 and I'm very excited to be hosting this event along with the Tomcat team, Donica, Brian, and Elizabeth. The tackling global challenges series is designed to highlight problem areas in energy and sustainability, provide some insight into a specific area by engaging outside experts and we hope stimulate conversations to generate new solutions. This is the first season of the series and the theme is plastic energy and sustainability challenges associated with plastic with a particular emphasis on what to do about plastic waste and how do we minimize and hopefully eventually eliminate plastic pollution. So just to very briefly recap, this is episode three. So in episode one we heard from Mike Biddle who gave a broad overview of the plastic problem and his perspective as an investor and entrepreneur. In episode two we heard from two experts from the Department of Energy who gave us their view on the R&D horizon for the prospects for developing some innovative new technologies to address the plastic waste problem in particular. And today in episode three we're focusing on the question can plastic waste be turned into useful products on a meaningful scale? And by meaningful we mean a scale that ultimately is commensurate with the scale of plastic waste generation which is upwards of 300 million tons per year. And today we're extremely fortunate to be joined by two entrepreneurs who have founded companies that are working directly in this space and developing technologies to address plastic waste. They have actually very complementary approaches. On the one hand we're going to hear from our first speaker about a company developing a way to turn plastic into fuels and feedstock chemicals for the regeneration of plastic. And from our second speaker we're going to hear about a company that's developed a technology to turn plastic waste into pavement for roads. So how this is going to work is we're going to hear two presentations. Okay so we'll hear from both of our speakers back to back and then we will have a combined Q&A session. You should have received a link to poll everywhere from the reminder email. You are welcome and encouraged to submit questions during the presentations to poll everywhere. You can also vote for other questions, try to bring them to the top of the list. The link to that if you didn't get it from the email Danica just put that in the chat. I will do my best to try to weave in as many of those questions as possible in the Q&A. We also want to remind you that there is a Tomcat LinkedIn networking group which is a great way to connect to other people at this event. One of our goals is to try to bring together people with as diverse interests and skills as possible to help generate creative solutions to these problems. Okay so let's get started with our first speaker. I'm really pleased to introduce Bob Powell who is the founder and CEO of Brightmark. Bob has spent the majority of his career working in renewable energy. He was an electrical engineer by training. He has held various leadership positions in the solar and energy management industry including president of North America for son Edison, president and CEO of solar power partners, co-founder of a virtual energy team that's helping commercial and industrial customers make better energy decisions. And he founded Brightmark in 2015 to reimagine waste and that's the story we're going to hear today. So Bob thank you so much for joining us and we're excited to hear about Brightmark. Thanks. Thanks very much Matthew. Great to be here and as I look across the screen I actually see a few familiar names here so great to speak to some of you all who are old friends and then hopefully new friends as well. So what I'd like to share with you is about Brightmark and what we're doing with respect to plastics so I'll start with our mission and if I may I would like to walk you through a few slides here. Let me pull that up quick so just pulling to make sure the team here can see my presentation. Matthew is that? Yeah we had it there for a second. Yeah let's see we're going into presentation. Fantastic. Okay well let me get to it because you know we could talk about this topic for a long time so when Matthew set up you know is there hope around solving this immense plastic problem? I believe so and this team at Brightmark is very mission oriented around solving our our environmental issues and my forward button is not working. I'm going to try. So Danica could you possibly do me a favor here and do you mind pulling up the PowerPoint please? Yes one second. Thanks. Sorry gang so our mission at Brightmark is to create a world without waste and what we're doing is we're tackling two particular areas one I won't focus as much on is tackling greenhouse gases predominantly with renewable natural gas which we create out of food and animal waste. Negative carbon solutions relative to what happens when food and animal waste turns into greenhouse gases very powerful environmental solution there. But the focus of this is what are we doing with respect to plastics? So if we could in presentation mode if you're able Danica to go to slide three. I'm going to leave it in this view only because I think it's easier for us to navigate it between the two of us and just say next as you want me to move forward. We'll do. So it's quite likely that most of the folks here realize that we have got a tremendous issue with respect to plastic waste. There was a study that was done in 2015 that really I think created a sense of awareness around the magnitude of the problem that we have and one of the things that came out of that particular study was that if we continues we're going right now by 2050 there will be more plastic by weight in the ocean than marine life. It's a stunning statistic and it's one that as I've become and spent more time in and around the oceans as part of our mission here I've actually seen live myself so it's a real threat but I have hope for where we're headed. So you can see not only is it an environmental issue it also creates a tremendous cost to the tune of trillions of dollars per year and it's our belief at Breitmark we need multiple ways to deal with the problem part is waste reduction but much of the problem should be solved with circular solutions that eliminate the waste and then reuse the resources. So our goal in eliminating waste is to be fully circular. We're not fully there yet and I'll talk a little bit about that journey in a second but one of the fundamental questions I always think about is should we be using plastics or not. So Danica if you could go to the next slide. You know listen in the COVID year I think a lot of us probably realize that there are a lot of life-saving properties associated with plastics. There are a lot of other uses and I think we oftentimes may not know how important plastics are from a safety perspective and a fuel efficiency perspective. So as you can see there's a lot of fuel and combustibles that are saved by having plastics in cars. In fact as you can see per car not environmental savings of about 162 dollars relative to other uses. About 50% of the volume of what is contained in cars is plastics safer and as I said more fuel efficient. Another tremendous use for plastics is packaging which reduces food waste in particular pretty dramatically and you can see the impacts when you think about something that many of us to the extent we're meat eaters are familiar with. Plastics reduce waste and reduce greenhouse gases as a very profound benefit on a per ton basis with respect to things like sirloin steaks. Anything that can decay like food waste is benefited by plastic packaging. So let's as a mission-oriented company at Breitmark we're always looking for the best solution and one of the things that we spent a lot of time thinking about is what are the alternatives and the impacts of alternatives. Today's solutions can become tomorrow's environmental problems and so in our minds eye we're always trying to be focused in on hey if we can get away with plastic like for example plastic straws I think that's probably a really good thing to consider. Some other alternatives to plastics have more environmental impact and more cost impacts as well. We have the sites on the studies here if anybody's interested in the future in getting that. So these are not simple ban the plastics types of solutions that we can offer people. So we think with the power of plastics one really good way of dealing with it is what can we do post-use with plastics and that's where part of our solution comes in. Next slide. So but why do we throw away plastics? We throw away plastics that we use because fundamentally right now there's no value associated with them and so it what one of the the things that I talk with people about often is if you know for example I live here in the city in San Francisco if a plastic bottle is on the street there probably somebody is going to pick it up eventually that being said if there was a $20 bill take to that water bottle what would happen to it it's quite likely somebody would see the $20 bill pick it up hopefully do something with the plastic bottle but certainly they would take the $20 bill because there is value there. What I will tell you is there is value in plastics that we are not unlocking and that's why right now only 9% of the world's plastics that we use and then discard are being recycled. Next slide please. But the fundamental value of plastics is that they are basically a series of hydrocarbon molecules attached to each other. Those atoms have incredible use while it is not our preference certainly hydrocarbon atoms in the form of diesel and gasoline are valuable products lubricants motor oils are just a series of hydrocarbon atoms as well and then finally plastics themselves and the great uses of plastics are valuable so how do we deal with something that has inherent value that has been used and we unlock the value that's where our technology comes in so if we could go to the next slide the the untapped value is pretty immense here certainly if plastics that we use here in the states were all converted to fuels you could fuel 9 million cars a year on them so again unlock value there next slide. So as I said when I gave you the example of the $20 bill in the plastic bottle what we think is necessary in order to solve the problem is to create an ecosystem where the value is unlocked in plastics so that the right level of incentives are made so that people will collect plastics bring them to parties like Breitmark who have solutions to excuse me to then create useful products out of the plastics after we use them there need to be the right level of incentives and how that happens is by us creating products that people are willing to provide an economic benefit associated with those products so that we can also help those economically that bring what is now a waste product to us create an ecosystem of value there next slide please so let me talk about our technology our technology is a form of technology known as paralysis excuse me our technology the specific application of it was invented over 15 years ago is patented in most countries in the world and has the ability to process at scale post use plastics let me talk process and then I'll talk about some of the inherent advantages of our specific application so what we do is we take waste that's collected either in bales of plastic waste which are typically if you know the numbering system one through seven most typically three through seven bales and then other forms of specialty streams like we get baby car seats in our facility in actually Indiana as well and what we do is we shred dry and pelletize the plastics and then in the next step we take the plastics and we heat them in an oxygen starved environment no combustion there associated with the conversion of plastics and in stainless steel vessels we heat and create a vapor and as we fit in the front end of the vessel the vapors come out of the back end we cool the vapors and we create a liquid stream and there is a gas stream as well this actually used to create the energy that's necessary to heat our stainless steel vessels the liquid stream is then captured and cooled into it's a hydrocarbon liquid which we currently in our first facility which I'll talk about in just a second here then converts into ultra low sulfur diesel naphtha which has two primary purposes one is a gasoline feed in blending and then the other is as potentially input feedstock in order to remake plastics and then wax which can be paraffin or food grade waxes as well it's a simple process and concept a bit more complicated I'm not a chemical engineer but we've got a lot of really smart chemical engineers that both invented and commercially applied our technology so next slide what plastics do we take we can take danica if you could go to the next slide thank you we can actually take all plastics one through seven most typically we do not receive in great volumes one through seven as pet number one and hdpe number two some force as well at dps are actually mechanically recycled that's that's that nine percent number I told you about but we can take every last bit of the plastics one of the so it's not a single stream solution here um and so we have the ability on that 91 percent of plastics that are not recycled and reused to take them into our process so it's commingled and we run at a continuous rate which helps make the process viable economically in addition to operate at a scale where we can tackle this globally uh we're 93 percent efficient in our process and the seven percent that is an inefficiency is an inert uh non-toxic landfillable residue and uh actually the advantage um with respect to greenhouse gases for getting the great benefit of plastics is greater than 14 percent we did our own uh life cycle analysis which has now been completed and when you compare our process to extract extracting the feedstocks crude oil and natural gas from the ground and then converting them into plastics and then land filling them after they're used we actually provide a 24 percent greenhouse gas uh benefit relative to the traditional process that I just described so it's very powerful not just from pooling uh plastics out of the environment but definitely also from a greenhouse gas perspective so if you could go to the next slide all right I told you our first facility is uh located in Indiana it's located in northeast Indiana and we are almost complete with the plan uh we started construction two years ago in April 2019 invested a total of 265 million dollars including green bonds that we used to help finance the facility and uh as I said we'll be online and our annual rate of that first phase in Ashley Indiana so 100 tons 100,000 tons of plastics a year that we then convert into diesel and then the nap that which I described as well as the wax that I described as well 18 millions of the first gallons the first two six of the wax as well and you can see the metric ton offset of the greenhouse gas emissions that we have each year from that specific facility so what I told you is diesel and nap that particularly as they're combustibles not really something that I'm uh happy with from a long-term perspective but we're on a journey towards circularity and what I will tell you is when we were commercializing our technology and uh seeking to finance and invest that significant amount of capital in that facility in Indiana uh four or five years ago we couldn't find customers to take the liquids and turn them back into plastics so we had to very pragmatically uh produce products that were commodities that are combustibles the world has changed so if we could go to the next slide the world has changed and I will tell you now unlike four and five years ago when we were designing Ashley there are uh producers of plastics your consumer brands who are now knocking down our door because I think the world has finally realized that what we need to do for any form of waste including plastics is to close the loop so all of our future facilities will be circular totally geared towards circularity where what we do is we take plastics convert them with the efficiency that I told you and then provide the feedstocks in order to remake plastics because we think a world without combustibility which is another form of waste that does create greenhouse gases is not the ultimate goal and where we shouldn't be so uh our long term is around circularity and closing the loop let's go to the next slide so to answer your question Matthew in terms of can this be done globally absolutely can our technology is scalable economic and generally at four to eight times the size of the facility there the first phase in Ashley Indiana and at a lower cost per ton produced and we're currently developing facilities more facilities in North America we actually a year and a half ago publicly announced that we were starting an RP process for our new sites in North America we have projects under development in Europe and in Asia Pacific as well and a couple of months ago we actually announced a relationship with a large Korean concern that is helping us with at least one location in Asia Pacific so we can do it at scale we can take all of the plastics create fully circular solutions and so we believe that the answer is yes and we're super optimistic about the future so let's go to the next slide so we've made commitments and within the next five years what we intend to do is divert over eight million metric tons of plastic from landfills in the natural environment and that as I said we now move to a fully circular model and both with our renewable natural gas projects and our plastic projects offset significant co2 emissions so happy to answer questions as we get into it later a very quick overview around the process plastics and their uses and then ultimately the fully circular nature which is where we ultimately want all of us to be so with that I'll pause and look forward to the questions in a few thanks thank you Bob that was that was terrific so we're going to go right to our next speaker and so so hold your questions for for Bob please put them in the poll everywhere and then after our next speaker we will have a chance to talk to both of them so I am very pleased to introduce Sean Weaver he is the president of Neo Sean has been working since 2006 to disrupt and transform the pavement industry so in 2006 he founded Techno Soil Global and Techno Soil Industrial these were originally working on developing new pavements for sidewalks and pathways at campuses and then based on that success they set their sights on a higher volume product and developed a recycled road system that combines recycled asphalt with a binder that's generated from chemically recycled plastic so Sean is going to tell us about his technology tell us about the story of Neo and thank you so much for being here today yeah thank you Matthew for having me today I really appreciate it so I'm the CEO and founder of Techno Soil Industrial which is the creator of the Neo Technology and that's me so today we're going to talk about the technology the history and evolution the material and process performance and sustainability their cycling process and then the power of scale so when we created Neo we weren't trying to solve the plastic waste problem we were trying to solve a road rehabilitation problem which led us to the plastic waste problem so it was kind of a lot of times material science students will you know try to develop a compound and then try to find a product for it we found the product and then try to work backwards so Neo began as a journey to build a better road and so back in 2012 I started looking at different adhesive systems that would just bond aggregate together and what I was trying to do was trying to build a golf cart path just kind of open up a new market for like a natural paving material that looked natural and so without any without any restraints I looked at every compound every type of adhesive that I could get my hands on so epoxy urethane acrylic polymepatholite I mean just basically everything I could find to glue pebbles together or rocks together and so it kind of begs the question you know roads are built out of tar and what we ended up coming up with was you know more like super glue and so you know would you rather build a road out of tar or super glue so when we started we developed this natural paving product and we became pretty successful at corporate campuses it's used at the apple google facebook amazon campuses they use it almost exclusively in 2015 we started a program where we looked at the binder technology used with 100 percent recycled asphalt and in 2015 we built our first road in st. George utah and it's on the right hand side of the screen and you can see on the left hand side of the screen is traditional asphalt with the thermal cracking in it so this road here is about six years old so in 2000 uh so we built the first road in 2015 and then we had to solve just a whole slew of technical problems how do you pump super glue you know like how can you pump super glue reliably and uh you know it typically clogs up the pumps and then we have to dust the $5,000 pump and so we we work through all these technical problems over the next four years and uh in 2019 the department of energy reached out to me and they said hey we understand you have a road recycling technology that that could use a lot of plastic waste and we said yeah and they asked us hey what can we do to kind of further your your mission and you know first I asked them for money and they said no and then the second I asked them to introduce me to a city such as Los Angeles so they we met in Los Angeles uh Los Angeles agreed to look at my program and they ran a 1400 lab tests the first two two months and uh the results of the lab tests basically said uh we were 10 times the performance of normal asphalt with six times less energy to produce it at the same time we recycle 100 of the road so in 2020 we commenced with some in-ground trials and in December 2020 we did a high-profile street in front of the Disney concert hall with the mayor so this is uh they took they basically gave us the worst road in Los Angeles and this road you see on the right here has the highest bus loading out of any road in the city and it happens to be on a slight upgrade and it's a left hand turn so if you add all those things together it's the most that road section receives the highest distress levels basically a city bus in Los Angeles is equal to nine e-sales and each uh e-sales is equal to like a semi truck and every semi truck is equal to 5600 passenger cars so just in the last four to five months that our road piece has been down it's gotten equivalent of like 35 or 40 million cars over it uh they would have expected that road to run at least one inch by now and it has not so you can see the road piece here so with this technology from uh from Neo we can move closer to our most ambitious climate goals improve the way we deliver high-quality city services and pave the path to a greener future that was a very nice uh a quote we got from the mayor after the event so we started really thinking about uh plastic waste and could we incorporate large amounts into our system and so it kind of started a kind of a thought process where you know plastic waste is a problem failing roads is obviously a problem uh maybe we can provide a solution for both so it's all about the binder uh Neo we arrived at a urethane base binder um urethanes are kind of interesting in that you can bring in many input streams of different grades of plastic into it um obviously PET is easy to put into it but we can also bring in HDPE as a you know a different uh mechanism into into the binder as well as we can um we're working on carbon capture liquefying uh co sucking co2 out liquefying it and we can make a useful molecule uh with that as well for it so what we feel the pavement that we've created you know we're using a hundred percent of the existing road um it's not asphalt it's not concrete it's a new category of pavement we call it composite pavement or plastic pavement and it has some unique properties that asphalt does not have so here's a picture of the road recycling processing trailer so we use uh uh we modified existing equipment that was available to the market now so cold in place recycling existed but it could only build a road that was a percentage as strong as a HMA road and right now we're putting the equivalent loading of about 150 000 plastic bottles per lane mile we know we can double triple quadruple this this loading but we're going to do it at a scale uh approach and uh because the road lasts you know in the lab we're getting you know many times greater than two to three times but we're being very conservative with the two to three times longer life cycle to HMA uh which ultimately delivers uh 50 percent life cycle savings to the taxpayers that's good oh there we go so here's the process um so we have the binder and the first vehicle the orange tank's there and then we have a milling machine and then the processing unit in back of it um so we do it all in one step but we mill the road crush the material uh combine it with the binder uh the finished mix material comes out the back of the machine and the paver fix it up so it's all done in one continuous process so with our technology performance as a driver we're trying to build the the most high performing road pavement we could um and what we ended up getting out of the labs what was that roads fail for a number of reasons um sometimes they rut sometimes thermal cracking uh there's a whole host of uh of failure modes for roads and what we found was uh with our binder with 100% recycled material we can create a material that is highly resistant for reflective cracking meaning if there's defects in the lower layers if we recycle the top layer they won't reflect into the upper layer and that's extremely unique um so typically with uh normal pavement strength and flexibility is a trade-off if you get uh if you make something stiffer you know it has it's more apt to crack and if you make something more flexible it's more apt to rut so with typical pavements it's always been a trade-off um with with our system uh you kind of get the best of both worlds we we have increased uh strength and increased uh ductility it's kind of like an aircraft wing they kind of use that as an analogy an aircraft wing flexes but it always snaps back to its original position um with an asphalt road it flexes under the load of say a bus but it only snaps back 99.9% and so you know after you know a million cycles the bus is going over it you know now it's only snapped back 95% and so that's kind of a lot of the reason why roads fail to begin with so in the lab um we have a fatigue life ratio 6.6 to 13.1 times longer lasting than HMA and you can see uh this is a rutting test uh we got zero rut after 20,000 cycles so here's some lab results from Los Angeles you know if you look at uh the Marshall stability of uh traditional by two minutes material it's 2,500 pounds we're 26,000 pounds and so you can see it's quite it quite a difference so uh with our system because we use no heat we get a 94% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions versus the traditional HMA mill infill for road rehabilitation so there's 42 billion tons of asphalt in the world's roads there's a lot of carbon associated with that material you know to get that material mine that material process that material and transport that material if we can reuse all of that material obviously that reduces a lot of trucking and fuel consumption and you know traditional road fact there's 84 trucks needed per lane mile to haul in haul out the waste material and haul in new material so just that process alone destroys the surrounding roads so how do you get plastic into roads so there's two methods that are being taken on right now one there's a company out of Europe that is milking plastic and hot mix and we wish them luck but we've taken a different approach to it we chemically recycle the plastic using a glycolysis process and we extract 100% of the monomers and so uh so you can kind of see the the process here so it can accommodate a broad range of input grades of various plastic streams and so we can take distress plastic you know the people that remelt bottles into bottles well they can only do that a certain amount of times and then the plastic becomes distressed and they it goes to a landfill we can actually take that distressed material and capture 100% of the monomers out of it so it's uh so you know even uh fiber feedstocks that some a lot of that material is not recycled now so we think this depolymerization plus end of life use kind of equals you know we're sequestering the plastic in the roads and at the end of the roads life in 40 to 50 years we can just use the same process and recycle that road again so what's the feasibility of scale so it needs to check all the boxes technically viable commercially viable and scalable so I began to evaluate the feasibility of recycling plastic at scale and who the stakeholders would be um who I would reach out to and see if I could get interest and I kind of found at the end of the day was large-scale energy companies with terminals positioned globally uh the world's leading by two men suppliers that have existing distribution networks large-scale chemical producers to make our other components and then govern governments municipalities to participate in the plastic collection and then we can set up the uh the recycling plants at the at the terminals so after speaking with these groups you know I thought you know the plastic waste problem will start to be solved when the technology becomes the catalyst to monetize it at scale much like Bob said earlier if we can create a high value uh material out of it um then I think the private industry will get involved and with ours you know we can make a compound for 25 cents that's worth a dollar 25 per pound so the value for stakeholders countries get better roads which leads to boosted GDP manufacturers secure a new market with low cost speed stocks the road industry produces longer lasting roads and reduced carbon emissions by 94 percent citizens get saved for roads with substantially less potholes and you really won't see construction zones uh with our process because they'll deploy the trains 10 o'clock at night they'll finish at four in the morning they'll reopen the road that next morning so imagine not sitting in constructs construction zone anymore and then obviously the rate of pollution slow slowing on the planet would be a goal for all so what's next for neo so we're we're going to accelerate the merging of lab and field results so we get this you know incredible lifecycle extension in the lab of six to 13 times right now with our machines we're getting two to three but we're going to optimize our equipment lines to achieve optimum outputs and then we can get closer to the lab results we're going to find the formulation to incorporate additional classic types that will come as we start getting revenue and then engage with partners and governments to support global implementation so we feel it's uh you know you get it's a win-win you get durability and sustainability so that concludes my piece here thank you shine terrific so yeah I want to remind everyone you can you can still submit questions through poll everywhere we're going to move to the Q&A session now I'm going to try to balance it between questions for Bob and for for Sean obviously they have two very different technologies very different businesses but you know both of you have presented basically a vision for how this could scale to you know really enormous volumes because I want to start at a high level and maybe I'll start Bob with you what do you see as the biggest challenge for getting to scale so you're about to bring your your first plan online this year you talked about activity really across the globe what what is the biggest challenge that that you see in taking this from 100 000 tons a year to megaton to multi megaton yeah I I think it is the ability to to deploy and build our projects so that we're making a difference as soon as possible and when you talk about investments of in in is a cinema presentation roughly four to eight times the size will be each one of our new projects there you're talking about 500 million to a billion dollars worth of capital and while the team has a lot of experience in project finance and energy infrastructure throughout the globe there's a lot of capital and then forget the capital part of it the construction turning on so there's a lot of bandwidth necessary in order to do that and when I see a clock like the 2050 clock and then what many of us believe is a climate crisis as well it is how do we get how can we do this and do it with credibility like have people can construct etc quick enough so that we can make a difference here I think that's the biggest biggest issue we have now since our technology is at a point where like we know it works we just need to build it as soon as possible thank you so and yeah I'm going to um I'm going to dive a little bit deeper into questions around the technology in in just a minute but Sean I want to give you a chance to tell us for Neo what what is the biggest challenge for scaling so at this point it's finding the right partners and for us we've been lucky enough that they found us and so we're already having those discussions with companies that have global terminals that want to have the want to incorporate our technology into the road networks they've had the discussions with the governments and so I think that over the six next six months it's just negotiating those commercial contracts and and start moving we'll pick a territory and we'll start we're gonna start North America but we're gonna pick another territory as well so yeah it seems like actually for both of you that there are a lot of stakeholders involved in in this process of scaling and and rolling this out is that is that a significant obstacle basically communicating with you know everybody in your supply chain bob for you I I I guess there's a question around who who is off taking your liquids and and products particularly as you start to go to plastic monomers do you have to then figure out how you co-locate with those with those customers Sean you mentioned of course getting municipalities behind you as well as the other other stakeholders involved in urethane production how do you how do you manage that and how do you how do you see that going I've been with the my manufacturer since 2013 we spent the last eight years together discussing how we would roll and scale this up from from their end and and we got that covered I just was missing the piece of uh you know we need this large energy company with with terminals globally to buy into it and to be quite frank it was non-existent I didn't I couldn't find any of these guys for the last you know seven years and just recently uh they came they came to me this just I they started and started getting some press and then they started exploring you know my technology and they said hey you know they put me through the paces and and then they said hey let's let's let's move forward at a based approach so it's really sort of the plastic angle you think that caught their attention for sure you know I was always pushing this this high performance road and and I think it's that technology stands on its own but when I started promoting that we could put recycled plastic and that changed everything Los Angeles wants to be the first city to take their plastic waste stream sort it you know they have new technology of optical sorters now and actually give us a facility some land down there to build a facility convert the material there and put it right back into the roads so they're they want to kind of leave the world in that yeah and Bob I for you I guess the most curious about you know particularly in in Asia or or in Africa um is it a challenge to get all of the sort of relevant stakeholders on the same page with respect to setting up first of all you know a huge plant that that you would want to construct but also integrating it with the appropriate infrastructure to to really pull this off yeah it's a it's a pretty profound issue um in some countries you know when we think of Asia there's a lot of different countries and so South Korea looks very different than maybe India and Vietnam Burma but in general I think for a large part of Asia and Africa as you mentioned as well um yeah it's more complex well why is that because in many places the waste management infrastructure is not as robust there are communities that are called pickers in some countries whatever you know the equivalent translation is we have people it's much more of a manual process it can be done it just takes longer on the supply side with waste management in some countries I think that selling the product depending upon what market you're in can be a little bit more challenging as well um it may be that the highest use of your product in one location is different than it would be in a Europe or the state so for example we're not a huge fan of combustibles that being said in some markets that may be the most viable way to go we want to avoid that but there's so there's some very pragmatic differences and for us to take an approach that the states the Europe more developed industrialized countries works in different countries is not not really what our experience has been so when you see us announce projects in the future I think what you're going to find unfortunately is there's work going on in less developed countries but the first projects you're going to see from us are where they're more robust waste management infrastructure as well as a little bit more of robust economy on the offtake side you know the feedstock is necessary the monomers etc so yeah it creates more issues and you know so we have decisions to make do we because we can't develop 100 projects at one at once across the globe so do we go with more developed and create a critical mass while we put on the back burner some other locations that simply will take longer it's part of what we're we think through as we think strategically how to solve the equation here and diving into the the processes a little bit deeper and I guess I'll start with with bright marks process first so you you mentioned that these these facilities are they're designed to run 24 7 the first question is sort of around the the feedstock the sourcing there so so it seems like you will inevitably have a heterogeneous feedstock is is the really the the key to your technology the fact that it can operate despite the fact that your your feedstock coming in is not consistent is that part of what what sort of differentiates you from other pyrolysis technologies and then I guess a really somewhat related question is you know how do you manage harmful you know possible harmful emissions especially for something like dvc that you know generating chlorinated emissions yeah and so back to the last one again we don't combust inside our reactor vessels so it helps eliminate emissions from that perspective but and then I'll go back to your original question in a in a sire or the first question with chlorides pragmatically we can take up to what eight nine percent of chlorides in our process I will tell you so Sean down in LA they use optical source we use optical sorters as well we actually have a couple of videos on our website where I and other people are tossing them in we we oftentimes will pull out some of the pbc I think pbc is one of the most problematic issues we have in the plastic area that I see because the chlorides again we can take them but it really creates havoc downstream in our process the catalysts that we have are used at a much higher rate so we try to sort out those but we can again we can take them all and we don't have environmental issues associated with what we take on mass our process actually looks better works better when we have a lot of different types of of plastics a greater array if you will almost a broader distribution curve in terms of the types of plastics that are coming in it works really well from a cracking perspective some processes technologies sort of utilize it similarly more that are maybe more familiar to some particularly in the states will take single streams like a polystyrene so what we were seeking when we decided to to actually buy the technology was something that had the greatest application and that's why I think it's very powerful to be able to take all the one through seven plastics in our process it was that helpful yeah yeah it's helpful and and you integrate so basically you do the fuel refining yourself I mean you're that the output from this Ashley facility will be fuel grade diesel or is or is it a you know liquid product that's going to another party that's going to refine it further yeah so and Ashley on the first phase we're actually and it really has to go pragmatically to the market I talked about before when we were designing a project four to five years ago the only market we had people would not buy our product to throw into crackers to remake plastics so we designed it with a fuel upgrade system so we have a hydro treater on the onsite as well a steam methane reformer for some of the more technically oriented people here on the call the call and distillation column so we produce the three primary products directly onsite the ultra low sulfur diesel is actually on spec and British petroleum is it's public is our customer when they pull up the trucks there they will they will load off the ULSD as they call it the acronym and then put it right into their tanks and then on the nap the side when we process it initially it will be going into as we understand it likely the gasoline blending tanks fortunately together with our partner we're looking for fully circular solutions there so yeah we we have the fuel upgrade system onsite in the future that may not be the case so as the market from selling our product has changed there are co-option location opportunities that we have or that liquid stream we we may hydro treat it a little bit to pull out some of the elements over there but we may take that whole stream post hydro treating and feed it into co-located plants or plants where you might you know deliver that that liquid product so they can then be upgraded at someone else's facilities okay and and Sean you mentioned a period of you know a lot of troubleshooting in terms of getting the the binder properties right for the the pavement can you give us a little bit more insight into sort of what the problems were that you ran into and what you what you had to solve there yeah so you know when you your things react with moisture right so inherently there's moisture in the pavement there's moisture in the air so we had to slow down the reaction and then at the same time for performance properties we had to really balance the tensile and elongation properties to get a very you know middle of the road where we you know duct ductility you know we had sufficient ductility at the same time we had sufficient tensile strength for taking heavy loads um so it really wasn't actually that difficult but um you know for a company that didn't have a lot of budget you know it was a lot of trial in air um and how much of that is done in the lab versus sort of in these field experiments we we try to get it you know get to a sample we're happy with in the lab and then we'll take it out to the field so every time we get a variable you know we refine it in the lab take it to the field and and the um you showed that video it gets about three vehicles in a row that you start with the tanks of the binder if i understand it right that the next vehicle crushes up the existing surface it mills the uh the existing road like uh between one and four inches deep okay it takes that that milling and it sends it up into the second uh for the third uh vehicle which is a processing trailer um so that has a series of screen decks that its sizes it takes the oversize and sends it to a crusher and then it recombines with the fine material in a pug mill and then we uh meter the binder into the pug mill it makes a homogenous mix and then drops onto the ground in a windrow and then a paving machine picks up that windrow and paves it so all these vehicles were available you could you could sort of repurpose existing vehicles or did you yeah so there's the whole recycling process with bituminous products already existed okay so you're just just swapping out the binder then we did but we had to change out the pumping system we had to we refined you know the the crusher and the the screen decks and and a few other things to we're looking for a different gradation than the bituminous guys were okay getting that gradation um yeah okay what's the challenge and so this thing is is it's a single pass basically repavement yep you mentioned it could be done overnight I mean how fast does that the we can make uh like between 2.5 and maybe four miles per shift eight hour shift depending on fast we're running and so um you know a lot of cities are looking for a quick in and out solutions you know if you go to like Manila Philippines um they have bumper to bumper traffic 24 hours a day so shutting down large large swaths of road is really not an option for them and so you know this could be a potential solution in that we can simply cold recycle that lane between the hours of 10 p.m and 3 a.m or 4 a.m minimize you know traffic close the least amount reopen that that piece and um you know it becomes a good solution for a lot of these cities but one of the one of the great value propositions we have is for you know if you take a road in a developing country a lot of these roads only last one year you know as opposed to roads in the U.S. or Germany or Japan that last you know 12 to 20 years with a few maintenance courses done to it but our system doesn't care if it has a low quality aggregate road or a high quality road you get the same end product because the binder is stronger than the aggregate itself so we can take a road that needs to be rebuilt you know every year in India and we can turn that into a 40 year road like without this massive infrastructure that the you know asphalt industry needs to bring there to bring up the standards of the roads we can simply just bring our machines in our binder and and recycle those roads in place. I want to ask a little bit about the a little bit more about the inputs and sort of energy balance around around both of your processes so so Baba I'll start with you you gave the number I guess going for fuel it's a 14 percent reduction is that because primarily because of the energy intensity of the pyrolysis itself that you have to burn a considerable amount of natural gas I would presume in order to do the pyrolysis steps is that is that really the main sort of energy input and I guess carbon footprint of your process that's number one and then number two are there prospects for turning that over to renewable energy input and there's a lot of recent work on trying to to basically electrify high temperature process heat and industry have you looked into any of that yes on the last one and I'll describe that more in a second there are actually two primary components that are the emitting parts of what we what we both the process and what we produce you nailed it on the first one which is we use gas whether it be the non-condensible gas that comes out of our system or if we have to supplant it with natural gas as well so that's one the other is our products that we produce you know as you saw the 18 million gallons a year at the first phase are predominantly combustible products so those are the two factors associated with that what are we offsetting we're offsetting the tremendous amount of methane gas that is used with the extraction of either crude oil or methane out of the ground to produce the version plastics that also includes the the methane emissions at the sort of the well head and then you've got carbon emissions associated with transportation down and ultimately down to the cracking facilities and that sort of that life cycle production of virgin plastics from fossil fuels extracted out of the ground so we offset that and when used for fully circular products as we now have the ability to do with the market changing that number is much more profound from a greenhouse gas offset because that second largest component turning into transportation fuels will be gone and as we are actually producing circular products we will update our life cycle analysis that we completed to make sure that it includes that as well so the combustion part of our reactor vessels absolutely utilizing electric energy as the way to heat the vessels is on our target list in fact you know as you said my prior prior life here I spent a lot of time with renewables and what I would love would be for us to actually have solar on top of our facilities with electric you know if you will heating elbows fairly sophisticated that are the energy source for our reactor vessels so what you know one thought here is what you can see is and I've even said this in some of the things I've written about when you start a journey it's difficult when you're trying to create economically sustainable solutions to start with perfect so our journey is one of a good getting to a grade and hopefully closer perfection because if we were forced four to five years ago into a situation where we could only deliver circular products this facility in actually Indiana wouldn't be constructed now it would have been constructed potentially later maybe never I don't I don't think that's the case but so there's a journey of getting better and better from an environmental footprint and as long as we're better tomorrow and we keep pure with the mission we're on we think it's a it's a good approach to take and can I ask on the sort of circular plastics are are you going after would polyethylene be the main target or are you going after xyleans or what are the feed stocks that you're targeting to then send back into a polymerization unit to make the the plastics again yeah so in those situations is polyethylene and likely believe it or not polypropylene as well if you take our whole stream and what we would be doing would be delivering a much more refined hydrocarbon liquid to the producers of the you know the plastic feedstocks so they will likely be putting them into their um into their crackers and the other thing you some of you all may be familiar with as well as if we are able to create electrification of our our reactor vessels that gas stream could be fed into crackers like ethane crackers which basically take natural gas to create plastics out of them so we have a real opportunity to create a super high proportion of truly circular products here great thank you and and Sean for for you on you know you mentioned the sort of life cycle savings around just having a road that that lasts longer I guess my my question is a little bit more around the the scaling of this and the basically the demands on on the urethane production do you do you see an issue at some point where you start to if this scales as you're envisioning you start to uh run up against you know current production limits on we're spiking spiking the market basically right right right so um no we've uh we have agreements in place to uh you know supply agreements in place uh we can do a certain amount of you know roads per year and they're going to scale with us um they're willing to make the large investment uh to scale with us and uh so we have that part covered um producing the polyols from the recycled plastic at the terminals um you know we might we might create an excess of polyol that we're not you know we have more than we're going to consume in that particular country well that those polyols can be sold into the open market um as urethane is one of the most ubiquitous materials in the world in terms of you know you sleep on it you you're sitting on it and your seat makes up the inside of your car installation your homes i mean it's everywhere and so those polyols i mean the market price for those polyols right now because of the freeze in texas six dollars a pound so we can produce those polyols with recycled plastics for 25 cents a pound when when those producers get that type of margin you know normal price will probably adjust back to a dollar 25 a pound but when they're getting a five times return on selling excess polyol you know it's truly a win for the for the producer and and the the challenge is associated with sort of bringing other streams in so that's a the recycled pat I mean which you know there's huge volumes of pat and and as you pointed out if you can utilize the the lower value distressed pat then then there's there's not a not gonna be a limit on that anytime soon but um can you give us a little insight into the the challenges associated with bringing something like uh like an hdpe or another another feedstock into your right so we've already started that research with hdpe and looking at how we can bring that in to produce like a chain extender and I'm not a chemist but we're certainly going to go all hands on deck once we join forces with some of these large stakeholders that want to implement so we certainly will grow a large percentage of our budget at incorporating these other plastic types in in creative ways not just as a polyol but as a chain extender as a different other different methods as well so uh so this is a question for both of you that that uh that has come from the from the audience so there's you know obviously there's huge uh desire to do something about plastic in the ocean is it at all that do you see a scenario maybe I'll start with bob where you could you know harvest some of that trash in the in the ocean and use that as a as a feedstock I don't know how diffuse it is or how energy intensive or impractical it is to try to collect this but there are you know sort of infamous areas where there's massive amounts of of floating plastic in the ocean do you see any possibility for that I do see possibilities for that the ultimate goal here is to keep plastics from ever getting into the ocean because they're so valuable all right probably not a hundred percent possible unfortunately for a variety of different reasons but the fact of the matter is we have a lot of plastics in the oceans now and you know I'm fortunate enough recently to spend a lot of time with people or oceanographers marine biologists divers all those kinds of things because we're trying to understand the impact in the oceans well and then extend that to how can we participate with groups that are doing great things to pull plastics out some of whom are brands that many of you all if you track social media are really doing some amazing things the challenge is location and cost it's very expensive and I don't think the solutions to the problems we have is just one company like a bright mark right I actually think that there is to use the term again on ecosystem and part of it I think is foundations that help support these efforts to pull plastics because the cost associated with them out of the oceans I do think that governments need to help us with the support as well and that includes things like the extended producer responsibilities so do I I believe that we will be pulling plastics out and that bright mark will participate absolutely there are a few things about plastics in the ocean that we may not realize most of the plastics in the oceans aren't in the big ocean guys there most of the plastics in the ocean are actually very small micro plastic particles and I spent you know as part of some engagement I've had with people are involved in marine biology all you have to do is get a beaker that comes out of the ocean and have them take the water and sift the elements out put it under microscope have an opportunity to see it and you can see strands of plastics really small strands and then even smaller particles as well so those are going to be really challenging to get out of the ocean so we just need to stop getting them in the ocean but yes we'll participate in efforts and I think you can with help get some of the bigger plastics out thank you and we've had discussions with a number of nonprofit groups that are working on those challenges now and we don't I don't really have any insight to you know how quickly they're going to scale but I've been part of conversations that you know talking about solar barges that are filters and they'll put them in the in the focal points on the bale ships will come they'll pull those bales and those that'll be back subsidized by governments globally questions we've got gives me a brief opportunity to have it to so the the the last episode in this season we'll we'll focus on this issue of micro plastic in the ocean in particular I want to I want to finish with basically asking you you know sort of a wish list so and maybe make it a little bit more specific is there a particular technology gap that that you see that could conceivably be filled that would really help you scale faster or scale more economically to to deploy your your technologies is there is there some is there one piece out there sort of an opportunity for an innovative breakthrough that you see or are you know most of the challenges sort of what we've already you know discussed around logistics and capital and maybe Bob I'll start with you. Yeah so I think the biggest challenge I see right now is it's something we've talked about a few moments ago and that's on the and you asked the technology question I've got a different answer on maybe a couple of different other areas from the technology question is co-mingled streams of waste organic material plastics a whole host of different things just thrown into you know big pits trucks buckets those kinds of things and how do we efficiently pull those streams apart into very usable streams not just on plastics but other streams as well for example the organic matter that comes through municipal solid waste could be very powerful in terms of creating renewable natural gas but because the co-mingled streams are there it makes it very difficult to use a lot of those streams so if there is a set of technologies that are employed that can very efficiently separate into or pure streams I think that's going to go a long way in dealing not just with the plastics issue but also dealing the broader issue of waste that we have as human beings we just throw away and utilize too much so being able to reuse that stuff we throw away that's a pretty critical one thanks and Sean is there is there one for you I mean for the system that we have in place now you know we feel like we've solved most of the technical challenges but I mean that's pet so what we see in the future is co-mingled streams you know streams of different grades of you know fibers and you know solid material and you know your thing is very forgiving in terms of its inputs and I see us spending a great amount of time and resources trying to bring in the other streams and I don't know how we're going to do it but you know if we can get our initial system running and generating revenue I'm certain that we're going to find solutions in the future for for the other streams and you have a rapid rapid sort of testing protocol if somebody has a new binder derived from a another stream can you give an answer quickly test it within three days okay okay and and Bob going back to you on this on this issue of sorting which has come up in in previous episodes and there is some there's definitely some work in that space in terms of innovation some of them leveraging AI some of them leveraging you know different detecting technologies is that is that a huge bottleneck in your process or do you have a sort of partner or or municipality that that helps do that up front or yeah how much of your cost and efficiency is sort of tied to the sorting and removing the plat you know even though you can accommodate multiple plastic streams just removing that from the other non-plastic components in the in the waste streams for now in the developing more developed countries it's not as big of an issue but as we start to move to less developed countries something I did talk about before then it becomes a big issue and then as we start increasing our sort of if you will penetration rates into waste streams even in more developed countries that's where it begins to be an issue so there's a ton of plastic waste out there right now that we can take but with you know in the States and Europe and a lot of places in Asian other countries so will I have enough plastics for the immediate future you better believe it but if we want to do it on the ground and places in Asia that are less developed where you know frankly a lot of the problem is created for example with ocean plastics in Asian Africa if you look at the studies on that you know we're going to have to figure this out for sure and I don't think it's all about just manually doing it I think that repeatable technologies that are scalable are going to help us a lot but this has been a truly inspirational session so I want to thank both of you for for sharing your visions and your incredible ambition and actually really exciting technologies I want to encourage anyone who wants to reach out to either Bob or Sean please please do so you can do so through the Tomcat you can you can do so directly you can connect through the Tomcat LinkedIn group please do get in touch and thank you we really we really appreciate the time and all that you've shared this afternoon thank you thank you thank you yeah no it's great yeah we're super optimistic here we think the future is bright and one of the reasons why I feel that way is when we have the opportunity to engage I know we're down to 61 participants now but one point time we had 130 it's amazing so there's a lot of people are going to help make this happen so we're really optimistic about the future thank you Bob thank you