66. From Waste to Wardrobe: Tomtex's Ross McBee on Spinning Sustainability into Style

[00:00:00] Erum: Ross McPhee, we're so happy to have you on the grow everything podcast. How are you?

[00:00:06] Ross: I'm doing okay. Thank you for having me.

[00:00:08] Erum: I wanted to have you on the podcast since we first met, which was last year. Sometime. gave us a tour of your laboratory and we saw some of the materials that you guys are whipping up and then we met again at the time. Holiday slash investment closing party, which was super fun, super fun. And we had a great conversation about everything.

[00:00:30] Erum: And I was like, oh my gosh, why didn't we record our conversation? Because it was perfect podcast material. So now here we are on the podcast.

[00:00:38] Ross: Yeah. Amazing. Yeah, that was a lot of fun. That party was nice. It was a good wrap up to a good year. I think

[00:00:43] Karl: Awesome. Yeah. And then we ran into each other at biofabricate a couple of weeks ago in Paris. How was that for you?

[00:00:48] Ross: that was cool. I mean, it was great to be in Paris. It's a new venue. get to see some people get to meet some people that might not have made it out to the States, which is cool. it's always great to see the progress of everyone. you always keep your eyes open, but having everyone together and being able to talk being able to get people to talk, maybe a little bit more openly than they would another context is also great to, really think, and I think a lot of other people feel this way that, this is not a winner take all space, rising tide lifts everyone.

[00:01:13] Ross: So sharing, being open, being able to talk. Freely and strategize and talk about how we could work together on things is also a really great sort of opportunity for an event like that. That was a pretty productive few days. Yeah.

[00:01:25] Karl: Pretty awesome.

[00:01:26] Erum: Yeah, that's great to hear. , we'll definitely have to dig into that more. I love the rising tide, and there's very interesting biomaterial companies are out there. And, when we make products, not necessarily one material, it's multiple. So that

[00:01:38] Erum: makes a lot of sense that you guys can collaborate and get those connections.

[00:01:42] Erum: But why don't we just kick it off from the beginning? I mean, led you to co found TomTex? What was the inspiration behind creating biobased materials?

[00:01:53] Ross: so a lot of my background is in biology. lot of my formal training is in synthetic biology. there's a bit of my brain that has always been really engineer brained as well. for a long time, I thought I'd be an engineer until I realized I'm. Pretty bad at math. and so I think this space really feels like a really interesting, crossover of those Venn diagrams, You're trying to learn as much from nature as you can, but you're applying that to a product, This is about making something that actually goes out into the world and that people can touch and use and live with. And that's, fundamentally, the appeal to me kind of at the surface level is being able to take, what we hope is a pretty sophisticated approach, and apply that in a way that actually touches people's lives.

[00:02:29] Ross: there's a strategic element to this particular choice as well, in the sense that, while you could probably make a pretty coherent case that something like packaging is a more impactful space to be operating in, fashion is interesting because it really touches people's hearts.

[00:02:42] Ross: personally really think that the climate crisis is not just a techno economic crisis. It's probably a cultural one as well. It's about the way that we relate to the world as much as it is about, how the spreadsheet works. and so if you're thinking about the problem in that lens, then you should probably be working in a space that has some sort of cultural valence and fashion.

[00:02:59] Ross: It's a great example of that. People really care about how they dress. They really see this as a reflection of the identities of their lives. so being able to say, Hey, look, This isn't a worse alternative to something you like. This is new way of thinking about what the future could look like in terms of real tangible materials.

[00:03:14] Ross: the world is made of. I think this space has a really interesting, resonance there. part of the other appeal for me is coming from an academic background where you can be a little, I don't want to say siloed, but you can get.

[00:03:26] Ross: Very focused in a way that, at its worst can end up feeling like you're really not having much of an impact, and experience like this, you really feel like you're, you're putting something out into the world quickly, efficiently, with power and purpose, that can be pretty gratifying too.

[00:03:41] Ross: So that's maybe the personal kind of attraction to it, from a. Technical perspective, I did a bunch of my PhD work, here in New York at Columbia. And then on the side, I've done some consulting work basically with artists and designers, some people that want to, you use bacteria or fungus as part of their practice, but also just some more straight up engineering mechatronics, sculpture design stuff.

[00:04:00] Ross: so it was sort of at the edge of the biodesign space. then connected with Atom who had started the company a little bit earlier. technically I'm a late co founder, and was working with them really got along well. so, joined up to lead the development side of things and very happy.

[00:04:14] Ross: I did. it's been a immensely gratifying experience and an immensely interesting experience to, work on this project for the last few years.

[00:04:21] Karl: That's fantastic. you talked about being in academia and maybe not having an impact or feeling like you're super siloed. And then you also talked about, the impact of. fashion on people, but maybe you could talk a little bit about how do traditional textiles that are in the fashion industry, how do they impact the environment and how does the materials that context is developing compared to that?

[00:04:43] Ross: Sure. Yeah. Yeah. off the top of my head, you could probably chunk this into three categories. the first is, the pure input material category. So a huge fraction of modern textiles are not natural materials. They're synthetic materials. They're petrochemical plastics fundamentally.

[00:04:59] Ross: depending on how you count, these are probably the majority, by mass of textile materials that get used. there's obvious problems with this. from my perspective, if you are thinking about what the world needs to look like in 2100, solving atmospheric carbon is not enough. there's a real nightmare scenario where.

[00:05:15] Ross: Everyone gets their shit together, pardon my language, and solves for atmospheric carbon. then planet drowns in plastic because there's a huge oversupply of petro supply. we haven't really broken the fundamental issue, which is that we need to build things in a more regenerative way, in a more cyclical way.

[00:05:30] Ross: that's a very basic ground truth. You can start with if you're looking at fashion, the amount of impact, both from an emissions perspective, but also from this material reality perspective is very high. The 2nd class of impact is, the production itself.

[00:05:41] Ross: There's some significant concerns about land use and water use and the use of a variety of not particularly nice chemicals. And. Across the fashion space from the production of fibers themselves to their dying and finishing, the last category would be the end of life of these materials.

[00:05:56] Ross: I think there's a growing acknowledgment of both the technical aspects, things like the productions of microplastics when a bunch of these synthetics are, even just washed, much less disposed of. also there's real striking sort of human cost to things like this in the form of.

[00:06:10] Ross: Yeah. What's often called waste colonialism, where either waste products, or even unsold product is shipped off to parts of the world, basically to get it out of the eyes of the Western consumer. what we're trying to do with Tomtex is in the best case approach, all of these things.

[00:06:24] Ross: So. We have a very strict mission, which is that, , we want to make things that are completely petrochemical free. So there's no carbon in our materials that came from below the ground. it's not just that these are recycled materials. they are completely bio based. That's probably the hardest one.

[00:06:38] Ross: The second is, we're going from a waste material, fundamentally, we can talk about sourcing, I think, in a minute, but, we really wanted to find interesting molecules that already exist and use them more productively than how they're being used now, and bring those into valorized, more productive circulation.

[00:06:54] Ross: want to do that With conscientiousness and care across that supply chain. So understanding where our materials come from, understanding how they're made, understanding who's making them really important part of this. And that from a business perspective is also great because there's a whole bunch of traceability and digital passport requirements, for instance, that are coming down the pipe that is well suited for.

[00:07:13] Ross: that's not the reason to do it. The reason to do is because it's the right thing to do, but helps. and then at the end of life, If you're using something, it's 100 percent bio based, not always, but oftentimes you get biodegradability for free. if it's a natural molecule that something already eats, it'll eat it in whatever form you've transformed it into generally, not always, but generally.

[00:07:30] Ross: so making sure that our materials are biodegradable is also really important. We also have a pretty high standard here. The goal is home compostable. There's lots of stuff that is technically compostable, but it's only in industrial settings. And the fraction of waste that actually ends up there is very small, particularly in the U.

[00:07:43] Ross: S. so we want it to be something that you can genuinely chuck out into your garden and it acts almost like a fertilizer in some cases, in our case, often very much like a fertilizer because it's a nitrogen heavy material, but we're trying to approach this a whole life cycle perspective for the to be correct.

[00:07:56] Ross: The production environment and production process has to be correct. The carbon emissions from all that have to be correct. And then what happens to it at the end of its life needs to fit that. And we think that's a great business case. I think the consumer is really tired of being sold a bill of sustainability goods.

[00:08:10] Ross: That's not really quite true. the amount of greenwashing in the fashion space is really astronomical. so being able to say, Hey, look, Not only are we, sustainable, but we're the real deal. the thing that you think you're buying when you go buy a vegan leather or something like that, we think is a great case to both the designer and the of consumer at the end of the day,

[00:08:28] Erum: Yeah, I mean, that's, amazing. I mean, it's a great ethos to have and, we welcome that. Of course. let's get into What are Tom Texas materials derived from? And what is the science behind their production?

[00:08:41] Ross: so our base component is a molecule called chitosan. chitosan is a polysaccharide like cellulose. So fundamentally is a polymer made up chain of sugars. depending on how you count, it's probably the second most common polysaccharide on the planet after cellulose. So if cellulose is, cotton and linen and components of trees, chitin and its derivative chitosan, the distinction there is chemical and somewhat subtle, but chitin is in the exoskeletons of anything that has an exoskeleton.

[00:09:09] Ross: So, marine arthropods, shrimp, crabs, lobsters, things like this, but also terrestrial arthropods, insects, arachnids, it's also in the cell walls to one degree or another of all fungi. So it's all over the place in nature, but hasn't really been used so much as a bulk, dry material, all that much, is a shame because it has some really interesting properties.

[00:09:27] Ross: The most interesting for us is that you can work with it in solution in a liquid form with really gentle solvent systems. You basically just water based system. that's the fundamental core idea. You take this. Polysaccharide that you can get from a number of different sources, and you can dissolve this up into a liquid then you can transform this liquid into any number of things.

[00:09:45] Ross: What we're starting with is basically a thick film material that you can think of like a leather, almost like a synthetic leather, but you can also make other stuff with it. You can, theoretically do things like 3D print with it. You can theoretically make fiber out of it. There's a whole bunch of other stuff.

[00:09:59] Ross: We started with leather Effectively, because the economics work well in this space, but the theoretical underpinning of the technology is quite adaptable to other things. So we are interested in exploring that in the future. this allows you to make, interesting high performance materials.

[00:10:11] Ross: it allows a huge amount of aesthetic versatility, so you can control the texture more or less arbitrarily. You can draw the color more or less arbitrarily. You can basically think of it like a paint. You can just mix in pigments to get different colors. importantly, you can use.

[00:10:24] Ross: Existing industrial infrastructure to actually make the final sheets or rolls of fabric. Basically the same stuff that you used to make synthetic leather, which is taking synthetic polymer solution and casting it out into a long roll. You can use that with our stuff with some sort of minimal modifications.

[00:10:40] Ross: So we think our to scale therefore price point, is, hopefully pretty competitive, especially because we're starting with, the inputs that we're starting. And can talk about that a little bit. So, we have basically two different sources at the moment that we're focusing on for chitosan.

[00:10:55] Ross: The first is, waste shrimp shells. this is an interesting case. It involves a little bit of explanation of how shrimp actually works, but, this is a pre consumer waste stream. So we, for instance, know the Vietnamese market the best, although there are other markets and the way it works in Vietnam.

[00:11:09] Ross: Is that there are literally nobody knows tens of thousands of small farmers in the Mekong Delta in southern Vietnam. these folks are often people that once grew rice and now can't because of climate change, the delta is getting too salty to grow rice. And so they've actually had to switch to things like shrimp and other forms of aquaculture.

[00:11:27] Ross: thousands and thousands and thousands of different farmers sell to maybe a dozen large processing plants. They will then take these shrimp and they will D head them and D shell them and freeze them. And that's what you're going to buy in a Western supermarket. that also means that these guys produce an enormous amount of shrimp shells and trim heads.

[00:11:44] Ross: if. Someone like us doesn't do something with them. This is a proper waste stream. This ends up back in the ocean or in a landfill. occasionally, it's used as a very low value fertilizer, but that also has problems from salt carry over to actually poison fields. this is a material that does damage if you don't do something with it, which is an important distinction from some other way streams.

[00:12:02] Ross: Um, it's an important distinction from leather, for instance, where the economics of hide production are significantly different from something like this. this is not a side stream. It's, properly trash. You don't do something with it. so we can take that and again do something more productive with it.

[00:12:14] Ross: Find something interesting to do with it. so that's stream one. Stream 2, is from mushroom. this is, slightly different process to isolate this molecule. it's a slightly different source. These are generally speaking, at the moment, although we'd love to change this, these are mushrooms that are grown for purpose on wastes, rather than being a waste themselves.

[00:12:33] Ross: take sawdust or something like that and grow oyster mushroom on it. And then you can process this into our material. This produces some other side streams, some protein fractions and things that are generally sold into things like animal feed. but this produces from our perspective, the same molecule.

[00:12:47] Ross: so the downstream process for us is the same. We just buy these from different suppliers these are extant supply chains. Kytosan is produced from both of these sources at industrial scales. So we don't have to go build out this from scratch, which is great. this produces basically two different SKUs.

[00:13:00] Ross: One that we call series WS for Waste Trim, and one that we call series M. Series WS is a little bit less expensive, but it's not vegan. Series M is a little bit more expensive and is vegan. And so this also allows us to do some differentiation, and present different versions of this product to different customers who might have different preferences.

[00:13:18] Karl: So, the mushroom base material is considered being aware as the shrimp phone is not.

[00:13:24] Ross: Yeah, some of this hinges on how strict you are with the definition of vegan. An animal did not die for this, but it is an animal product. So. Different folks have different opinions and different weights. we want to just make sure we could serve a variety of different preferences when it comes to this.

[00:13:39] Ross: We also know that in the fashion space, the vegan label and vegan materials have had an enormous amount of uptake, from our perspective, despite the fact that what this really means 99 percent of the time is just plastic.

[00:13:51] Ross: one of the things we're interested in doing is saying, Hey, look, we are vegan, but let's remind you what that actually means.

[00:13:56] Ross: We're vegan the way you think it means not big in the way that you're being sold. so that's a story that we want to tell with this type of material again, going connecting back to that idea that you don't want to trick people into this story. You want to show them a vision of the future that is more open and productive and interesting and honest.

[00:14:12] Ross: that's really the way to convert people to your cause when it comes sustainability, rather than sneakily playing some game with, labeling requirements,

[00:14:19] Erum: Yeah. First of all, I love the series W. S. and series M. It makes it sound very, very luxurious I do recall when we were at your lab, you had samples of the material and it looked beautiful. I just felt like this materials from the future. so I can see it being used in luxury products.

[00:14:38] Erum: But I guess I'm really curious to know, do they have different performance characteristics because they're derived from different. Men. sources or are they the same because you process it in a way that ends up becoming similar.

[00:14:50] Ross: yeah, when it comes to that base material, the molecule is the molecule to us, so we'll buy it to a certain spec, certainly, but we can get that spec from both source. So, we have some versatility to tune. The mechanical performance to different, use cases. So really basic stuff, thicker, thinner, things like that, obviously color and texture, but even some of the things like, how much it stretches, how it drapes the stiffness, the hand feel, stuff like that.

[00:15:12] Ross: We can tune that as well. but that's done in the formulation stage. these are not pure Kites and materials. There's other stuff in our base recipe that helps us move those different characteristics around. but when it comes to the Zero modifications. No customization. We don't really care from a technical perspective where it comes from.

[00:15:29] Ross: input is the same.

[00:15:31] Karl: that's so cool. I mean, when we talk about your material and some of the other, biomaterials that being produced, from mycelium or from bacterial cellulose, lot of times we say it's a leather alternative, but they're really not. these are novel biomaterials that have different, performance characteristics.

[00:15:50] Karl: What do you say as opposed to alternate leather?

[00:15:53] Ross: Oh, man, we haven't really settled on a good word for this. I think this is really tough. you're absolutely right. Alternative is not a nice word for this again. You want to present a positive, expansive vision of what these things can be. And so there are a few things we can do to highlight that.

[00:16:07] Ross: there's some colors that we can do that are Pretty difficult to achieve for the traditional leather. We can theoretically make stuff that's clear or at least translucent, which I think echo leather maybe has a product that's like this, but it's not really leather anymore. It's basically a plastic thing that they've laid on top of leather, as far as I understand. some of that is down to what you present. You have to give people something that they can of hook onto, they can get their head around the idea that it's leather ish,

[00:16:29] Ross: then you can go tell this aesthetic story that goes beyond that.

[00:16:33] Ross: language wise, it's still really tough. It also depends on who you're talking to. some designers, especially if you're showing something that's really wacky, like the clear stuff, They'll instantly grok that this is. Different and new and they can think about it as if like, Hey, look, this is a film made of a new thing and we can kind of make it look like whatever you want it to look like.

[00:16:51] Ross: and then some folks, you have to be like, Oh, no, it's a luxury heritage, leather, like material. We can make it feel beautiful. We can make it, have all those characteristics that you love with leather. and then you can maybe, suggest expansive understandings of what that could mean, both, from a supply chain perspective and sustainability perspective, but also an aesthetic one.

[00:17:07] Ross: So that is a delicate dance when you're talking about these materials. but I agree. And I think, to go back to biofabricate, this is something that I think a lot of people think about is, really, this is a new class of material. these are new biomaterials, and this allows you to do both storytelling from a business perspective, but also again from a mission perspective, being able to communicate a vision of the future that is, open in that way there's an analogy that I think we use a lot, which is actually to the early days of plastics, early plastics begin as mimics, they're fake ivory and tortoiseshell and silk, and stuff like that, but the age of plastics, that Monsanto, DuPont, World's Fair, Pavilion, Disney, kind of vision for the future is not mimicking anything. The whole point of that is that it's something new and something different and something wonderful and something about, the way the world can be with these materials. I think that's the kind of story that we're interested in telling.

[00:17:56] Ross: And fundamentally, it's a story that we don't just need to tell. We need to be able to do, this is slightly off topic, but I think connected enough humans make materials basically by taking complicated molecules, usually ones drive from oil and cramming energy into them until the form that you want them to be.

[00:18:11] Ross: a piece of aluminum is almost better conceptualized as a battery, like all this energy you've had to pour into this thing to get it to do that. balsa wood is twice the specific strength of aluminum, and it's made of sugar and light. and that's because nature is really, really good at taking these kind of boring molecules and architecting them, doing nanotechnology basically to produce really, really remarkable mechanical properties.

[00:18:32] Ross: that's. What you want to learn how to do that's the long term idea of us and I think of a lot of other people is that you're not just learning how to make leather. you're learning why is leather interesting? What about its architecture allows it to do what it does? And then you can take those learnings and translate them back into making more and more and more of the world in this way.

[00:18:49] Ross: That's low carbon intensity, low energy intensity using materials that already exist on the planet, but using those to make. Remarkable, productive, , high performance materials again, that are not alternatives to things, but new way of rebuilding, quote, unquote, bioeconomy.

[00:19:04] Ross: It's not just about substituting your fundamental carbon source. It actually has to touch the way things are, physically made. that Connection to reality, connection to lived reality, connection to people's sort tactile experience, I think, is again, part of this connection to fashion and part of the story that really have to learn how to tell if you're thinking about the post climate crisis future.

[00:19:23] Erum: Yeah, it's something new, think depending on where it's going or talking about fashion, but, these words are invented like leather was a word that was invented by somebody, right? There's spandex, there's Gore Tex. There's a lot of the X latex,

[00:19:39] Ross: lots of that one. Yeah,

[00:19:40] Ross: lots of X.

[00:19:41] Erum: we'll have to come up with a new word, I guess, depending on, where the materials are going, what part of the fashion industry are they being used?

[00:19:48] Erum: Are they being used in the athletic world? Are they being used the runway? Are being used in Bags or something so that could help, create that word. But I just think it's really fascinating. The idea of creating this new word to describe a material that has never been created before.

[00:20:04] Ross: Yeah, it's a tough one, but think we'll probably end up settling on something that is hopefully pretty descriptive. Wishing for the day when that's something I don't have to explain. I think a lot of people already intuitively understand it.

[00:20:15] Ross: I think they don't quite have the language to describe what they're actually looking for. and that latent demand is really, I think, from a business perspective, what we're trying to serve.

[00:20:22] Karl: You talked about you're sourcing, you both the mushrooms and the shrimp shells are readily available, but how does that fit into the Tomtex, circular manufacturing process you talked about, beginning of life, end of life. Give us a picture of what that looks like.

[00:20:37] Ross: This is a real fundamental thing for us, The waste fraction of these materials needs to be as absolutely high you can. this is the point taking things that are considered useless and revealing their true use. it starts there, within the manufacturing process itself, we're trying to be as low impact as we can, right?

[00:20:52] Ross: So this means using water as a solvent, as much as you can green chemistry, as much as you can, really being pretty hard nosed about a bunch of this stuff. to some extent, that comes with the territory because these are natural biopolymers. They want to be wet. They like water.

[00:21:05] Ross: there's certain things that naturally fit together that way. most obvious end of life again, the biodegradability closes that loop. If you're taking it from the normal carbon cycle, you can put it back in the normal carbon cycle. There are elements within that that we are interested in developing more technically.

[00:21:20] Ross: There are theoretically, for instance, ways you can do, Lossless pattern where you can take our material and recycle it back into the liquid form and then make new stuff out of it. This is super interesting, particularly when it comes to leather because lost fractions for leather, particularly mid grade.

[00:21:34] Ross: Others can be as high as 50 percent like half of what you buy in terms of sheet goes out as powder or scrap because. The animal had a bug bite or ran into a fence or something. And so there's a mark. And so you can't use that portion. And even just the sort of Tetris game of laying out stuff onto this very uneven shape that is a hide, necessitates a certain amount of waste.

[00:21:55] Ross: This is tricky to actually go implement because. hands have to be really into the nitty gritty of somebody's factory. and the way global supply chains work in fashion makes that challenging, brands don't often make things, they design things and someone else is sort bidding for the pleasure of making them.

[00:22:10] Ross: so there's a bit of a dance you have to do to incorporate this, but we have a couple of early conversations about elements like this, where we really want to be integrated with people and say, hey, look, you're starting from waste. You're basically lossless. You're basically wasteless in the process.

[00:22:23] Ross: And then at the end of the day, you can take this stuff and bury it and it'll just go. that again is a, much more harmonious vision of the production cycle than the way it functions now, which is basically you extract a whole bunch of energy out of the ground. some of these factories are, Hellish is maybe too strong, but they're, aggressively industrial, to transform them into these materials that you want. And then at the end of the day, they what get chopped up into bits and end up in your liver. I don't know, contrast here is fairly striking. so this has been embedded in the philosophy and in the technology of the company from day one.

[00:22:53] Ross: And that's certainly made my job harder. if it's worth doing, it's worth doing correctly. another way of phrasing that, cultural versus economic distinction is that I'm a little skeptical that we'll optimize our way out of this, just iteratively improving iteratively shaving a few percent is, one way you could approach this.

[00:23:11] Ross: I'm a little skeptical of it. I think you have to break hard for the hard thing then work backwards from there. that seems to be a way to maybe make change a little bit quicker than, 2 percent a year over the next couple of decades to get to a hundred percent bio based or something like that.

[00:23:23] Ross: But

[00:23:23] Karl: yeah, mean, the crazy stat that stood out for me from biofabricate was that, despite all the use of leather, something like 130 million hides go straight to landfill. grow that many more cows and we don't even use our hides. what is wrong,

[00:23:38] Ross: Yeah. Production supply demand stuff here is really gnarly. even with clothes, there's overproduction of stuff because people, got a, demand number wrong. And then you have a whole bunch of bags that get slashed and burned or something, I think people are slowly understanding much of a problem that is.

[00:23:55] Ross: but, a. thousand foot vision of that and trying to architect, what is fundamentally for us a fairly verticalized company we go from fairly low on the value chain to something that's really quite finished. It goes right to the guy that's making the handbag, that.

[00:24:10] Ross: stack, I think can hopefully smooth and optimize away. This is the place where optimizing maybe is a good thing. some of those cycles where just at every step you're losing 10 percent of something and it just ends up in a landfill, that type of stuff I think really has to get tightened up.

[00:24:24] Ross: And I think it is slowly getting tightened up for these cycles to become actually self sustaining again, as opposed to just like, 80 percent self sustaining and the 20 percent is as damaging as the status quo or something. Now there's plenty of cases where you can corner yourself in quite nasty ways.

[00:24:39] Erum: Yeah, absolutely. so I'm interested in this idea of the material being biodegradable. And this is something that I would like to understand is. How do you prevent the material from biodegrading on your body? I know there's probably biocoding, maybe something like a, coating to help prevent that, but then does that affect the biodegradability and have you done any tests to understand how long it takes to biodegrade?

[00:25:04] Erum: So, you kind of shed some light there?

[00:25:07] Ross: Yeah, sure. I think the best version here is by analogy. So a wooden table. Is a biodegradable object, that will vanish pretty quickly if you chuck it in the right environment, but in your house, it's fine. That's the line you're walking, Something that can be eaten, but that the stuff on your body doesn't eat.

[00:25:24] Ross: That's kind of where you want to be. This is to some extent tunable. You can change. A variety of things in the formulation to make it more or less susceptible to this. And you probably will do that. If you say biodegradability to a car guy, for instance, someone in automotive, they flip out they really don't like that.

[00:25:38] Ross: So you would want to be on the longer end of that spectrum, for someone like that. And for someone that's making a mid market handbag or something, you'd probably dial it down. so there's a, bunch of customization that you can do given our process that allows you to do this.

[00:25:51] Erum: so the microbes on the body would not eat any part of the

[00:25:56] Erum: material.

[00:25:57] Ross: every microbe on everybody, I don't know, but biology is this big smeared out thing. You know, I'm sure you can find somebody that somebody who has bought a little munch on it is fine. But, the goal is, something like, your hair or a wood table, or even a leather handbag, a less finished leather handbags sits in the same space. That's something that is within the context of a, Objects that a human uses every day and cares a little bit about it's just fine. It will last for many years and outside of that context where the microbial load is a little bit higher and the right folks are around, it'll get degraded quickly.

[00:26:26] Ross: The way you prove this, is a variety of different things. oh, man, certifications are complicated. the one. That will end up going for, is a specific home compostable rating. there's really only a couple of certs that do this. The majority of compostable stuff in the U. S. is a certification that is actually not home compatible.

[00:26:44] Ross: A lot of people think it is. It's not. so to be very careful with this. and you really test two different end points. The first is. the functional category of home compostable, are these conditions sufficient to degrade this? And the second is, what is the ultimate destination for all this carbon, because what you don't want to do is make a material that mechanically falls apart, but then ends up as microplastics or ends up as a dead end compound that's sort a forever chemical, which can happen. There's some things that look like they biodegrade and they biodegrade all the way down to molecular chains, but then they stop there.

[00:27:17] Ross: And they're sort of dead ended and don't return to the carbon cycle. So there's a series of, tests that you do that actually measure the CO2 produced effectively when you degrade your material in a natural environment. And that proves that it's running all the way through the cycle and getting metabolized, getting eaten by something, and really, truly returning to the carbon cycle.

[00:27:34] Ross: those are very expensive and take like eight months. So, we'll run those once we have a more full lock on the recipe. but this is something that is a hard requirement for us. It isn't like we're going to run this and just say, like, Oh, you know, we got too close. we're iterating towards that, and know that we need to hit those marks.

[00:27:51] Ross: So I can't give you a certain number in a third party pdf, but again, it's a really core part of what we're doing. And if you're not going to do it well, there's no point in doing it. So we're serious about. Both of those as metrics that, think are core to the mission of the company as well as core to the, business proposition, being able to go to a consumer and saying, like, look, this is what we tested.

[00:28:09] Ross: This is why we tested. This is how this is different from other materials. and. You're better off for buying it and you're better off for knowing about it after that, too. that type of education is also pretty important.

[00:28:20] Erum: you'll want to be able to say that it could biodegrade in, four weeks or something like that.

[00:28:26] Ross: Yeah, the, typical time for home is 90 days, but there's different cutoffs. and so you can say 90, 120. you also might say a different number depending on if it's terrestrial versus marine. And even if it's, saltwater versus fresh water, there'll be different numbers. These tests generally you will test until it happens and then you're comparing it to, is it faster or slower than a micronized cellulose or something that's sort of generally very biodegradable, So on the back end. That's how these things work. On the front end, it just needs to be something that the consumer can, trust, but verify, you know, it has the stamp and then you can actually go chuck it in your little rotating bin out the back and it does turn into warm food and a believable, comprehensible, usable timeline.

[00:29:06] Karl: were just told that the gold standard today for compostability is the Austrian TUV. Certification or something like that.

[00:29:13] Ross: A U S T U B home. as far as I can tell, there's them and there's a German D I cert that are the only ones that are. stamps, you get a logo that are specific to home compostability and they'll use, an Australian test, a French test or a EU wide test.

[00:29:29] Ross: That's kind of weird, to verify and then distribute those like certifications.

[00:29:34] Ross: there's an Austrian company that provides the stamp, but they use an Australian. I think this is true.

[00:29:39] Ross: It's very complicated and it's very confusing to the consumer as well. the amount of different certs out there that say a variety of some useful and some frankly, not very useful things, is, Part of the reason why greenwashing is a trick here is because you can play enough games to cobble together stuff that sounds quite convincing, even if it's sort not.

[00:29:56] Ross: So this is a challenge that hope as people understand more about how these things work, they'll become a little bit more fluent in and hopefully we can help with that as well.

[00:30:05] Karl: Well, we know the fashion industry, gets criticized for The amount of material that produces. The amount of waste that it produces, but also for exploiting workers and harming communities, especially in the global South. How is it that Tom Tex ensures fair employment practices and ecological care throughout its supply chain?

[00:30:23] Ross: Yeah, so, back to certifications, there's a few of these things that you'll end up going for, some of the better certs, things like, blue sign is one of them. There's a couple of other ones, incorporate, basically social practices into these things. So people go out of your factories, people go out of your production.

[00:30:39] Ross: The really, really good stuff that we're going to chase again once recipes a little bit more locked, will hopefully speak to the fact that we've done our homework when it comes to this. what that actually looks like in practice is, we went and visited farms in Vietnam. We went and visited the factory that makes the chitosan from that stuff.

[00:30:54] Ross: we really want to have visibility top to bottom into this chain to make sure that someone's not. Pulling her leg when it comes to some of the stuff that's being said, that's pretty important. we know that, fashion is maybe not the worst in the world, but it's giving people a run for their money, in terms of exploitative practices there might be a point in saving the planet, but there's not Much point in saving people on the planet by way of harming other people, part of the point of this mission is to, minimize the harm that we're causing, not just make number go down.

[00:31:24] Ross: you have to pay attention to this. This has to be core to the mission, and we need to take that pretty seriously. So understanding how, these farmers have been affected by this change in salinity in the Delta was really, really interesting to learn and really, really interesting to understand that hopefully what we're doing is contributing to supporting a group of people in a, frankly, national food supply chain that is otherwise like genuinely pretty imperiled.

[00:31:45] Ross: by these changing conditions and hopefully, the use of waste in particular is a great way to transmit value to people who are, generally being extracted from as opposed to being compensated for that sort of ethic. I think fits quite well into a cradle to cradle. design ethic, those principles are quite easy to extend to, those that consider people, not just objects.

[00:32:08] Ross: that again is, something that is quite easy to forget. Because the power of a globalized supply chain is in many ways to make these things invisible. That's part of the function of this is to smooth out the wrinkles that people might otherwise notice. fashion in particular, because it's so fragmented and so globalized, is invisible in exactly that way times.

[00:32:31] Ross: and so being again, quite forceful in the approach, Not just from a policy perspective, but from a fundamentals of the technology perspective, I think is a good way to marry that desire and that mission and really that requirement for building a sustainable future that is not just sustainable in terms of carbon in the atmosphere, but sustainable in a harmonious and livable way for as many people on the planet as possible.

[00:32:53] Erum: Well said, very well said. so curious, right? Right now you're talking about series WS for the waste shrimp and then we have the series M for the mushroom, but of course, you're probably tinkering in the lab before you guys landed on these materials. What were some other waste sources that you played around with?

[00:33:12] Erum: And why didn't they make the cut? Is

[00:33:15] Ross: Yeah, the crustacean stuff is the most developed chain. shrimp is probably the largest of that, but we've played with some other stuff, some crab shell stuff, for instance. there's shrimp from different regions. there's differences in. Particularly the speaking of human costs of these things, right?

[00:33:30] Ross: There's different regions that do shrimp farming differently in ways that can be quite exploitative. so we were quite careful with that. some of this is not the exact focus of the company at the moment. We really do want to rely on existing supply chains as much as we can. You want to build one business, not several stacked on top of each other in a trench coat.

[00:33:47] Ross: so finding folks that can already supply the volumes and prices that we need is, a reasonable place to start. from that perspective, the place where we've spent the most time thinking, is actually on the mushroom side. so right now, as I mentioned before, these mushrooms are usually grown for purpose.

[00:34:03] Ross: they're going to be going on ag wastes, but it would be nice to have proper mushroom waste. And there's really two different ways you can do this. The first is to find people that are growing mushrooms for human consumption and take scrap supply is relatively large, but not that big. the second is to find.

[00:34:18] Ross: Someone that, is producing industrial quantities of fungal material. this could be, for instance, from all the new food people that are using fungi as part of their, meat alternatives, but even legacy industry, citric acid, The sour stuff on the outside of your sour candies that crystal that's produced industrially from a fermentative process from a filamentous fungus, I'm having a slow series of conversations with, the car Gill esque people of the world to try to be like, Hey, look, I know you produce trucks of this stuff. And I have a guy that will buy trucks of this stuff. Can we please just get everyone on the phone together and play matchy because a lot of times it's just that.

[00:34:53] Ross: People haven't bothered to connect them, these streams exist and the use cases for them exist and they just Don't there's a bunch of really interesting development work to be done here to close loops that are like technically proven and economically proven.

[00:35:07] Ross: And you just need to get people to talk to each other. That in particular is an area that we spent a little bit of time focusing on. It's not, core to the business, but we think is a really great way to expand the use of this really interesting molecule per se, as well as, expand our supply chain and stabilize our supply chain as well.

[00:35:24] Karl: Can you let us know, to date, where have the materials been used? I I seem to remember reading, article or seeing some pictures, but our listeners a view of they can see these materials in action.

[00:35:35] Ross: we've had stuff in the last three. Fashion weeks. So New York with Peter Doe, Paris with a brand called, Machu Pierre, London with a brand called the Petsa, New York again with a brand called Dauphinet, and then we'll have some stuff with Dauphinet again, this coming season. this functions for us, three things first, it's fun being able to, actually go produce materials and, get to go to a show and get to, actually make an object is really great to, it's.

[00:36:05] Ross: can build awareness of the brand and kind of FOMO. it's really nice to work with oftentimes smaller designers who are maybe a little bit more nimble, and that oftentimes larger fashion brands will look to actually for inspiration. that's a great way to get your name out there and to get people interested in the material.

[00:36:20] Ross: and three, it proves that it's real. think it's, quite easy to take a picture of a sheet of something and say that, you're making the next great thing. It's different to like make a pair of pants. You learn a lot about how a seamstress actually handles things and the way it sews and cuts and all this other stuff.

[00:36:35] Ross: It's, very difficult to capture in a, spec sheet. so that iterative process and making sure you can actually make object with them is pretty important to this. I think we've been fairly successful at getting this stuff, at least on the runway. All of this stuff is only done.

[00:36:48] Ross: For the runway or for, a few things have ended up with celebrities and things like that. So these are very, very small runs of these, which is a necessity, just because me and my team are physically making this material at the moment, sort of not the best use of our time to go make thousand sheets of something that's probably not.

[00:37:05] Ross: Can I make anybody's pocketbook happy, we really think mid this year is when we're going to transition into more proper commercial stuff. And that'll be the first time that, you can actually go out and buy a bag or a wallet or, maybe even a jacket made out of this stuff.

[00:37:15] Ross: That's our timeline. Internally,

[00:37:17] Erum: is that what was made on the runway? Were they dresses or bags? Or can you paint a

[00:37:22] Erum: picture of that?

[00:37:23] Ross: we've done a pair of pants. We've done a top. We've done, yeah. A part of a top we've done, another funky dress, we're about to do a handbag and then we're about to do some shoes. so we've done, I think, fairly well across the apparel spectrum. that's a variety of different techniques, a variety of different styles.

[00:37:40] Ross: None of it looks like leather. we've made stuff that looks like other fabrics. We've made stuff that's translucent. I may ask you to cut this later, but we are about to show something that looks like meat. It looks like prosciutto. It looks dead nuts like prosciutto. You made this stuff. It's like shocking.

[00:37:57] Ross: It looks like prosciutto actually. and this is again, to paint this picture of, this is a material that you can really make into whatever you want it to look like, and helps communicate that expansive story. that vision of the future that we're interested in telling.

[00:38:08] Ross: So really haven't made a plain Jane. just bag, it's always been stuff that is a little bit, different. and I think that's been, very fun to be able to talk to designers and come up with ideas. That's great. and it's been, I think, effective from a positioning and branding perspective as well.

[00:38:22] Erum: when I saw the samples, when we went to your lab, I was like, this is very high-end futuristic, space material. Like if people go into, I dunno, space station or when we eventually terraform Mars. And the translucent, deep green color, very like organic.

[00:38:40] Erum: it's like, wow. this is like nothing I've, seen before. But I could see that it could be used, it just completely changes the way you look at material and you're like, is this something you wear or could like a home good or maybe it's like something on top of your table or.

[00:38:56] Erum: a curtain. I mean, it's, was very interesting to see, that had this translucent property with the beautiful color.

[00:39:02] Ross: don't think we want to restrict ourselves to just the fashion space. I think we've had some conversations with some folks in interiors and hospitality and things like that. And we've also had some conversations with folks in automotive. that's a.

[00:39:11] Ross: Much longer talking about cars, but there are very, very large markets for this stuff outside of it. And again, if you want to have the most impact, can't just be something that shows up in just luxury handbags, That's not. Impact that's a luxury good. So we really think that because of our process, our goal is price parity with like mid grade leathers.

[00:39:30] Ross: and to be able to go to a designer and say, Hey, look, you get all this aesthetic versatility and all this sustainability, and you really don't have to pay much more for it. we really think that's the butter zone for the market, You can't compete with cheap vinyl because it's basically free and you probably can't compete with White crocodile, because at some point the fact that it was once crocodile is part of the thing, but there's this huge space in the middle for mid low grade leathers and nicer synthetics, that for the synthetics, like people think is sustainable and it's actually just a plastic and for the other leathers, there's still a very high carbon textile.

[00:40:00] Ross: so people do want to switch out from that and particularly, often want to switch to a vegan version. that butters on if you can hit that price point. and we think you can, really think that's where a lot of the impact lies. You want to be able to do regular leather and then you want to be able to say, Hey, look, you're a mid grade company and we can make something that no one has ever seen before and be able to serve seamlessly transition between those, things and then go be able to do that for, somebody that's making a couch, I don't know, maybe not a couch, the transparent couch might be a bit weird, but

[00:40:26] Ross: you know what I mean?

[00:40:26] Karl: Depends on what's on the inside.

[00:40:28] Ross: I guess that's true. You could do a space frame, Renzo piano couch or something. I don't know, that could actually be pretty interesting. and similar with automotive, there's sort an order of operations that you go here. you might start with stuff that's not really high contact surfaces.

[00:40:40] Ross: You car seats are brutal. It's shocking that anything survives a minivan environment. That's kind of nuts. but there's a whole bunch of soft paneling and these and other applications that I think were well suited to being able to fit into. Yeah.

[00:40:52] Erum: Yeah, So, your lab is based in the Brooklyn Navy yard, and there's a bunch of different buildings there, but there's 1 building. There's a company that makes spacesuits. that's based in the Navy yard. guys got to connect you guys.

[00:41:05] Ross: there's some guys that do, electric motorcycles and stuff too, that we've had some conversations with. Navy Yard's a cool place. there's some other guys that are part of new lab, which is the space that I'm sitting in right now that are micromobility of one degree or another.

[00:41:16] Ross: and, certainly easy culture fit when it comes to saying, this is a sustainable product. This is about the way we should be moving in the future. I think that's a really great synergy for how we think about these problems.

[00:41:25] Karl: Yeah. Very cool. Oh, no, go

[00:41:27] Erum: you and I had a great conversation just about future of materials and what is possible. We talked a little bit about that here, but how do you imagine by materials playing out in the next 10 years?

[00:41:38] Ross: 10 years.

[00:41:40] Ross:

[00:41:40] Erum: that not enough time?

[00:41:41] Ross: depends, depends. I think a lot of this is. to some extent, it's a little bit tricky. It depends on how the regulatory environment moves. this is a very boring answer, but, we really need to get to a place where the true cost of carbon is actually priced into everyday materials. there's a lot of really remarkable stuff that we can do in.

[00:41:57] Ross: the fashion landscape and other durable goods, landscapes, you again, interiors, that is really enabled by the fact that we understand more and more about how to use these types of molecules, productively responsibly, there are some applications where the economics are just really tough, packaging single use plastics.

[00:42:11] Ross: That's tough, because genuinely this stuff is free. the machine time is far more expensive than the cost of the material itself in many cases. so until you're actually pricing in the fact that those materials are Using the atmosphere as a sewer, like fundamentally, that's a hard ask.

[00:42:25] Ross: I think consumer sentiment and regulatory pressure are both moving in the right direction. the question is, are we doing it fast enough? The answer to that is almost always going to be no. That's just the default is. It's the answer is no, you're not moving past enough. so I'm encouraged to see, for instance, a bunch of the stuff that's coming in the EU when it comes to some of the sustainability stuff when it comes to fashion in particular, things about traceability, things about not being able to lie quite as much on your label about sustainability claims.

[00:42:50] Ross: Really being quite forceful with that, in some cases forceful enough that the brands are freaking out because they know they can't actually meet the requirement. That's coming in to really change some stuff. that type of pressure I think is pretty important. I'm hopeful that. the U. S. frankly, catches up to the you in some cases when it comes to this type of environment.

[00:43:07] Ross: think that there is certainly amongst younger folks, a growing and profound understanding of the need to do that. And so I am cautiously hopeful that's going to happen when it comes to the basics of the science. you can look to nature, there's nearly no let's say, productive mechanical characteristic that doesn't exist in nature that we use every day.

[00:43:27] Ross: it's not like nature can't make soft materials, hard materials, rigid materials, waterproof material, it's not like we're really lacking this type of functionality in the pool of materials that we see even just among living things, much less the stuff we could make from the stuff that, living things make.

[00:43:40] Ross: The opportunity is clearly there and the functionality is clearly there. so just understanding how to do that, understanding how to do that competitively, understanding how to do that responsibly, I think slowly you'll see that push into more and more and more of the material reality that we encounter the longer timeline I think May be easier to imagine for all these reasons. but my dream, I guess really a world where you don't ever have to make a trade, You get all the, you make a airplane. Out of 100 percent biowaste materials, You can do everything you need to do out of these materials that are, fundamentally circular and fundamentally renewable if a seagull can be a seagull, then we can make an airplane out of this stuff too.

[00:44:19] Ross: That's probably stretching when it comes to, I don't know, the interiors of the jet or something, but for the vast majority of things that we encounter in everyday life and many of even the high performance materials, I really do think that, this must be the way of the future. as much as we can now applying pressure.

[00:44:33] Ross: to the regulatory environment applying, education. To help people understand what this means and understand how it impacts them and understand how they can contribute, and then applying knowledge to the problem set, learning as much as we can about, frankly, the very simple, almost brutish stuff that we're doing now from the perspective of where we need to be, but learning how we can translate that into I mean, man, go stare a friggin.

[00:44:54] Ross: Oyster shell for about 20 minutes. these things are just wondrous. they're remarkable. They're beautiful, learning how to do that, I think is the dream of the, of the like nerd in me. and I think that's, the vector is there. The speed probably needs to pick up, but just that alone, I think is hopeful.

[00:45:13] Erum: that's so great. Very well said. if you're looking for a company that's making material that are seashells. our friends at Biomason, our friends at Prometheus Materials, they're there, doing the work,

[00:45:26] Ross: of biofabricate, The very first biofabricate I attended, was I guess in 2016, probably, it was a Parsons and I attended as an usher because you got a free ticket. And I think I still have the t shirt. you let one person in the door and then you like go stand in the corner of the auditorium and listen to the talks.

[00:45:42] Ross: And I remember, the eagle natives are there. Biomason was there. Spiber was there. I mean, there's a bunch of people that are still around that I think we really look up to, in terms of. What they've been able to build what they've been able to do, I talked to, one of the founders of bio mason the other day, ginger, think I really love and respect how a bunch of these companies got their start as design focused companies, they're the products of designers in many cases, as are we, our CEO Ian is a, fashion designer by training.

[00:46:05] Ross: and I do think that. Helps offset some of the engineer brain optimization stuff, That's a great forcing function for doing the hard thing and doing the right thing and thinking more about the way these products and this approach works within a larger sustainability system rather than just like, here's my widget that is 10 percent better.

[00:46:22] Ross: I think that's a very powerful. Motivating and organizational for us when it comes to that. And I really respect a lot of the folks that have paved the way when it comes to these ideas and, these companies,

[00:46:31] Erum: now you're doing it, right? Now, you're, the one who's going to be headlining BiFabricate, yeah, you're in your labs, stirring the pot right now, making the small batch materials, craft Brooklyn based materials,

[00:46:45] Ross: I

[00:46:48] Erum: materials,

[00:46:49] Ross: it is lot like cooking, it's a bit of a heuristic, If it's not something that is simple enough to do in an industrial kitchen, a startup is probably going to have a hard time making a couple million square feet a bit without.

[00:46:58] Ross: a whole bunch of millions of dollars of money. it's a productive way to think about it actually, in a interesting way.

[00:47:03] Erum: Yep. And so we're excited to see you guys scale up, you're talking about doing that this year. So we'll have to check in with you later this year. Maybe we'll probably check in with you sooner than that because we're neighbors, but on the pod, on the record, we'll definitely have you back on and see how scale ups going.

[00:47:20] Ross: Yeah. We'd love to

[00:47:20] Karl: Awesome.

[00:47:21] Erum: Thank you so much, Ross. Thank you so much for coming on the pod. and, have a good day. We'll talk to you

[00:47:26] Ross: Yeah. Thank y'all. This is a

[00:47:27] Ross: lot of

[00:47:27] Ross: fun.

[00:47:28] Karl: a great one.

[00:47:28] Ross: Y'all too.