Tony Bova and Jeff Beegle are the CEO and CSO of Mobius, a mission-driven chemical company focused on eliminating waste by leveraging industrial organic waste streams to create new materials and chemicals. Today, Tony and Jeff join Alexsandra and Christophe to discuss the idea behind Mobius and explain how they are using the lignin stripped from trees by paper companies to make biodegradable plastics for agriculture.
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at NORI, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change. Hello, and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. My name is Alexsandra Guerra, and I’m here in beautiful Denver with my awesome colleague, Christophe Jaspe.
Christophe Jospe: Hello. And for those of you who are trying to decipher how to spell guerra, it’s G-U-E-R-R-A.
Alexsandra Guerra: This morning we were told by one of our wonderful mentors that he was listening to our podcast with his kid and his kid’s like, what did she say? What is her name? So I’m going to say it slowly now.
Christophe Jospe: Shout out to our listeners. Hey, listeners, if you tell us things, we might give you a shout out too. And it’s kind of cool. We’re sitting across from these two amazing people who are also in the Techstars cohort. We especially like them because one of them has a laptop open and has a bumper sticker that I’ve So hopefully you’ll hear something on this podcast that makes you think a little bit differently about waste, which is a topic that we’re going to get into. It’s something we’ve talked about before, but not necessarily.
From the perspective of people who are actually building systems and machines and extruders that can potentially transform the way that we think about waste. And we don’t always start off with introducing companies by their mission and vision, but I want to do this for this one because I think... It’s just really beautiful. Their mission is to create a world where there’s wonder in waste, and they are building a future where waste is not a burden on society or the planet, but instead a valuable resource for new materials. So sitting across from us, we have Chief Beard and Lieutenant Beard.
They also go by more formal titles, but we’ve got Tony Bova and Jeff Beagle. Welcome to the show, guys.
Unknown speaker: Thanks for having us. This is great.
Tony Bova: Thank you for the introduction. Excited to be here.
Alexsandra Guerra: For Not Confusion of Voices, who’s Tony? Who’s Jeff?
Tony Bova: I’m Tony Bova, co-founder, CEO, and Chief Beard.
Jeff Beegle: And I’m Jeff Beagle, the other beard.
Christophe Jospe: So Tony and Jeff, maybe we’ll start with you, Tony. We like to start with people’s personal stories. So how did you get here?
Tony Bova: Sure. So do you want me to go all the way back? I can go all the way back. Honestly, it starts back on my first day of kindergarten. So Jeff’s laughing already at this story. So I grew up in a household where my parents were divorced and they were separated. So I got to see two different lifestyles, one with bounty and abundance and one that didn’t have as much. And my first day of kindergarten, my mom sent me off to school with my brand new ALF lunchbox for people who don’t know ALF from 1987.
Go check it out. It’s worth it. And in my Alpha Lunchbox, I had, you know, a sandwich and a little thermos full of milk. And she gave me 50 cents to go buy ice cream because that was the thing that you could do. So I got really excited, bought ice cream, proceeded to not eat it, and then had conversations with all of the new friends I was making. So I put the ice cream back in my lunchbox, knowing that it cost money and I didn’t want to waste it. And then I brought it home.
Nevertheless, the ice cream didn’t make it. My lunchbox and my backpack were a big mess. But anyway, that kind of mentality persisted throughout my life. In undergrad, I studied organic chemistry and my mentor in undergrad, so I did undergraduate research, he had a lot of interest and taught a lot about the concept of green chemistry. Which is if you go look it up has these 12 principles that stand out, but effectively it’s a way to do chemistry. So how to make stuff like literally all the stuff in the world has chemistry in it to do it smarter, to do it with less resources, to make it safer.
And one of those core tenants was, can you use more renewable feedstocks, so the inputs to make chemicals, and then can you do that with less energy in a more efficient and safer way and not generate waste at the end of the process? And one of the things that I really learned that was really interesting in that area was about the pharmaceutical industry. So a long time ago, like ibuprofen, the Advil or Motrin that all of us love to take when we have a headache, For every pound of that they made, they made about 90-something pounds of waste.
And I was like, oh, that’s crazy. And it was just normal. And it still is for a lot of that industry. And it didn’t make any sense to me. And he’s like, with green chemistry, now... 96% of the output of that process is the ibuprofen and the other 4% is vinegar. And all of those are products that people can sell. And I was like, that’s great. That’s how everything should be. And so I went to grad school looking for a program where I could continue my studies in chemistry and find a way to do this.
And at the back of my mind... Maybe it’s watching too much Shark Tank. I don’t know. I was like, I want to do this myself. I want to find ways to do good in the world with the chemistry that I learned. And I would love to start a business around some research that I do. And the idea of finding a waste stream was really, really high on where we started. And so that led me down to finding the graduate research program that I was in at the University of Tennessee. Ultimately, which was taking a waste product and turning it into a valuable material and loved it so much that I convinced Jeff to join me in this journey as founder in our company.
His research, and I’m sure he’ll tell you about it, was also about waste and a much more wastey story. And yeah, so we started the company and here we are today.
Christophe Jospe: Cool. Well, Jeff, over to you. What’s your waste story?
Jeff Beegle: So my waste story didn’t necessarily start in kindergarten. But there was a pretty impactful field trip that we had to a wastewater treatment plant in second or third grade or something, which I was like, I never want to go to another wastewater treatment plant again. But it comes back. So I met Tony when I was at the University of Toledo for undergrad. I was studying bioengineering, which for most people is like a route to biomedical engineering or working in the biomedical industry. But I had this interest in biology and renewable energy and stuff.
So I was Going a different route than most people, really trying to look at like bioprocessing and how can we use biology and microorganisms to turn waste and other things into valuable chemicals and things like that. One of the projects that Tony and I were fortunate to work on an undergrad was this project sponsored by the state of Ohio. There was a interdisciplinary group of students that were funded by the state to investigate renewable energy technologies for Ohio. And we were trying to solve this problem of nutrient runoff. Going into Lake Erie and contributing to algal blooms, which for several years, and this continues to be a problem, the city of Toledo has been unable to drink their drinking water.
And this is a pretty large metropolitan city in Ohio. We were working on this technology where we could mitigate nutrient runoff into Lake Erie, essentially capture that in an agricultural system and give farmers a way to produce renewable energy and capture those nutrients and reuse them on their farm instead of losing it all into rivers and lakes. And we, in developing this technology, the group of students that were working on this, We entered into a business plan competition and while we did not win or come anywhere close to winning, this was a really good exposure to how entrepreneurship could be used as a way to bring technology into the real world.
Credit that to the entrepreneurial bug that Tony and I caught. But after undergrad, I also went to the University of Tennessee for graduate school. I was studying at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. And this is where the water treatment plant comes back. My graduate research was literally studying poop. And how it could be used as a feedstock for energy and chemicals. So I was using these systems called microbial fuel cells, which are super cool. Essentially, it’s kind of like a battery that’s powered by microbes, but you feed poop into it.
And you can produce things like hydrogen or electricity or other chemicals. So I was doing this research for my graduate work. All the while working with Tony on what was then Grow Bioplastics and the company that ultimately became Mobius. And yeah, here we are.
Alexsandra Guerra: I love that, Jeff, because I have very similar stories where I was in university and did an entrepreneurial business plan competition. We got third, but we didn’t win. But it was definitely that like bug. Oh, my God. I have to drop out of my PhD because I can’t do this anymore. I have to start a company and make instant change now. It’s addictive. And I love, I also worked with poop too. So like, good on you, man. So you guys have painted a story for like your whys and like, how did this come together?
But I’m missing, like, how did Mobius, like the idea of doing what you do, and maybe we can describe that a little bit. How did that come about with your two stories?
Tony Bova: Sure. So one of the things that I learned about when I was an undergrad was different sorts of byproducts from different chemical industries. And there was one in particular that there was another graduate student in the lab that I was in when I was at the University of Toledo. He was working on called lignin. So for people who don’t know, lignin is the glue that holds all plants and trees together, or as Jeff likes to say, it’s the brown in trees. It’s what makes them that naturally dark color and lets forests grow tall.
The paper companies of the world and the biofuel companies of the world that use biomass, whether it’s from trees or grasses, usually strip that lignin out, and it’s burned for low-value energy return in some sort of facility to power it, or it’s landfilled. So in undergrad, I had heard a little bit about this and people were like, yeah, we’re trying to figure out things to do with it. And it’s pretty complex from a chemistry point of view. And so that’s just stuck in my mind. And so when I got to grad school, I, you know, with the mindset of maybe I can find some cool technology that I’ll work on that might be useful for a company.
I found a researcher who was working with lignin and they were learning how to make materials out of lignin. Initially the project that I came in behind was one that was trying to make carbon fiber. So any sort of like advanced materials you would see for cars and airplanes making it out of renewable materials rather than petroleum. But what I started working on was how to turn lignin into plastics. And so, the majority of my PhD research was, can I take lignin and turn it into plastics for things like the automotive industry, trying to increase renewable content there, rather than using some fossilized carbon, like petroleum-based resource, which is most of the materials world.
But pretty quickly, I realized that it didn’t necessarily fit with like the waste mindset for me of why would we use a renewable material when at the end of the day, we haven’t solved the bigger problem, which is the waste side. And I knew pretty quickly that lignin is in trees. Most trees eventually when they fall in the forest or grass will degrade over time, it’ll decompose. Why couldn’t we make our plastics do the same thing? And so I started to dig into the idea of making biodegradable plastics using lignin.
And very similar to the undergrad experience, I took a few classes in entrepreneurship and technology commercialization. And one of them, Jeff and I kind of partnered together on with a few other students. And we saw a flyer in the hallway for a pitch competition. And we’re like, well, that would be a cool way to validate this idea. Because the entire class was, how do you put together a business plan and validate that, go talk to some people, get out of the office? We’re like, what a better way to test it out than to compete against other people who have business ideas.
And mind you, like all four of us on the team at the time were all PhD and master’s student candidates. We didn’t have any business in business. So we went and we won. We won. We took first place. It was $1,000. So it was pretty exciting. And that, I think, regurgitated that bug back up in us. And so over the next... Year and a half, you know, we walked away from it just because it was a fun thing to do at the time. But I had taken a few more classes and those classes continued to spin up this idea.
And at the end of one of them, it was a master’s in business course called New Venture Planning. And the goal of that was to write a front-to-back business plan, find an application. So I named the business Grow Bioplastics. And we would make lignin-based plastics for the agriculture industry. And at the end of that semester, the professor teaching it said, I don’t know if you intended to, but this is an actual business plan that you could start a business with, not just an academic exercise. You’ve done a really good job.
So I really think you should consider this. And I don’t think he thought that I would do it right then, but I did. So that was in December of 2016. A few weeks later, I was sitting in Chicago. It was like 2 in the morning right after Christmas at my fiance’s house. Whipped up the Secretary of State website from Tennessee, dropped $300 and started a company. And then a couple days later, I called Jeff and I was like, hey, remember that thing we did a couple years ago? Well, what do you think about actually starting a company?
He’s like, yeah, I think that we could do that. When do you want to do it? I’m like, well, I already did it.
Alexsandra Guerra: And when was that?
Tony Bova: That was 2016 when we formally started the company.
Alexsandra Guerra: Really cool.
Christophe Jospe: That’s such an amazing story. Before we dive too much into Mobius, I want to pick up on a couple of things you said. You mentioned the waste problem. Don’t know what that means. I might agree, but I just don’t know what that means. So I’m interested in you defining that. But I’m also interested in you sort of framing this in terms of like, how big is the waste problem? And people talk about like plastics, like, oh, we should be afraid of plastics, not like graduate style plastics. We’ve done that before on this podcast.
But so yeah, why is waste a problem?
Tony Bova: So if we’re only talking about plastics, which is just one facet of all of the stuff that we use as a society, there’s somewhere between three and 400 billion tonnes of plastic produced a year. Which is if you do the math versus how many people there are that’s in the much more plastic than you ever thought that you were responsible for. And it doesn’t mean that us as consumers are the ones who are actually consuming that directly. It’s not that there’s that many straws out there. It’s every single thing. So plastics and polymers broadly can be the fender on your car, the siding on your house, your shoes, this microphone in front of me, all of those things.
And We have forever designed things as a species to be very effective at doing one job. And that job is not to get deconstructed back into its finer elements. But when we look at nature, a tree, if a tree falls in the woods, yeah, someone probably hears it. But it eventually will turn back into nutrients for the rest of the ecosystem around it. It’ll be a home for things. It’ll get consumed by those. And over time, that tree will be gone. It’ll be back into new trees. And as humans, we’ve done a really good job of doing everything but that.
So like we are not creating a closed loop system for this stuff that we make. It’s very linear. We kind of take, make waste. And so on that plastics issue, that’s just one facet. If we talk about all the waste in the world, Food, forestry, agriculture, everything else, it’s a much bigger problem. I don’t know that I have numbers on all of it, because we’re focused on just a few parts, but it’s up there.
Christophe Jospe: Cool. So you talk a bit about trees falling down. I mean, that’s the biological carbon cycle. In some of your literature, you’ve written about the technological carbon cycle. I’ll say it first, so you don’t have to, but then you can define it for us, which is the circular carbon economy. This idea of... It’s a hard word.
Alexsandra Guerra: I’m not even going to try it. Cyclical?
Christophe Jospe: Cyclical.
Alexsandra Guerra: There we go. I tried that earlier today and it was a fail, so don’t be that impressed.
Christophe Jospe: And then there’s this beautiful concept I learned from Jeff, which is lost carbon. So where does that fit in these cycles? Can you find the cycles for us first and then tell us what lost carbon is and where it fits?
Jeff Beegle: Yeah. So the circular carbon economy is certainly not something that we’ve invented. This is a huge movement globally that a lot of organizations and companies are really investing into. Like, for example, Google just recently announced their commitment to the circular economy, which is amazing. But essentially the circular economy has two loops. You have the technical nutrient cycle, which the way I like to think about it is the components in electronics are made from metals and other things that can be reused and recycled over and over. So like when you’re done with your cell phone, you could give that back to Apple or Samsung.
And in theory, they should be able to take those parts and put it into a new phone and essentially create this Nearly infinite loop of metals and other types of materials. With Mobius, we’re very interested in the biological nutrient side, which is you might have different organic sources like trees, biomass, poop, things like this that can be Broken down into the environment, into nutrients or carbon, and just contribute to those ecosystems and be rebuilt into biomass again and kind of creating a more regenerative cycle in that way. And so, yeah, our focus at Mobius is much more on the biological nutrient side, but as a bigger picture for the circular economy, you need both because not all plastics...
can or should be designed to be biodegradable. Like Tony said, some of the components in your car are made of plastic. You do not want it to degrade while you’re driving on the interstate, but something like a plastic fork or maybe like a flower pot, there’s no reason why that should be designed to last forever. So there’s kind of a mix mash right now with how things are designed and how they’re designed to be disposed. And the circular economy is one way to try to rectify That kind of design issue.
Alexsandra Guerra: Are you guys familiar with Green Biz?
Unknown speaker: Yes.
Alexsandra Guerra: I know you are because we’ve talked about this, but I was really saying it for the listeners. You’re welcome. So Green Biz is a media group that gives a lot of like, they shine a lot of light on what’s going on within the trends of sustainability in the private sector. And they just did their first ever circularity conference in June in Minneapolis. Minneapolis. I was there and I’m like blanking out. Anyways, it was really good and they completely sold out. So it’s weird to me, or it’s a big signal to me, that if group says we’re going to charge these premium tickets for an event, and it was a very good one, it was worth the value, and they sell out immediately, then they’re honing into something really big.
And so you guys are also honing into something really big in a market that can grow.
Christophe Jospe: Just observing things. Just a validation point. Yeah, totally. Cool. So you’ve got this circular economy where you’re trying to make the most of your materials, but somewhere along the way you might lose carbon. Can you unpack that for me?
Tony Bova: Sure. So the term lost carbon, I don’t know if anybody’s used it before us. I don’t want to lay claim to it. Although I did search on Twitter for a hashtag and nobody used it before me.
Jeff Beegle: We have a few hashtags.
Tony Bova: We do. But the idea is that for us, for me in particular, as a chemist, I learned to see the worlds in atoms and molecules. So to me, it’s super fascinating that the same 12 atoms of carbon that are in a molecule of sucrose, which is just table sugar... Something you might put in your coffee or tea every morning can be the same 12 carbon atoms in like a life-saving cancer drug. To me, that is amazing. And it’s the power of chemistry that does that. And whether it’s us as humans that design chemical systems to do that, or it’s nature that has biological systems to do that.
We know that these transformations can take place. And while it’s not entirely like taking apart your favorite Lego figure and turning it into something else, there’s a little more science and engineering behind it. We have the technology and tool set to do that. So when we see something like waste that’s organic, so if we talk about the lost carbon that we’re very interested in talking about to us, what that is, is it’s three, maybe 400 million tonnes of carbon every year. From just a few sources, and these are only four that we like to talk about of organic waste that just gets burned or landfilled.
So lignin is a big one from the paper and pulp industry. The dairy industry, any sort of cheese or yogurt creates all of this whey waste, which has tonnes of carbon in it. Food waste broadly, things like seafood shells, your leftover banana peels. If you were to go to like a plant that processes and makes ketchup, all those tomato peels, like at best, most of these things may be composted or turned into a low-grade animal feed. But nature has done a really, really good job of putting some pretty complicated chemistry into that and we’re just...
Throwing it away or burning it. To us, that value is lost. So that’s where the term lost carbon came from for us. And we see it as an opportunity to really offset all of this new carbon that we think that we’re getting, which is really old carbon from petroleum. From coal, we’re taking things out of the ground. All of the atoms that have ever been in the universe always have and will be the same. So we just want to make sure that we can get ones within our lifespan that are renewable, that it’s not going to take millennia to return back to those sources.
And so we don’t want to lose the opportunity if we put a ton of time and energy into growing a bunch of bananas that we throw away all the carbon in those peels if we can go make it into something else.
Alexsandra Guerra: And it’s more than just renewable, right? Because you guys have these plants, these pots that are carbon negative. Can you tell us more about that?
Tony Bova: Sure. So the first technology that we’ve been working on is related to the work that I mentioned earlier on And that’s taking lignin, which is the glue in the trees, and turning that into biodegradable plastics. And so one of the application areas that we’ve been working on partnering with manufacturers is to bring biodegradable and compostable flower pots to market or any sort of container for the horticulture or nursery industry. And we look at it in a way that if you think about the trees or even you can get lignin from grasses that grow much faster than trees, They’re sucking that carbon out of the air and then putting that into this biological material that they need.
We as humans will harvest that and if we just burn 30% of it and send it right back to the atmosphere, that’s not super great. It’s not ending up back in soils. So for us, if we’re able to make a container like that could be made from these materials, And one that you could plant directly into the ground. So imagine if you’re a farmer and you have thousands of little seedlings that you started in a greenhouse and then you have to throw away that seed tray at the end because it’s made of plastic and it’s contaminated or you don’t want to spread disease.
Imagine where you could plant the entire container seedling and all. Or if you were a consumer, you went to Lowe’s or Home Depot and you bought a flower, plant that in the ground. That carbon gets actually returned back to the soil and the lignin, just like lignin in nature, Creates that robust carbon system in the soil and that top layer that healthy soils need.
Alexsandra Guerra: So two weeks after program started, I went home to Seattle to celebrate my brother’s birthday and I have a garden. I wanted to plant some of the vegetables in the ground. And of course, I’m dealing with these plastic freaking containers. And this is before I really took time to look at what Mobius is doing. I heard the pitch and we did the thing before. And I’m just looking at these piles of plastic containers. I’m like, I hate this so much. Like this is a pain that I feel as a gardener who is working on a carbon removal marketplace.
I don’t want this. Two days later, I’m looking through the update emails and I see like the article that you shared and you asked for us to share on LinkedIn, which was like, oh, here’s our carbon negative plotters that you can put straight into the soil. And I thought, my God, like, where can I buy that? Here’s my money. I have cash. Like, where can I get some of these pots? Can people buy them now?
Tony Bova: So not yet. And to be clear, it won’t be our business to sell the pots because we’re not a flower pot company, but we are a materials company. And so our goal is to be able to work with people who are already making these products. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of brands and manufacturers that are feeling pressure from their consumers to have more sustainable materials in their supply chain, in their ecosystems, in their products. And there’s no one solution that will fit them all. There’s lots of different degradable materials and sustainable materials out there.
So we’re looking at this niche in the agricultural and horticultural space. And our plan is to manufacture and sell these materials to the people who make The flower pots today, which go often end up in the places where you go and buy those plants for your garden at home. So we have some partnerships that we’re working on that right now. We have some funding from grants that’s helping us test that. We need to make sure that they’ll work in the greenhouses with all the robots and everything that they use. Ultimately, before they can end up being on the shelf at your local home garden stores.
Alexsandra Guerra: So for the listeners and for myself, should we just keep looking at Mobius.com to like see who those distributors are so where we could buy those?
Tony Bova: Mobius.co.
Alexsandra Guerra: Oh, Mobius.co. Okay, great.
Tony Bova: But yes, please absolutely keep an eye on our website and we’ll continue to post updates there and on our blog about our status and how close we are to bringing stuff to market.
Alexsandra Guerra: I don’t want to make that sound like a wrap-up. We’re still going here. I just really wanted people to know and I wanted to know where I could get these pots.
Jeff Beegle: Would it be helpful for us to explain kind of how the traditional chemical industry works and how we’re being different?
Christophe Jospe: You are permitted to ask yourself your own questions and answer them.
Unknown speaker: Go ahead. Okay, Jeff. That was a good question.
Jeff Beegle: So this is a vast oversimplification, but we’ll try to just kind of explain at a high level how petrochemical industry works right now. So a lot of it starts with petroleum or oil. And to be super clear, oil is not a single thing. Oil is an amalgamation of many, many, many different types of chemicals that are ultimately kind of separated out. That’s like what refineries do is to separate out all the components of oil. Some of them become things like gasoline, diesel. Some of them become things like lubricants and some of them become things like plastics.
So all the components of oil, Are essentially separated out and typically sold to like specialty chemical companies like Dow, DuPont, BASF. Those are some of the big dogs in the industry. And as it relates to plastics, those specialty chemicals are sold to a type of manufacturer called a compounder. So compounders use a fairly common piece of equipment, which is essentially like a KitchenAid mixer, just much more fancy, that takes these specialty chemicals, blends them up in a KitchenAid and makes a pelletized plastic. This is essentially the currency of the plastics industry.
If anyone listening ever sees us, there’s a good chance we have like a little jar of black plastic pellets that look like sprinkles. Those are the pellets I’m talking about. These are sold in like millions of tonnes quantities around the world between compounders and other manufacturers called converters. So compounders make the pellets. They sell them to compounders who make the finished product, whether it’s like a flower pot or like a car fender. Whatever. And then those are usually either like sold to like a finished assembler or like packaged and sold to a retailer.
So that makes sense. That’s kind of how the conventional industry works. And where we fit in is we fill the role as a compounder, but instead of using raw materials from the petroleum industry, we are using waste and other renewable materials.
Christophe Jospe: So basically you’ve got the lignin and then you’ve got, what is it, a biopolymer and you mix it together and it goes through some machines that look like a large blender and then it somehow gets extruded and turns into a very thin film that you could then turn or morph into any shape that you’d like. Is that about right?
Tony Bova: Yeah. Pretty much, yeah. So at the end of the extruder, you can put on a dye, if you will, for anybody who’s ever had like a Play-Doh noodle gun when they were a kid, just like that. You squish the stuff out and depending on whether you put like the spaghetti one or the flat ribbon one for like your Play-Doh lasagna, you can put these different dyes on the end. So for us, we want to be in the business of making pellets, which start as like a little filament that gets chopped up.
Or maybe big sheets of plastic that can go and get formed. But we are not the finished product. We’re the step above that in the raw material.
Christophe Jospe: Got it. So two weekends ago, I did something for the first time ever in my life, which was I got to brew beer with these fine fellows. And for anyone out there who’s ever wanted to brew beer, do it with chemistry PhDs because you will have like the geekiest and wonkiest conversations and learn way more than you ever wanted to know. And I’m very excited to taste this beer. But I had a sense and I wanted to ask this on air. What does brewing beer have to do with your company?
Tony Bova: So, that’s a great question. And I’ll lead this off and Jeff, I’m sure you have some more to add too. We look at it as one, it’s just super fun to be able to start from raw materials and make something, you know, I think that there’s so many things that exist in the world that people have no idea how they’re made. And some things like making a plastic fork or a knife isn’t very accessible for regular people, but beer is. And so for us, I think it’s a combination of I’m a chemist, Jeff’s a biologist and an engineer, and all three of those things together is like the fundamentals of brewing.
And so for the chemist in me, I really like understanding like I have some raw ingredient and something in it is coming out and I’m doing an extraction here by, you know, Brewing and making like the wort and then we’re adding hops at different times for other components. It’s like cooking, but it’s the same way that chemistry works. You’re combining things at the right time to make a new mixture. And then on the fermentation side, that’s where the biology takes over and there’s all of these yeast cells that are turning all the sugars from that in there.
And so like one, it’s a super cool process just to be able to talk about from like a scientific point of view, but also It’s one of the things that I think that we like to do. Jeff taught me how to brew. And it’s been kind of just a relaxing activity for us to take a step away from the business and invite friends like you guys out to join us. And a lot of brewing is do something and then wait for a while. And so in those wait for a while periods, it’s time for great discussion.
So it kind of fits the culture that we have about like wanting to be really open and transparent. You learn how to make the beer. You get to see how the sausage is made for lack of a better term. But also, you know, sharing and educating is a big deal too.
Jeff Beegle: So when I was an undergrad, again, I was a bioengineering student. And if you look at it in one way, essentially that is learning how to brew beer. I took a class my senior year that was a winemaking class. And we made wine and learned like the science and the microbiology of like how wine is made.
Alexsandra Guerra: I want to do that.
Jeff Beegle: Yeah. Wine is, it’s similar, but It usually takes a little bit longer than beer. But with some of my friends in undergrad, we, for several reasons, wanted to take this knowledge of how to make beer and bring it into our social life. So we started making beer every six weeks or six months. Partially, it was because it’s economical. So once you buy all of the equipment... Like a single kit can make five gallons of beer, which is the equivalent of like 50 bottles of beer. And depending on how much that kit costs, you might be saving a ton of money on beer.
Alexsandra Guerra: And depending on how much you usually drink beer. Right, right.
Jeff Beegle: And so there was like an economical component to it. And very quickly, and I’m a little bit of a beer snob. But very quickly, it turned into almost like an artistic expression of like, what are beers that I really like and how can I completely make it my own? So when I brew, I really like to add like other herbs and flavors to like make beers that I’ve never heard of. And I’m sure there’s a microbrewery out there that does it, but maybe they don’t sell in Tennessee. So there’s like an artistic expression to it, but there’s also the underlying science and engineering of Brewing.
And then, yeah, Tony and I brewed for the first time like five years ago. And we’ve made a series of really good beers since then. And we tried the one that we made two weeks ago because we just kegged it last night. It’s delicious. And we’re waiting to try the stout that we made last weekend.
Alexsandra Guerra: Wait, did you bring it for family night tonight?
Jeff Beegle: For our family night in October.
Alexsandra Guerra: Ah, all right.
Jeff Beegle: It’s not totally ready yet.
Alexsandra Guerra: All right.
Christophe Jospe: So one of the things you didn’t say, and I’m not trying to put words in your mouth, but like each beer has its own recipe and its own unique, the unique elements that go in to make this end product. And it seems like when you’ve got lignin of different forms and biopolymers of different forms, there’s a unique way to now transform this into something which might be more or less biodegradable or more or less durable. Am I trying too hard? Am I grasping at strings?
Tony Bova: That was beautiful. Yeah. You’re really good. You could teach our new employees how this works. Do you want to be our new chief marketing officer?
Alexsandra Guerra: Hey, relax, bro.
Christophe Jospe: I have a job.
Tony Bova: So yeah, no, you’re absolutely right. And it really is chemistry and biology. Well, maybe not all of biology. Biology is a bit more complex. But chemistry is akin to baking.
Alexsandra Guerra: Jeff shook his head very vigorously. Yeah.
Tony Bova: Biology is a lot more complex. But chemistry is a lot like baking. It’s a set of ingredients and it matters how much of each that you put in, when you put it in and what the conditions are in between. You can go and make a set of chocolate chip cookies and tweak one ingredient or change when you add it and totally change the outcome. Chemistry is the same way. And so for us, these materials when we’re making our biodegradable plastics are very much the same way. Every type of tree has a slightly different kind of lignin, which creates a slightly different type of material.
We can tune what the rate of degradation is to some degree. We can change whether it’s stiff and rigid and brittle or if it’s, you know, flexible and tough like, you know, something like rubbery. All those things are tools or we find ultimately that the raw materials are tools that we have at our disposal. Yeah. And so I would definitely agree brewing beer is a lot like that. And then once you learn the fundamentals, like Jeff said, it’s when you can really start to play around with it. And, you know, maybe it’s not mixing things in beakers quite the same way as you may see chemists portrayed on television, but it’s the same general idea.
Alexsandra Guerra: It looks so fun. I’m just sitting here thinking like, oh, that sounds so nice. Like getting your hands dirty and building materials and For some of the stuff that we do in business development with Nori, the results are not so tangible. So maybe I’m totally over fantasizing what it’s like to work at Mobius.
Tony Bova: So I’m glad that you brought that up. So when I started as a chemist at the University of Toledo, I have a great story where my role was to make things that are called organometallics, which means you take an atom of some metal and you attach some pieces of an organic material. Molecule to it, which organic in this term doesn’t mean that it’s grown without like pesticides or anything. It just means that it’s made of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen and maybe nitrogen and maybe sulfur. What that meant for me is that I would mix stuff up in little beakers and it would be like some maybe colored liquid or colorless solid.
And at the end of a multi-week thing, I would have like Half of a gram of some little powder. And I would run it through a bunch of instruments that would tell me what I made. And I couldn’t really physically hold it. It wasn’t tangible. And so I would always ask the graduate students that I worked with, I’m like, what is this that we’re doing and why are we doing it? He’s like, oh, well, I could do this. You know, it could be a catalyst for this reaction to make it more efficient.
I was like, cool. Like, why are we doing it? And I would get the same answer. Well, nobody’s done it before. And I would be like, yeah, for a while. I was really excited. I was like, cool, I’m doing stuff nobody’s done before. I didn’t know that was a thing that could happen. I thought like everything that ever could have been invented was. Yeah. And well, it’s not true.
Alexsandra Guerra: No, no, no. I share the same false myth in my head.
Tony Bova: Right. We’re all, I’m really happy that everybody in the program is inventing really, really cool stuff. So I asked him this again a few weeks later and I was like, really, why are we doing it? Like, what makes you want to do this? And he was like, well, it’s different for everybody, but for most people it’s because, you know, then you can publish your results and share it with the scientific community. I was like, great, why do they want to read it? And he’s like, for the advancement of knowledge. And I was like, that’s a very noble cause, but why do people keep doing it if that’s it?
And he says, well, for most people, it’s to continue to do research. And I was like, how does the research get out of the laboratory into the real world? Like, is that a thing that happens? He’s like, well, most of the time, a lot of these papers are published and were driven in academia by... How many citations we get? What’s the impact factor of the work that we do? Which is a measure of how important is that work, but it may never mean that it ever comes out of the laboratory.
And I was like, but who is it for? How can I make an impact on the world with the chemistry that I do? He’s like, Tony, let me tell you. I’m finishing my PhD and my grandma introduced me to her friends as the type of doctor that doesn’t help people. And I just... It was very like... Dark comedy to me. Yes. It was incredibly humorous when I laughed. I was like, your grandma must be a great woman. And he’s like, oh, she absolutely is. And she’s not wrong. But it made me think like, how can I make the chemistry that I work on help people?
Like, yeah, I would love to be able to publish our results and share with the world, with the scientific community, the things that we do. But I also want to be able to see that it’s out there. And not for me personally, like as much as that would be great validation that what I’ve worked on is useful. But to know that like chemists and biologists and scientists are out there trying to solve real problems. You know, we’re not the next pizza delivery app. No offense to any pizza delivery apps, but if you can find a carbon negative way to deliver me pizza, I will pay for it.
Yeah.
Alexsandra Guerra: I was going to plug in there. I was like, you could partner, the pizza company could partner up with... I don’t know, something like the Stripe for carbon removal sounds like, Nori, we could just do microtransactions for carbon removal with the purchase of your pizza.
Tony Bova: Sign me up.
Alexsandra Guerra: I had to do it, sorry.
Tony Bova: Hey, Stripe. But yeah, so sorry, that was an aside, but I just thought it was an important point to bring up.
Alexsandra Guerra: It is. It’s really important because I think a lot of people out there are looking for how do they get involved, and we have a lot of people who are in college reaching out to us all the time and listening to our podcasts. And yeah, whether it’s the research or like doing your own thing entrepreneurially or finding another organization to join like Mobius and you find like that work is really useful to you and exciting and get your hands dirty and feel like you have an impact. It’s very, very pertinent to the conversations that we’re constantly having.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, so when you finally get your doctorate, you can be a doctor that helps people. And I feel like that’s the common thread that sort of unites everyone in this program is not only do we care fundamentally about creating a greater impact in the world, but it’s things that matter and things that people are willing to pay for. So when you look at research, it’s like, hey, I’m going to publish this research because it’s interesting. Well, what if you can actually advance the research, which not only is interesting, not only has an impact, but there’s a market for it.
And what I love about what you guys are doing is like, there’s actually a really neat, real need with biodegradable flower pots. Like Alexsandra doesn’t want to see the plot deal with that plastic.
Alexsandra Guerra: I do not.
Christophe Jospe: But let’s talk a little bit about some of the barriers to adoption and why isn’t everyone doing this today? I mean, our oil based plastics just so much cheaper.
Tony Bova: Yeah. So, I mean, there are probably two, maybe three big factors. I definitely say one of them is cost. So, petroleum is relatively easy to get, which makes it pretty low cost in terms of feedstock. You I’m oversimplifying, but you poke a hole in the ground and then you turn it into money. And that’s worked for lots of people for a very long time. Another part of that is for the plastics industry, it’s not just oil, like the black liquid that you think of, but it’s any sort of natural gas.
So most plastics that we see in durable things like vacuum cleaners and cars are made out of More complicated polymers that usually come from liquid petroleum. Other ones like your grocery bag or your milk jug is made from natural gas. And lately with all the boom and fracking, like it is just so cheap and very, very hard to compete. And as much as people in the world want to do better, a lot of business is still driven by the bottom line and cheap things just work. A second thing is that those industries have existed for a very long time.
You know, Jeff mentioned earlier the petroleum refineries, and it’s not like that just developed overnight that they were so efficient. Like their entire job year after year is how do we squeeze every single atom out of this raw material, which I actually, I really think that’s aspirational if you think about it, because while they are necessarily not always creating things that could have a known end of life, They are really, really good at not having any waste come out of their process. And so I think that there’s a lot of lessons to be learned from that industry to not have the petroleum refinery of the future, but the biorefinery of the future, the waste refinery of the future, which is what we’re hoping to build at Mobius.
Every single application for plastic, if we’re talking about that, has a different set of requirements. And that means that there needs to be a slightly different modulus in terms of the stiffness of it, or it needs to be stretchy, or maybe it needs to be transparent or opaque. Which means there needs to be a lot of options out there to replace what’s on the market. And maybe I think it’s less than 2% of plastics that are sold are bioplastics. And there’s just a lot more needed. So we’re at the kind of genesis of this.
I mean, there’s a lot of room to be made up. But yeah, I don’t know that those are things that are working negatively in our favor. It’s just why the industry is where it is. It’s hard.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, that’s... That’s a good question. I guess a follow up to that is how do you see these existing petroleum or plastic space companies fitting into the circular economy or the green chemistry that you’ve described in the beginning?
Jeff Beegle: So one of the things that’s been really interesting to us as we’re like learning more about this industry is that a lot of these companies that have built their entire business around like petroleum and natural gas, they’re honestly looking really hard to find more sustainable materials and resources to make more sustainable plastics. So a lot of them have begun researching like. How can they use bio-based feedstocks to make plastic? When you think of the seven numbers that are typically on the bottom of a plastic, how can they make that same plastic, whether it’s polyethylene or polypropylene, but instead of from petroleum or natural gas, they can use something like sugarcane or something else.
Like Tony mentioned, this entire industry didn’t just happen overnight. So reinventing that whole industry with a whole new set of feedstocks is going to take a while, even for the people who have been doing it for decades.
Alexsandra Guerra: It’s a matter of being patient and also really, really having a sense of urgency to act really quickly. So proactive, but also acknowledge what you cannot control, which is everything else, and you can do as much as you can. That’s what you guys seem to be doing.
Christophe Jospe: Totally. One of the fun conversations that came up while brewing beer with these guys was sort of, I’m drawing a weird sort of X and Y axis. And Jeff was describing, we were talking about biodegradable. And I want to go back to that. Because we’ve used that word several times on this podcast. So when you have the mic back, I would like you to first define biodegradable. But you had this continuum of biodegradable versus non, and then petroleum-based versus non-petroleum-based. And actually, you can have things which are petroleum-based and biodegradable.
That blew my mind. But first of all, what is biodegradable and how do you think about that? And then how do you think about this continuum?
Jeff Beegle: Yeah, so Tony and I can definitely tag team on this one because it’s a super complicated issue. This is like one of the questions that we get all the time because this is a huge confusion point with people. So biodegradable, like we’ll start super broad, just means that a material is able to degrade in some sort of natural environment. And there’s several very important considerations. One is defining what that environment is. How much of it is degrading and in how long. So when you see something that says it’s biodegradable, if it doesn’t say where, in how long and how much, like call BS.
So...
Christophe Jospe: So for lignin, what is that? Does lignin even biodegrade? We’ll get back to that.
Jeff Beegle: But so to dig a little bit...
Unknown speaker: I call BS. Yeah. No. You asked me to.
Jeff Beegle: It does, but... To dig a little bit deeper. So there are a lot of kind of regulations and stuff coming up. A lot of this is being led from Europe, which has a little bit more progressive policies on the degradation, but there are starting to be certifications For materials to degrade in soil or compost or in anaerobic digestion or in like oceans. And so all of these environments are super different. And even if you take the same piece of plastic and put it in each environment, it’s going to degrade very differently.
And so it’s a really hard question to be like, does your thing degrade? Because it’s going to degrade differently in every one of those environments. Sure.
Tony Bova: And I think another really important thing to point out is when we say degrade, it’s not like something is just spontaneously falling apart. If you have a biodegradable plastic on the shelf, it’s not just going to fall apart. It’s through the action of some outside thing. Biodegradable broadly means that it’s a biological process. So there’s some sort of a microbe, a bacteria, a fungi that’s literally eating the plastic as food. And then just like us, they breathe out carbon dioxide, they poop out carbon, they multiply and make more bacteria and fungi.
Those are really, really important for people to understand. There are plastics that can degrade in things like sunlight. There’s a class of materials out there called oxodegradables, but they’re often marketed as biodegradable. And if you run them actually through the certification processes Jeff talked about, The way that you see if something’s actually biodegradable is you’d measure how much carbon dioxide is released and how much, you know, we eat things as humans and we breathe out CO2 and that’s our metabolism. The metabolism of those organisms, those environments can be measured. With those oxidegradable plastics, they’re really just getting broken up into very, very tiny pieces to the point where we can’t see them anymore.
They might eventually be consumed, but it’s over hundreds if not thousands of years. Most of them turn into microplastics and up in the soil and our food and in the water. So the certification side of things for biodegradable in your garden in under two years or industrially compostable at the compost facility in your city in under six months are very, very important.
Christophe Jospe: Details matter. So we’re getting to the time where we want to wrap up. We’ve already given you the shout out to the website, so mobius.co. But before we do that, I’m interested, what’s next after flowerpots?
Tony Bova: Sure, this is a great question. So, we have a number of different angles that we’re approaching this waste problem at. One of them is continuing to find more applications for the lignin-based biodegradable plastics that we’re making now. And again, focusing heavily on the agriculture industry. So, currently we’re exploring some new opportunities in things like seed coatings, fertilizers, where if we can control the rate that these degrade, we can control When a seed germinates for a farmer without there needing to be plastic pollution in the soil from that coating or when a fertilizer could be released into the soil.
This is super early, but it’s an area that we’re exploring and this program has been great. On the actual material side, there’s a lot more plastics. Plastics used in agriculture today. There’s things like plastic mulch film. So if anybody’s ever been on the west coast of the United States or in Florida and you’ve ever seen like a strawberry farm, there’s usually this black or white plastic film that’s laid out over the ground everywhere. Almost all of that is single-use plastic that has to get collected at the end of a season and then it’s usually landfilled.
It’s very hard to recycle. We would love to have our plastics be that mulch film and have the farmers just plow it back into the soil, add that carbon back to the soil. And to answer your question, yes, lignin does biodegrade. It does it very slowly because it actually contributes to organic carbon that can be stored in the soil. So really rich soils have lots of great lignin components in them. On the other end, we’re looking at other waste streams. So we recently were really happy to get a big grant from Kroger.
They have a zero hunger, zero waste foundation that started an innovation fund. And we were one of seven companies that received A total of 1 million across all of us for funding. And the project that we proposed and that they’re partnering with us on is to take waste cooking oil from the food industry and turn that into molecules that can become specialty chemicals or other biodegradable plastics. And we continue to look for new technologies. We’re talking to people who have hemp flower waste from the hemp industry. We’re very interested in You know, the dairy industry and cheese and yogurt and all of the whey that’s produced there.
All of these things are on our radar. Now, we’re a super small team right now. There’s six of us, but we’re definitely going to be growing in the future. And all of these are opportunities to solve some pretty big problems and use some science and entrepreneurship to bring new solutions into the world.
Jeff Beegle: And create a world where there’s wonder and waste.
Tony Bova: Yeah. Our other hashtag is the future is garbage.
Alexsandra Guerra: Wondering Ways is pretty great. I felt so uplifted and inspired by that. And it seems like you guys have a really good vision and you got to start somewhere. So well done for the work that you’re doing. It’s really exciting. And thank you for it.
Tony Bova: Thank you very much. I really appreciate to be able to do the work and to find like-minded people who see that there’s potential and appreciate the problems that need to be solved.
Christophe Jospe: Thanks a lot.
Tony Bova: Thanks. Thanks.
