Next-Gen Materials Podcast Lauren Blake

In this episode we explore the next-gen mentality of plastic technology with experts from one of the largest custom thermoformers in North America, Plastic Ingenuity. Brandon Abernathy, a technical sales engineer, and Zach Muscato, a sustainability champion, represent Plastic Ingenuity which serves customers in the food, consumer goods, and medical industries for their plastic packaging needs. Our society's overconsumption of plastic is no doubt problematic, but spoiler alert: plastic may not be as evil as we often make it out to be. Brandon and Zach discuss both the problems and the benefits of plastic, with a comprehensive discussion of plastic innovation's major opportunity areas. They dive into the myriad upstream, middlestream, and downstream considerations for making plastic production more sustainable. After the episode, you'll definitely want to check out their Good Information YouTube Channel where Brandon and Zach have put together educational videos covering the basics and common misconceptions about plastic!

You might have heard about meat without the animal; but have you heard about wood without the tree? In this episode we are introduced to the concept of lab-grown furniture, and in particular, lab-grown wood, by Ashley Beckwith, mechanical engineering PhD Candidate at MIT and Draper Scholar. Ashley is developing a novel method for producing wood by culturing Zinnia elegans plant cells into different desired shapes. Her work was published earlier this year in the Journal of Cleaner Production. Listen in to learn why lab-grown wood is needed, the myriad uses of wood, and the biological considerations when growing plant cells in a lab.

In this episode we are joined by Edwina Huang, CEO and Founder of Vivify Textiles and Phoenxt, two fabric and textile waste recycling startups. She shares her personal journey and motivations for starting these companies, introduces us to the three main categories of textile recycling, and offers her predictions on the future of the textile industry. Edwina works closely with the fashion industry and offers many insights on sustainable practices within it.
Vivify Textiles website: https://www.vivifytextiles.com/
Phoenxt website: https://www.phoenxt.com/
Ethical Fashion Room Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCruxsAEs4v7VOm0GyYHzdVA/featured

Visualize your Future clip with Jim Carrey on the Oprah Winfrey Show in 1997: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ct1Gd4jMJuY

Dr. Sydney Gladman joins me today to discuss her work as Chief Scientific Officer at the Material Innovation Initiative, featured in the first episode. One of Sydney’s first initiatives as CSO is to perform an in-depth review on the unique properties of each of the materials MII is focused on replacing, starting with silk. She summarized her findings in the recent Silk Report, which we dive into thoroughly during this episode. In particular, we discuss exactly why silk production is so problematic, and all the opportunities that lie within alternative methods of silk production. As it turns out, alternative silk is expected to have impacts far beyond the textile industry.

For more information about MII and to read their latest reports, including the Silk Report, visit www.materialinnovation.org. If you have an interest in entering the next-gen materials space yourself,contact Sydney on LinkedIn or email her at sydney@materialinnovation.org.

Rita Chuang is a chemistry graduate from UC Berkeley now serving as Project Lead at a Japanese biotech company called Spiber Inc. Spiber was founded in 2007 with the goal of replicating spider silk and its superior mechanical properties by fermenting fibrous silk proteins in microorganisms instead of farming silkworms or spiders. Rita is now working in frontiers development at Spiber on some of their highly innovative projects to do with Spiber’s Brewed Protein™ product. She talks to us about the realistic challenges faced when engineering microbes to produce fibrous proteins for textiles, Spiber's partners such as fashion designer Yuima Nakazato, and the wide range of materials that Spiber can replicate beyond silk using their fermentation and spinning processes.

Website: https://www.spiber.inc/en/

In this episode, I am joined by Nicole Rawling, CEO and co-founder of the Material Innovation Initiative (MII).  Nicole tells us how and why MII got started in 2019, and her story behind  how she went from practicing law to starting a material science organization. She delineates the basic technologies that are currently being used to replace animal-derived materials such as silk, leather, fur, down feathers, and exotic skins used in the fashion, home goods, and automotive industries. We discuss why replacing these animal-derived materials is necessary, challenges in the space, and how material innovation is complementing the agricultural innovation we are seeing in the food industry.

For more information about MII and to read their latest reports, visit www.materialinnovation.org.