have access to the site and have access to the methane feedstock.

[00:06:31] Molly: We have a pipe that comes directly off that. Pipe that would normally be going to the flare. And instead of flaring, we take that pipe and feed it into a tall, deep tank, , that's full of water and where our bacteria live and the bacteria, like me or you if we're to eat a lot of. Chocolate or something.

[00:06:48] Molly: We would get fat because bacteria instead of eating chocolate, they eat methane gas. It's their carbon source. , their carbon feedstock. They eat the methane and they convert it to their carbon storage mechanism, which is a PHA. It stands for poly hydroxy aloid. It's this naturally occurring bio polyester that's inside their cell walls.

[00:07:08] Molly: It's how they've evolved to survive famines, similar to us getting fat. It's similar. Process. Process. And so they've accumulated this biopolymer inside their cell walls. We harvest that biopolymer, comes out looking like a white fluffy powder. And that's one of the key ingredients for the pellets that we then sell onto the market.

[00:07:28] Molly: instead of having this methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas, like you mentioned, instead of having it be flared or vented in some instances, we feed it to our bacteria, to make materials.

[00:07:39] Karl: Yeah, I remember, I mean now it must have been four or five years ago you were wearing, one of the bracelets that was made from the material and I was like, oh, this is cool and it's real.

[00:07:50] Molly: Yeah. And actually I'm not, today. This sweater, is not from PA, but I actually have a sweater made out of PHA fibers. generally our material is going into pellets. So pellets is what we ship. And generally it's going into a hard good, an injection molded, something like this.

[00:08:08] Molly: or something little like toys. These are little injection molded figurines. And we don't make figurines, we don't make packaging. We make pellets that get melted by someone else to make things. But you can also have a different grade of pellets that gets melted to make fiber that could go into apparel.

[00:08:22] Molly: So I do have a, PHA sweater. or yeah, actually I have a shoe upper. So in this case, The pellets get shipped to someone that makes the fiber. The fiber gets shipped to somebody that gets knitted. ends up in a shoe upper, it's like a huge complicated supply chain. But, , we make the pellet.

[00:08:36] Karl: Okay. just so our listeners who aren't seeing the video know, Molly held up a test tube that looked like it was full of little white pellets. And then she held up basically like a little, pot that you would have, a cosmetic product in. I think those are usually, made out of a plastic or glass.

[00:08:51] Karl: She held up a little toy, like a rubber ducky for a bathtub. And yeah, then also white shoe, looked a little bit like a Tom sandal kind of shoe, woven. Very cool.

[00:09:04] Molly: Upper mesh.

[00:09:05] Karl: Yeah. So, going from the lab I think again, when we first met, you finally had this little bracelet that was one of the first products.

[00:09:13] Karl: But from a lab concept going from these benchtop, bioreactors to a full blown. Facility is a challenge. It's one of the things we talk a lot about here on Grow Everything. We've had a lot of people come on and talk about different ways to buy and manufacture goods, but for you and Mango materials, what were some of the challenges, either technical or operational?

[00:09:33] Karl: You're laughing at this question that you encountered to go from the lab to the facility and how did you guys overcome it? What'd your team do?

[00:09:41] Molly: We're still going through it now. there's constant challenges. right now, I don't know, we're building a larger facility and they came back. Something about the fire. On Thursday, the fire suppression system, they need something else the city does and no big deal. We can get the engineer to do something for the fire suppression system for this.

[00:09:57] Molly: when it was the three of us, just sampling the bioreactor and we would do things like 24 7, me and my, two co-founders, we would do this stuff in the lab ourselves, holding pipettes, doing the monitoring of the gas so we feed methane and oxygen, our bacteria also need oxygen.

[00:10:12] Molly: So this is actually an explosive mixture. We do gas fermentation, which is. I know not completely unique to your cohort, but in terms of the world of fermentation, very few groups are doing gas fermentation. So this is a whole different mass transfer feeding system. most groups stick sugar and feed sugar to bacteria to make stuff we feed gas.

[00:10:29] Molly: So when we first started, How do we get enough guests mass transfer? How do we make sure the bacteria work? okay. Ann and Allison, you sample at 3:00 AM and 5:00 AM all do midnight. that was our life. It is completely, completely different world right now, and the three of us are three co-founders all have.

[00:10:45] Molly: Different areas of the business that we're focused on we're kinda like engineers and very formulaic about things. , but now it's been quite a journey. So we're talking about having a partnership with a municipal city. We need, rights to the land and the feedstock. We need to work with the planning department.

[00:11:01] Molly: We need to work with permitting. we need to hire people. We need them all to follow the same standard operating procedure, the same SOP, to make sure the bacteria grow in the same way. And if something funky happens in your process, you need to have the system set up to be able to analyze what's happened.

[00:11:17] Molly: And that's a very different skill set than someone who can follow the same SOP again and again and again. Oh, something weird happened and you have foam coming out of this orifice. what the heck happened? So safety is number one. That is the number one and most important thing to us. And so that's part of our culture. So you never wanna jeopardize on that, but being able to be flexible and nimble and solve the unique problems by also having a rigorous Order of operations is not trivial.

[00:11:46] Molly: So it's been just a constant thing. And even today, we're trying to scale up and build a larger facility, we're introducing a new material. Like we didn't even met PHA. Others are producing it. It was identified almost a century ago, but it's not widely commercialized. So there's so much going on here.

[00:12:04] Molly: So I could talk for an hour about the journey or hours.

[00:12:07] Erum: Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure some of our listeners who are also founders, of the early stage, some of them are later stage, but I, could feel them resonating with you like. They're probably just like, yes, that also happened. but no, it's learning, right? And you have this, design, build, test, learn system that's engineering.

[00:12:25] Erum: This is why you're the CEO and founder of this company. I'm sure it's fun for you too. at times.

[00:12:33] Molly: Sometimes it's.

[00:12:40] Erum: That's awesome. But you're doing this for a reason. You're getting products out into the market. You're collaborating with some very interesting companies, especially with this, wastewater treatment plant that you have in, Vacaville. some of your partners include Allbirds Cell McCartney. Can you tell us how did these partnerships come about and what do you think is essential for, successful future collaborations?

[00:13:04] Molly: Yeah, so, unfortunately for us, all the collaborations have been very different. I wish I could be like, you go to this one conference and you network on this one day and you collect all. Put out some posts on LinkedIn. I was talking to current customer I'm super excited about right now.

[00:13:20] Molly: I was talking to him this morning just like when you originally found us, how did you originally contact us? He's like, Facebook like, sir, and he is like, you didn seriously. at some point in the next few days, I gotta go figure out somehow, you must be able to message mango materials on Facebook.

[00:13:34] Molly: I dunno where that goes that out. so that was first like, oh, Facebook. So, but going back to Naura, Allbirds, Stella. All really, really different stories of how they came to be of their interests. There are some themes. , I would say one of the things is having some sort of champion internally there, so somebody who cares about the material.

[00:13:58] Molly: This is a new material. I mean now for injection molding, it'll almost always process successfully the first time. But when we were first starting, it might not, and we didn't know, all the different levers, you have to do this a hundred times, so you know every little thing that'll go wrong.

[00:14:09] Molly: so you need somebody who's gonna understand that this is a new material there's innovation involved and they're gonna be patient and not. have a nervous breakdown if something didn't work, and they'll work with you together. So an internal champion is really important. Ideally, they're getting something very unique out of it, so they can tell a unique story on the marketplace, or they have a unique customer demand that is really, really asking for this.

[00:14:36] Molly: And so that pull the innovation through the supply chain. And ideally in the capitalistic world we live in, everyone's somehow making money throughout me.

[00:14:45] Erum: Mm-hmm.

[00:14:46] Molly: So those are just a couple of the key points I've

[00:14:48] Molly: mentioned.

[00:14:49] Karl: Yeah. And I wanna, just add to that question because I'm super curious. you're working with this wastewater treatment plant, and I'm sure that if I was in the wastewater treatment business, , I would look at this and be interested in it, but talk about how that one came about.

[00:15:02] Karl: I could just imagine, you guys pitched the wastewater treatment. Manager and they're like, what the hell are you talking about? You're gonna take our methane that we flare off and turn it into something useful? Are we gonna get revenue from that? what does it look like?

[00:15:14] Molly: that's pretty much how it goes. Yeah. yeah, there's a lot of other things. Around it they're like, oh, cool, we can get revenue from this. do they have space? Are they flexible? the economic development agency of the city or whatever is often interested in some kind of job creation or what have you.

[00:15:31] Molly: So there's an interest there. They have this method that they're flaring and we'll pay them for it. so that can be a revenue source for them. That's, of interest. we're definitely, Interesting and different. it's not like there's tons of groups going around talking to the wastewater treatment plants, being like, can I locate a facility there to use your methane? they're not getting a lot of that,

[00:15:51] Karl: there is one publication that everybody in wastewater treatment reads, and I just see the headline of you guys in there talking about what you do. And then the phone is ringing off the hook. And the next thing you know, the mango materials, factory of container ships is out there being deployed.

[00:16:07] Molly: Yeah. One day. One day. And you have, I mean, through all those cities and permitting and siting where you're located and how big the facility could be. the more methane you have, the more PHA you could produce and where's that going and where's it being shipped? so we love wastewater treatment plant methane, and there's a lot of reasons for that, but there's methane from all sorts of. landfills, agricultural facilities, abandoned coal mines release that of methane. there's a lot of stranded methane and just the natural gas ecosystem.

[00:16:33] Molly: , agricultural facilities often have vented methane or they have manure, other waste that's often, , could be utilized. It's of a dream of mine to use methane from an agricultural facility to make dairy packaging and closed loop That way long term.

[00:16:48] Erum: That's cool. Yeah. we like when people dream. That's one of the favorite things just to think about the future. But we know right now. you have investment, you have to get money in, you have to stay focused, get the thing done. in spite of all the different challenges that come your way, , I actually have this very vivid image of a wastewater treatment plant outside Philadelphia.

[00:17:09] Erum: , 'cause I lived outside of Philadelphia and to get into the city, we drive over this bridge and it always. ' not smell the greatest. And then you see the flares, I never knew what it was when I was younger. I'm like, why is there fire coming out of this pipe all the time?

[00:17:24] Erum: I never saw it not on. so you wanna go to Philly and that's the next plan, highly recommend it. I mean, it's a great city. cause now you're in Cali, but maybe you can bi coastal.

[00:17:35] Karl: Yeah.

[00:17:36] Erum: so now, I mean, I don't wanna get too political because, we always wanna focus on, biotech, but it seems like in today's, administration moving into an era where environmental regulations are loosening a bit and there's less focus on reducing greenhouse gases.

[00:17:51] Erum: Do you feel like that's an issue? what are the biggest hurdles for, broader adoption of biomanufacturing and biodegradable polymers? Is there any pushback or things are just going forward?

[00:18:02] Molly: with the new administration, other things, it's a little bit of a rebranding as what I would call it. And yes, you are correct of everything you said. I would also say that. Generally, wherever there's people are living things, there's methane and this is a wasted resource that could be used locally to make materials locally on demand.

[00:18:18] Molly: This is a way to have resilient economies. Also in the, rural communities as well often have access to this methane. So we could talk about, , local supply chains, the local production materials, being self-sufficient. we are completely focused on biomanufacturing and we use methane, which is a greenhouse gas to make an alternative to conventional plastics.

[00:18:41] Molly: But there's a lot of ways that can go different directions and that it's still core to, mangoes, belief in mission, which is, part of our story as well. so we're just highlighting those other aspects of it now.

[00:18:53] Erum: Yeah.

[00:18:54] Karl: Yeah, I mean, I would think that it would be very attractive to any municipal, and you said there's multiple places, but basically, to be able to go into a municipality and say, Hey, here's a way you can, increase resilience and make some money. then at the same time do some good for the environment.

[00:19:09] Karl: and that becomes the tertiary or, fourth message, whatever I would imagine it would be very attractive to people.

[00:19:15] Molly: Yeah, and it's creating local jobs and human health is also a growing concern, around, microplastics, the chemicals we're ingesting, that's becoming a hot button issue. And so that's something that we're inadvertently targeting as well. the concerns are, a little bit shifted now.

[00:19:33] Karl: Yeah. Well you're not the only one we hear it from, but I think we wanted to ask that question specifically because we see regulations being, loosened. But we also believe that that creates novel opportunities for companies if you're thinking that way. So one of the things going back and doing our research on you, it had been a while.

[00:19:51] Karl: you had this story about you guys doing, On demand 3D printing in space using your bioreactors. And we've had a number of people come on to talk about space. most recently we had Erica de Benedictus talking about creating these chassis microorganisms for Mars that would be used to create a bioplastic from Martian soil.

[00:20:12] Karl: so. how did my materials end up, in this, low gravity environment and what are you thinking about in terms of how you might integrate your technology to produce, sustainable materials off planet?

[00:20:24] Molly: Yeah, so we actually met a group through some circuitous means we met a group from NASA and ended up giving a presentation there where we learned about some of the NASA programs. So it was actually an STTR similar to SBIR, but there is more of a academic type collaboration that we applied for I can't actually remember what the solicitation was, but this spearheaded our initial work. Looking at this. we're never a space first company and we're still not. We're very focused on planet earth. However, you can use space and microgravity to learn so much about your system. So I mentioned a little bit ago how we do gas fermentation, and that's different.

[00:21:02] Molly: Well, a big part of this is mixing. So we have methane and oxygen, these two gases and. If you don't have gravity, that really changes the scenario. So we can learn more about mixing and microgravity and we can learn about how the methane can be dissolved and delivered to the organism. 'cause they need to uptake that gas in order for the process to happen.

[00:21:22] Molly: And then you can think through the other steps of your process. Thermodynamically, and this is really helpful on planet Earth, but when you can use, these. Off planet environments to think it through and you have funding to do that, that is enormously advantageous to the commercialization of our technology here on planet Earth.

[00:21:40] Molly: that continues to be the case. I can't remember what year this was. It was a while ago, our first funding, and we continue to advance that. we did a parabolic flight. Probably a year ago, maybe less than a year ago, , testing some of these various attributes. And so this has been a ongoing source of inspiration, collaboration, revenue for the company as we deploy.

[00:22:00] Molly: but really we want our first big commercial systems to be on planet Earth. We're focused on your more stereotypical type plastic applications here. But yes, you can imagine a world. If we're going to deep space, how are we gonna make our materials? we could just ship our freeze dried bacteria there and make materials locally on demand with methane that's there, rather than shipping, plastic pellets or every different type of plastic device you could possibly need.

[00:22:26] Karl: And just to go back to, the technology currently works, the methane is bubbled through water that the bacteria live in, right?

[00:22:34] Molly: Yeah, essentially,

[00:22:36] Karl: yes. Very simplified. Yeah. Okay. So then how would it work in space? I mean, how do you bubble, water or gas?

[00:22:45] Karl: Methane through water if, there's no gravity.

[00:22:48] Molly: Exactly. So you have to use a different form of mixing. A lot of our work has involved membranes, membrane technologies of dissolving the methane. longer term there could be some interesting dry fermentation, where you grow the bacteria in a different type of environment. they don't necessarily need to be suspended in water to grow.

[00:23:06] Molly: so that creates a whole host of potential innovation.

[00:23:09] Karl: Amazing.

[00:23:11] Erum: Yeah, I mean, you open up a can of worms talking about space. yeah, it's so phenomenal. I just really loved how you pinpointed the fact that you're using this space application as an exercise to be inspired to create new models here for your commercial activity on earth. And it is a good exercise for, others that are out there. I always tell people that I meet founders all the time.

[00:23:37] Erum: Can you do this in space? 'cause then you can get some of that space money and then help them, who knows if there's a true demand and someone maybe wanna license your technology or, as you get, bigger and you have the time. not?

[00:23:50] Erum: why not?

[00:23:50] Erum: If the money's there, go for it.

[00:23:52] Molly: for sure. For sure.

[00:23:53] Erum: and that parabolic flight sounds good. Were you on that? I mean, sure you tell us.

[00:23:57] Erum: Okay.

[00:23:57] Molly: some of my colleagues. Yeah,

[00:23:59] Erum: Your colleagues at Manga materials were on that flight.

[00:24:01] Molly: yeah. yeah. Mango materials. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:24:04] Erum: That's so cool. Was there any video of that?

[00:24:08] Molly: Oh yeah. Yeah. We have video. I think we have, stills on our Instagram page.

[00:24:12] Erum: Oh, I'll link to that. That's really cool. I'll have to see. It reminds me of that. okay. Go Music video. I don't know if you ever saw it. but they do a whole music video where they just time everything on this parabolic flight. but it's like, you know, it looks like they're, floating on a plane there's, balloons that are filled with paint and they bust them in the.

[00:24:29] Erum: Plane paint flies everywhere. I get motion sickness, so I dunno if that would be my jam, but it's fun to think about.

[00:24:36] Molly: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:24:37] Erum: so right now Manga Materials has a facility in Rockville. That's what? Right now we are focusing on getting that to be producing.

[00:24:47] Erum: What kind of scale are we talking about in terms of production? how much are you producing?

[00:24:52] Molly: Yeah, so it's a 5,000 liter gas fermentation system that we have there. So that's the scale we currently work at, and the facility is up and running and operating. , what we're actually focused on right now though, is larger volumes of our formulated pellets. So often that means purchasing raw ingredients from others.

[00:25:12] Molly: So we'll actually buy PHA powder from others. That's not made from methane. It's made from generally some form of plant type feedstock. It can be molecularly. Identical or very similar to what our methanotroph has produced from methane, but we're able to purchase this third party material, so we have significantly higher volumes because what we're really focused on as a company right now is getting more volumes of pellets into the market, getting more applications commercialized because we need that customer pull so that we can ultimately build a larger methane fermentation facility that's much bigger than 5,000 liters.

[00:25:51] Molly: But that 5,000 liter scale is what we'll be at for the near term.

[00:25:55] Karl: And how do you measure it in terms of, pounds, liters, tons of pellets produced from a 5,000 liter, facility?

[00:26:02] Molly: Some capacity is probably on the order of 20,000 pounds per year of, raw powder if you were just to operate it. Just to operate it. So it is not designed as a commercial production facility. if you're making 20 or even a hundred thousand pounds of material per year, and this is the raw powder.

[00:26:19] Molly: a hundred thousand pounds. that's a very small volume for the plastics industry. when we think of where we were a couple years ago, we're super proud. but yes, so those volumes are just small.

[00:26:28] Karl: Yeah, as you should be. and I'm just curious, it's been a while since we've had someone come on and talk about pellets have our audience understand, how do those pellets get turned into something? the things that you held up earlier,

[00:26:40] Karl: you ship the pellets and they go into these facilities.

[00:26:44] Molly: Yeah, so I love cooking analogies, even though I'm not a cook. But anyway, how I like to think of it is you have flour and there's different types of flour. So you can have whole wheat flour, or you could have white flour. So mango materials happens to make one type of flour, our bacteria, our meth toasts make one type, let's pretend it's whole wheat flour.

[00:27:02] Molly: However, what mango material sells is the dough. So we have dough that can go into waffles. And we have dough that can go into angel hair, pasta, and so there's other groups that sell waffles. And there's other groups that sell angel hair pasta, and they need different types of dough, even though it's pretty similar, you have flour and you have water, and you have eggs or whatever the heck goes into the dough.

[00:27:23] Molly: It's pretty similar, just different ratios, and you treat it a little differently. That's essentially what we do, and we ship the dough or we ship the pellets to all these other groups that make their different types of baked goods. So then they take the pellets, and if they're making angel hair pasta, you put it through a pasta machine and you pull out pasta.

[00:27:40] Molly: Well, if you're making fiber, you take those pellets, you melt it down, it comes out of a spin red, and you get these fibers coming if you're eating pasta at a restaurant, there's a lot of different steps that ended up to get that pasta on your plate in the restaurant, going all the way back to the farmer that made the flour.

[00:27:56] Molly: So, it's very, very similar, for the plastics industry to have all those different steps. And maybe you want it to be colored or dyed or treated or some kind of unique thing happens to your. Food or your PHA pellet to make it into that end. Good. So it can be a very complicated supply chain.

[00:28:16] Karl: Got So what kind of baked goods are selling the most?

[00:28:19] Molly: so our type is the waffles, because you can imagine if you have waffle dough, If you're Holiday Inn Express, you can make a waffle. It might not be the mess of waffle, but you can be four years old making a waffle at Holiday Inn Express. Or you can have a very fancy one at a Michelin star restaurant.

[00:28:37] Molly: can make a waffle. So we love small format of injection molded hard goods. similarly if you want the perfect angel hair pasta You probably can't have your 4-year-old at Holiday Inn Express, making perfect angel hair pasta. It might not even look like pasta.

[00:28:50] Molly: It might just be a little gobbly gook coming out of the thing. So there's more expertise to roll out the pasta at the perfect speed and the temperature, and then you need to maybe line up the pasta strand so they don't get all tangled. there's a whole thing about it. It's very similar.

[00:29:05] Molly: So our favorite is, the waffles or the injection molded.

[00:29:10] Erum: I love that.

[00:29:11] Karl: Yeah. That's amazing.

[00:29:13] Erum: any further questions?

[00:29:17] Karl: Yeah, I mean, we had all these questions, Molly, I'm like should I ask the Lego question? You know, which you've been asked many times.

[00:29:26] Erum: If this question is, please ask it.

[00:29:31] Karl: yeah, that's where I'm going. Yeah.

[00:29:36] Molly: I get this question from kids all the time. So Legos are very precision engineering of how they're made. So going back to the waffle analogy, they are the exact perfect waffle to the perfect, crisp, made the exact same way. Every single time they make these little bricks that snap together with the satisfying crack, and you can score 'em in different environments in your attic, in your flooding basement for generations, and they can still snap together decades later with that perfect snap.

[00:30:06] Molly: So this is very targeted, pristine engineering with very, very specific mechanical properties that is part of their whole brand. So for a new material that. melts a little differently, flows a little differently. we haven't talked a lot about biodegradability here, but that's one of the inherent benefits.

[00:30:22] Molly: One of the inherent attributes of PHAs. They need significant enzymatic attack. They need a lot of bacteria. They need soil and moisture in order to break down. if you have a Lego, this in your house's gonna last forever, but if you keep it in your basement of floods and there's soil down there and you never clean it for 30 years, it's gonna degrade.

[00:30:40] Molly: so that's why I like little figurines that are more either single use or, often these things could end up in your cereal box and you collect them and you use 'em for a little bit and then they're gone. applications like that tend to be more of a target than specific Legos, although, it'd be fun to be part of the Lego vision.

[00:30:56] Molly: there's so much creativity. I love Legos as a child, Right, and the reason I asked this question a few years ago is because they keep talking about how they're greening their supply chain, they're gonna start making more Legos. And maybe they just need to say, biodegradable as part of their new branding, or have a line that says biodegradable on it so that people understand that.

[00:31:16] Karl: yes, it's gonna last for a long time, but hey, if you really don't want it, the easy way to get rid of it is to put it in your backyard and it's going to fertilize your roses.

[00:31:30] Karl: Exactly.

[00:31:31] Erum: Harping on. He has so many.

[00:31:37] Karl: No, not anymore. No. I've lived that, I do have very large containers of Legos, and I've had this conversation where when my boys were young, their grandparents pulled out the Legos. so it goes to what you were saying in terms of these things last forever.

[00:31:50] Karl: And so as we started to mouse our collection, there already existed. Collection that we had, inherited. so as I watch what they're doing, and they're thinking about the materials and getting to know you, that was always one of those things

[00:32:02] Molly: Yeah, same thing. My kids have Lego sets that were both mine and my husband's and yeah, my husband had one of the early, I dunno, star Wars something I'm, that's very sought after.

[00:32:14] Karl: Right, the space ones,

[00:32:17] Molly: Yes.

[00:32:20] Erum: So you were talking about Biodegradability, so we've talked about that a little bit with some other biomaterials friends. , can you talk to us and remind us about how Biodegradability is classified? what is the testing and, I know it's, a matter of days, there's a biodegrade in 60 days or 90 days.

[00:32:38] Erum: Can you talk a little bit about how

[00:32:39] Erum: manga materials biodegrades?

[00:32:40] Molly: So there's two different things. There's biodegradable and there's biobased, and they're completely not related, but people get confused about it. So I mention that. So Biobased is in the material, so if you have. rapidly renewable methane, or you have corns or you have other kind of plant that is feeding something to make the material, that means it's bio-based and you can use sugar as a feedstock to make something that is completely not biodegradable.

[00:33:08] Molly: and you can use. ancient fossil fuels to make something that's completely biodegradable. So those two things are not related at all. But then we have the term biodegradable, which is actually very much a controversial term right now. I actually, try to avoid it, but do use it. but basically what biodegradable means is.

[00:33:26] Molly: Prone to enzymatic attack. It means bacteria, fungi, can secrete enzymes that break this down. So if you have a polymer chain and something can be secreted to start to break that down. That means something is biodegradable. there's a biological mechanism that can start to break something down.

[00:33:48] Molly: It might be really, really, really slow. Maybe it's 1% in a thousand years. It's still biodegradable. But that's why when we say something is biodegradable, we need to say in what environment and to what extent. And there's a lot things that influence that. so PHA is a family.

[00:34:04] Molly: There's many types, and like the most popular type is P three, HB poly three hydroxybutyrate. Anyway, it doesn't really matter, but it's very, very common. And most things on planet Earth have the ability to break down P three, hb, including humans. if you start breaking something down, if you want it to be fully biodegradable, you want.

[00:34:22] Molly: All the carbon that is, that material to be completely consumed, completely reduced to something like CO2 carbon dioxide, single carbon, C one carbon, or methane, CH four. However, how quickly something biodegrades it depends on the environment. If you're in the cold, deep sea Arctic, PHA is gonna, and a banana peel is gonna take potentially years to biodegrade.

[00:34:45] Molly: I mean, we, sometimes find old ancient organics that are super old 'cause they're in these unique environments. If you're in the Caribbean or in a backyard compost and it's warm and moist and lots of mixture and aeration, something's gonna biodegrade quickly. And if you have something thicker. It's gonna bio biodegrade slower than something that's thinner.

[00:35:07] Molly: So I like to compare biodegradation to cellulose and think of a leaf and think of a log, if you have a leaf and it ends up in, this moist environment, the leaf's gonna biodegrade very quickly. Just like a thin film of PHA will biodegrade quickly, if you have a log and it's in a ship and the.

[00:35:23] Molly: Dead sea or whatever with no oxygen. you could have a log that lasts a thousand years in that environment, just like you could have a big chunk of P. and I've said way too many words, but Biodegradation ends up being really complicated and To answer your question, yes, there are all sorts of standards that you can pass, and there's different ways to do it over different time periods, and there's.

[00:35:43] Molly: The TTUV people pronounce it differently. Austrian standard for backyard home compostable, okay. There's A-S-T-M-D 6,400. There's all sorts of different things. Maybe you get a checkbox or you get a logo that you can say, this is bad degradable, but that just really means it passed this one specific test in this one specific environment.

[00:36:00] Molly: It also doesn't mean if you want your material to not last forever and you want your material to be. Compostable, which a facility is a place, it's a noun, a compost location. Biodegradable is a verb. It's something that's happening to the material. But if you want your material to be biodegraded in a compost facility, there is specific testing that material can go under, that you get a label that says, this is okay.

[00:36:27] Molly: However, to make matters really complicated, compost facilities might not operate the way that test was done. And so it is possible you got this test, yes, the material works, and the compost facility is like, hell no, I'm not operating for those conditions. That's a contaminant for me. and when it gets even more complicated, but

[00:36:43] Molly: anyway,

[00:36:44] Erum: wow. are there industry associations where you're talking to your peers and you're trying to figure this stuff out, or

[00:36:50] Erum: you guys are getting tips. I would love to know what that is like.

[00:36:53] Molly: Yeah, there's a group called BPI. Products institute, I think is what it stands for. And they're trying to spearhead the cleanup of some of this. And it's also hard just going back to the compost facility for a second. that's great potential, a great end of life option for a lot of things.

[00:37:06] Molly: Whether it's food, green waste, certain packaging. But right now, the way standards are written, especially if you wanna make organic compost, if that's your product, you're in the business of selling organic compost. There are certain rules, and right now they're written in a way that. Perhaps PHAs or other materials and not just PHA couldn't be used because it can't come into their facility and you still sell organic compost.

[00:37:30] Molly: So yes, there's a bunch of agencies, organizations, trade groups and actually PHA companies as well that are trying to assist with this. 'cause there's different rules by different states, by different countries. The compost facilities operate differently in different places.

[00:37:42] Erum: Yeah. Oh my gosh. Wow. Yeah.

[00:37:44] Karl: Yeah, it sounds like a complicated matrix. I actually didn't have any other questions. Molly, Was there anything else that we should have covered that we didn't? I like, this was a really conversation.

[00:37:54] Erum: I feel like, Molly, you're amazing. I just love the fact that, you have really concise answers. I mean, you've been doing this for a while, so you're performing, but you're educating, you're selling. It was great. So great to finally meet you too.

[00:38:07] Molly: I.

[00:38:10] Molly: It's good to have a lot of love and a lot of support. And I know my co-founder was at an event last night and I was about I don't know, technical, nerdy people learning how to sell. 'cause we're working on that. I dunno. They told her, they're like, one company is gonna make it. We want yours to be wildly successful.

[00:38:23] Molly: So it's like, great to have that love when you're doing something and just so hard, every day you're just getting battered down oh my God, now this, now this, now this, now this. So.

[00:38:33] Karl: Yeah, I always love running into you and just hearing the progress because you've been resilient. You took this idea. You guys have come so far and I mean, we were trying to get you on the podcast pretty early on. It's even better now because of the progress. it's exponential.

[00:38:47] Karl: It's building. So

[00:38:48] Karl: thank you so much, Molly, for coming on. We really appreciate it.

[00:38:51] Molly: thank for having me. It's been.