 At UCI, I make new equalizers that can make advanced biofuels, like not just ethanol, they can make a very long chain alcohols that can have much higher energy density, or I make some non-natural amino acids that can be the building blocks of some blockbuster drugs. So that's a big challenge in the biodegradable industry, how to make something that is elastic and flexible so you can use them for different applications. That's how I came up with this kind of solution, to make a new material that is biodegradable, that is bioderived, that is scalable for commercial production. I think in this modern age, the most important thing is how can you combine all different knowledge to come up with new solutions, new devices, new thoughts that a computer cannot do, that anyone else cannot do. It's called personality. You should be your own and your own may be able to change the word. Nothing else. From my own experience, we need to love the planet just like we love our family. Know someone's opinion may contradict yours. Where's my friend Alan? It's all about your perspective. Who are we and what is the nature of this reality? What's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host Alan Sakien. We are on site at the beautiful Westlake University in Hangzhou, China. We are now going to be talking about sustainable industrialization and circular economics. We have Dr. Ketchum Zhang joining us on the show. Hi Ketchum. Thanks, Evan. Thank you so much for coming on our show. Really appreciate it. I'm so excited for this conversation for those who don't know Ketchum's background. He's professor and PI at the School of Engineering at Westlake University focused on designing greener chemical production processes and new environmentally friendly materials for a more sustainable path to industrialization and circular economics. He is the inventor of scalable sugar-based biodegradable rubber and you can find the links in the bio below. Ketchum, let's start things off with one of our favorite questions we like asking our guests. What are your thoughts on the direction of our world? So we have 8 billion people right now on earth. We are going to have 9, 10, 11 billion people very soon, maybe in just one decade or two decades. How can we find enough food, chemicals, materials to supply to so many people? In the same time, keep our environment intact. There's a big challenge in everywhere of the world. Yeah, how can we sustainably meet the basic requirements of living for a growing population of people that want to live more and more in a developed industrialized way? And we need green technology sustainable solutions for these processes. And I like how you put this. You put this as industrializing but doing it in a more sustainable way. I like that. I like that focus of yours. Okay, let's talk about, we'll get more into this as we continue the show. Let's talk about your journey and how you even got to become who you are today. How did you get interested in science when you were young? Actually, my father was a geologist. So he gave me a name of, my name is Kachun. In Chinese, it means the spring of science. The spirit? The spring. The spring of science. Yes, and then I was born on the Earth Day, April 22nd. So it's like a good journey from the beginning. Yeah. And then when I was a kid, we moved around China. So I appreciate the beauty of nature. So I would like to keep the nature as beautiful as it is all the time. But in the past four decades, you can see China has experienced a big change. The economy is growing. In the same time, the environment has big issues. So we make more and more chemicals. We make more and more cars. So we can see our pollution. People need to wear masks in Beijing or Shanghai, all those big cities. And our cars on the streets emit so much smoke every day. So this, some people like this kind of modern lifestyle, but for many people, it could be a big torture actually. A health hazard. Yes. And a hazard for nature as well. We're choking the area that we live in for the clean air. We're choking it with our landfills, with our garbage, not circular economics. Yes. So both father was geologist? My father. Was geologist? Geologist, yeah. And then you were born on Earth Day? Yes. Two. Cool. And it was in Beihai? Near Beihai, yeah. Near Beihai, which is on the very south coast of China. Yes. And it's kind of like you were saying like a very like Hawaii of the east. Eastern Hawaii, yeah. Eastern Hawaii, I like that. And then you were also teaching me, did you end up living in Gulin? Did you live there at all? I was always moving from one place to one place. You were always moving? Yes. Interesting. When you were young, always moving. Even, yeah. So I never stayed in one place more than nine years. Did you live in Gulin at all? Just very short time. Very short time. Yeah. And this is known as one of the most beautiful destinations of the eastern hemisphere along with Hangzhou where we're at now. But for those that don't know, it's G-U-I-L-I-N. And look it up. It's just gorgeous. Bill Clinton visited there, so. Yeah, yeah. It's unbelievable. I mean, I gotta go. It looks so amazing. I really appreciate you teaching me about that and even Beihai too. These are really important places to go to. People just think of the major cities when they think of China. And so I think it's really important to share these gems and these other locations in China. Also, that's why nature is so important to me. I've seen all these beautiful places. I appreciate the beauty of nature, so. Yeah. When you see the beauty of Gulin or of Yosemite, like in California, you become more aware of the importance of preserving these beautiful natural sites of the planet and not just saying, yeah, let the industry come in and cut down all the trees and put hotels up everywhere. And yeah, it's very important. But at the same time, we are human beings. We love to drive. We love to fly. So we cannot abandon our modern lifestyle. Yes. This is a very important point too. So, okay. So we figure out how to advance our modern lifestyle in a sustainable path of industrialization. And then that makes it so that all of our travel is cleaner. All of our food is cleaner. All of an agriculture is cleaner. All of our chemicals are cleaner. We're going to talk about this. So you ended up going to the University of Science and Technology in China for polymer science and engineering. And how did you end up like picking that as what you were interested in? That's very specific, polymer science. Polymer being long chains of carbon. Yes, because I love chemistry. But at the same time, I want to use chemistry to make some things. So polymer ends up to be a good target. So if you watch a movie, one of the most famous movies that graduate. So you watch the end. Where should you go? Plastics. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. So you were teaching me that polymers are the third largest manufacturing industry in the United States? Yes. Yeah, that's huge. Okay. And the top 10 polymers that we use are non-biodegradable in the world. The top 10 in the world are non-biodegradable. And chemically synthesized. And chemically synthesized. Okay, and we'll get to explaining this a little bit more too, but the names of them are polyethylene and polypropylene. And PET, like for the Coca-Cola bottles? It's PET. PET. Yeah, interesting. For like Coca-Cola bottles, all of the packaging around those little thin film plastic packaging around our goods. Or the iPhone top? iPhone top. Interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, polymers are a massive industry. And figuring out how to prioritize and making them biodegradable is very important. But not abandoning the modern lifestyle like you were indicating to, but sustaining our beautiful nature. So okay, so then from there it was doing your PhD at actually California Institute of Technology. So studying biomaterials and doing the PhD in chemistry. So this, tell teachers about this move. How did you decide to make the move to the United States for the PhD? And what was it first like when you got into the culture? US has been the center of science for a long, long time. And I believe it will continue so. So I think pursuing a PhD in US can provide me more opportunities. That's one thing. And another thing is I can experience more different cultures. I think diversity is important either for education, for science, or for our own personality. That's why I made the move. And Caltech has been a great place for science and engineering. And it's near Hollywood. You can find anything in Los Angeles. Why not? Yeah, I like your focus on visiting other parts of the world that have a strong scientific advancement happening. That's why we're here in China as one of the reasons. Like we want to come to a place in the world that has a very serious scientific advancement happening. And we want to interview the leaders in those fields and then share that with the world. And the USA is a very mixing pot of cultures. So you got to immerse yourself in a very deep diversity of cultures when you were in the US in LA. And when I come to China, I get to immerse myself in the diversity of China, a Chinese culture, even though it's more homogenized, only Chinese mostly here, but still I get a completely different cultural vibe being here. And I think that's really important for trying to bring the world closer together. So you doing your PhD in Caltech, me coming here for interviews and stuff, these types of moves are very important for especially young people to do their interviews. Yeah, to introduce and meet the cultures of people, make friends in the different parts of the world. Then all of the media stuff, it seems like it doesn't matter because I have friends. I know that we have love and friendship and collaboration across the countries and the media is just selling me fear and other nonsense. So if you look at the most from my own perspective, if you look at the most two important inventions in China, I believe is the paper and printing because they allow the spread of knowledge everywhere. Most people when they think about the invention of paper and the printing press, the spread of ideas and knowledge around the world, I think they think of the printing press and Johannes Gutenberg in the early 1400s and then also even prior to that we using papyrus and other animal skins to be able to write on and then not so easily being able to erase and having to write over things and all this type of stuff. When was the paper and the the paper and printing and printing was originally developed in China? Maybe maybe two to three thousand years ago. I don't exactly remember the date. Interesting and even prior to that we had all of the art cave paintings believe those were like tens of thousands of years ago. And this leads us up to all the way up to you were saying that the internet for the spread of ideas. Yes and then for example I went to Caltech. Actually Caltech people like Bill Shockley and Gordon Moore, they got their PhD or bachelor's degree in at Caltech and then they invented semiconductor industry and then it led to the internet. And then we can talk and then other parts of the world can listen. So that's amazing. From paper to internet now it's change of ideas can be instant. It does not take days or years. So I think because of this kind of technology development we can move our society our society fast forward but how can we keep our basic needs that's another issue. Yes yes I love that way of viewing the cultural dissemination of knowledge increasing over time. We also have to take into consideration things like the signal to noise ratio. So how much you know now that we have the internet everyone can publish things to everybody. How much of it is signal and how much of it is noise and so that's a very also very interesting question to ask. And when the printing press first came out how many of the things that were being printed were signal versus noise. These are interesting questions. What about the PhD that you did at Caltech? What was that in what were you studying in your thesis? I studied by materials and then how to design different materials from scratch. So it taught me some principles on materials chemistry and then on how to incorporate the latest knowledge in chemistry, biology and engineering. It's a small place just like Westlake University but physics, chemistry and engineers are very close so it allows exchange of ideas very easily so you can come up with new ideas in a better way maybe. Yeah and then you did the postdoc afterward in biomanufacturing at the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at UCLA. So what were you doing in that three-year period? So I designed new biosynthetic pathways to like advanced biofuels or new pharmaceuticals. So it's like a beer brewing process. We feed our engineer bugs sugar and then they make whatever you want. Not whatever, something we can do here. You can feed sugar as an input and you can synthetically engineer the bugs like the E.coli or yeast. You could make E.coli or yeast out the other side. Sugar in? I change the DNA in E.coli or yeast so they like yeast in your beer brewing process. They become the new chemical plant so they process the sugar. Sugar goes to the chemicals we want. Oh okay so there's yeast or E.coli inside that take sugar as the input and then they turn the output into what do you want? Yes fuels or chemicals or materials. And which chemicals and materials are you interested in them producing? At UCLA I make new E.coli that can make advanced biofuels like not just ethanol, they can make a very long-chain alcohol that can have much higher energy density or I make some non-natural amino acids. They can be the building blocks of some blockbuster drugs. Wow you can make E.coli turn sugar into non-natural amino acids? Yes. Whoa cool cool but you can't find anywhere else in biology? Not very common because you cannot say you can never find anything. The life is different. So maybe you can find this on Mars you never know. Yeah okay okay so non-natural amino acids and also the other one was advanced biofuels. Advanced biofuels okay so you said long chain alcohols okay and so if you can convert sugar into biofuels and sugar into non-natural amino acids did you immediately find applications for those? Did people want to turn the sugar into biofuels right away? Yeah my post advisor was the leading figure in the biofuel research. He got some medal prize from the president actually. Whoa a prize from the president of Obama yeah. From president Obama yeah wow for the labs for the labs research. Wow incredible and then did has the technology of you know turning sugar into biofuels or non-natural amino acids did has that been implemented into commercial applications? Yeah there's a company at UCL working on that area right now so. Awesome awesome awesome okay so it's been a long time for you with working with sugar we'll talk about this so you went after the postdoc and took assistant professorship at the department of chemical engineering and material science at the University of Minnesota and ironically enough we were both from 2010 to 2012 there we might have walked past each other it's very interesting and you continued working as you were in the professorship you continued working with sugar to make different things you ended up inventing scalable sugar-based biodegradable rubber and that's important because it can be used as an alternative to petroleum so teach us about how you ended up inventing this sugar-based biodegradable rubber and why it's important. Actually Minnesota has one of the best research centers in polymer science so also the chemical engineering is the almost the best in the country that's why I choose Minnesota to start my career there and then there I met professor Frank Bates and professor Mark Hume they work on how to make a PLA another biodegradable polymer like that has different properties actually PLA was made is made in is made by Nature Works a local company in Minnesota they can make PLA the problem is PLA is very rigid it's like glass it can easily fall apart if you just tell it so like several years ago when sun chip made the the potato bags from PLA they made too much noise just because the property is not good enough then they told me this is a big problem how can you make PLA that's flexible enough so it does not make too much noise and you can they do not easily fall apart that could be applied to many more different scenarios in our life so there's a big challenge in the biodegradable industry how to make something that is elastic and flexible so you can make so you can use them for different applications that's how I came up with this kind of solution to make a new material that is biodegradable that is bio derived that is scalable for commercial production and elastic and flexible yeah as well okay so you were given this challenge and then you figured out how to create this from biomaterials and so what is this sugar-based biodegradable rubber how do you input sugar in is it similar with the E. coli or yeast again yes we put some DNA we change the DNA of the E. coli they you input sugar and then the engineered E. coli will output a new polymer monomer and then we polymerize the monomer and is super elastic for example it can be stretched to 18 times of of its original length without breaking wow it's biodegradable but it's flexible like rubber up to 18 times flexible like rubber and biodegradable yeah wow you can get a yeast you can genetically engineer a yeast to take sugar in and produce a polymer monomer out the other side yes who would have yeah see this is also so interesting it makes me wonder how we can leverage ancient like E. coli and yeast ancient biology to engineer these things that are billions of years old that could potentially do new jobs do new jobs do new jobs more sustainably for our industrialization sustainably and environmentally friendly you blue beer you don't make pollution yeah that's right you do not put that explosive somewhere in the city yeah yeah yeah interesting so maybe the question could be something like could we have big bioreactors fooled with genetically engineered yeast that is taking lots and lots of sugar in and producing some sustainable biomaterials out the other side and is that process efficient because we have to make sugar we have to grow sugar yes and if we're doing that process unsustainably then that's not too good but if we're growing it very sustainably um this is through sugarcane usually yes it's how we're sourcing sugar like in brazil sugar can sugar to ethanol is a sustainable business it is sugar to ethanol yeah for gas for powering yeah in brazil the car is run by ethanol yeah completely yeah yeah or blend blend with or they do have some cars that are run by pure ethanol actually yeah but pure too yeah yeah okay so you're always doing a calculation then on how was the sugar and how was the yeast sourced and produced so that this input side of the production process takes less energy than what you get on the output is a greater amount of energy is a greater amount of value than what you put on the input side so that's this great also big question that needs to be asked of all these chemical engineers and biomaterials producers is um make sure that that process so very similar to things like nuclear fusion is we want to make sure that when we fuse atoms that we're spending much less energy than that we get out yeah that's yeah that's why my experience in minnesota helps a lot because i taught the intro introduction to chemical engineering so lesson number one in chemical engineering is you have in you have out your out must be bigger than your in otherwise forget about it yeah straight up forget about it if it's not bigger the out has to be bigger bigger in terms of the energy economy energy environment yeah a lot of things to consider i like that yeah yeah okay okay so then where can this specific invention scalable sugar-based biodegradable rubber where can these stretchable elastic polymer monomers be used in the real world applications so for example we can make this kind of phones this yeah and actually we have a new technology right now so we make the phones and then we can collect them and we hit them then we can recycle our monomer bag so it's the first kind of the recyclable polymer besides biodegradable that's one possibility or we can make a plastic bags that do not make a noise they are just like the picture-based polyethylene bags the the same property but it our material is biodegradable or we can make agricultural film for farming now the agricultural film is based on polyethylene it damages our land the fertility drops a lot because of those PE particles so if we in the future we scale up our production and the farmers use our biodegradable film then the land can be rescued in a long run interesting case so already many different applications and okay this move to west lake to july 2019 to the school of engineering at west lake you decided to take on professorship and the principal investigation starting the lab here so the lab focus on a more sustainable industrialization path new environmentally friendly materials circular economics greener chemical production processes what do you want to how do you want to achieve that goal how why is that goal important and how can we achieve it i can give you one example so i grew up in guanxi province so 20 million people in my province work on sugarcane industry 20 million people but they only produce around 10 billion u.s. dollars of value per year and it's highly pruted but there's a company called everview in chicago i know that the company pretty well it only has 30 000 people 30 000 employees the annual revenue is 30 billion u.s. dollars so in china you can see this kind of scenarios everywhere many people work on low value industry in the same time the industry generates a lot of pruted stuffs so then i realize maybe i can use my knowledge and creative ideas to help these people maybe the value can increase a little bit more importantly i can affect more people maybe 20 million people instead of 20 or 30 000 people there's a much bigger gym a much bigger need there's one idea i have another idea i have is in china we were always told by our parents or our professors you need to do this and do that but when i moved to the to the united states one big lesson i learned is be your own only you can make new things because when you create something it's based on your knowledge your personality everyone is different but we never had this kind of change in china before so west lake can be a new model for this kind of uh you do your own be original yeah yeah wow okay so i really like this paradigm of thinking that you know take on this big great grand challenges and you can be the one that tackles a really important industry change that needs to happen and build the new frontier and only you can do that go and do it partner with other people get their help go and do it be an entrepreneur be a scientist push a frontier be an artist and be an educator be an educator so then your students can spread your thoughts or they can be your they can be the new creators in the future yeah so you push the edge and then you also teach how you've been pushing the edge and teach what you know so other people can go and push it even more creatively with you and after you to get this teaching aspect is crucial okay let's go to the example you mentioned first in the guangxi province a third of the people so out of 60 million people 20 million of them work on sugarcane and the output of that industry is about 10 billion us dollars per year per year for 20 million people whereas you gave this example of a company in the united states that has 30 000 people you could also probably use the same example with olibaba or tencent or any of the other software companies in china as you many more people compared to amazon or or apple yeah yeah yeah so the idea is that um we're talking like 100 billion or more um per year uh profit for these companies that is made by an well almost two orders of magnitude less people so uh 100 times less people make 10 times more money yes which is very crazy to think about stuff like that and that usually if you have something happening like sugarcane you are actually teaching you there's actually a waste product that comes from the sugarcane process and the waste of water comes from that process and that you and your lab can do things like convert that to protein for animal feed yes so in the past so the factory has just dumped water in the river system and it has been a big pollution problem for a long long time it has never been solved easily but if we can convert this kind of wastewater into some valuable product such as protein that could increase the value of the whole process in the same time because farmers see value from wastewater they are not going to dump them into the river yes they see value and then they will convert that wastewater into animal protein feed okay and how do you guys do the process of converting it into animal feed protein so there is carbon in the wastewater like some um digested sugar or some fiber so we can do some engineering of the box then the bus can take in the carbon and then they can do some uh metabolic assimilation then the carbon will go to protein instead of uh some algae blooming in the river yeah and then which protein would you want them to make the box so something like a soybean protein because the the second biggest commodity product that the china imports from united states is soybean essentially it's the protein size of the protein source in china this soybean yes for animal for animal feed yeah so like all the all the ducks outside of beijing for the beijing khao yah pigs yeah pigs yeah interesting they're eating soybeans that are imported from the us yeah and so you can potentially grow the soybeans from wastewater for example that's cool yeah yes yes you know what's a good question to ask the eight billion people on the planet if you take you know something like the wastewater and if you don't have a an idea that there's value there like you're saying that um do you think that if you dump the wastewater into the river do you think this has a downstream effect or no it's a good question to ask people because if people think no there's no effect i can dump whatever i want then they lack the understanding of the interconnectedness of all nature so then that would be a good teaching lesson for someone that thinks that if i dump the wastewater there's no effect there's a big effect big the river can turn black and it can become very smelly if you visit some big cities in asia you you know that yeah we've had some similar issues in the united states as well and basically developing industrializing countries sometimes uh didn't proceed with very sustainable methods um okay and how would so this is also another interesting question because a lot of people think about um like if you were to tell me that oh alan why don't you just uh keep your uh your um orange peel right i have some oranges over there why don't you just keep your orange peel on the table and um and i'll uh i'll have someone come and pick the up the compost uh so the convenience thing right i can take the wastewater and how long do i have to wait until you pick it up and convert it into the animal feed how much money will you give me for the wastewater is it worth my time yes these are very important questions yeah it's always for any scientific or engineering projects you need to know some economics yeah yeah so what would be the ideal economics do you think for something like convincing the farmer uh that's doing sugarcane production to take the uh wastewater and and uh you give them incentive what would be the good enough incentive uh the best would be if your technology is good enough just you uh sneaking your current your developed technology it can be economically viable already it's always hard to use to for someone to do something would would we if we were smart maybe we would put the sugarcane development next to the duck or the pig farm then in the middle is your wastewater to animal feed protein conversion system so the sugarcane in the duck or pig farm are kind of next to each other with the middle being the conversion process that would be a perfect scenario yeah if the land can work for both sugarcane and for pig and also if um if it's down the line we may figure out methods like clean meat where we can grow meat in bioreactors from the pig stem cell or the duck stem cell actually artificial meat is a hot topic in us right now like that beyond the meat company or the impossible burger but you can buy at grocery stores and restaurants now which is so exciting if you haven't yet go and try it it's so good so that's why we hope more and more things can come from biotechnology yes from chemicals from materials or maybe even meat yes so it's environmentally friendly and consumes less energy resource how good can it be right yeah especially when you put the the blindfold on and I give you both duck from the duck as well as duck grown in the bioreactor and you taste it and then you can't tell the difference when it gets to that level plus the bioreactor is much cheaper too and you don't have to kill the conscious animal yes big big thumbs up huge planetary difference yeah okay let's go through the the other examples so that was the really good example we gave on um on um we talked about polymers uh at the beginning that being the the large manufacturing industry and solutions for that we talk about changing wastewater converting that into protein for animal feed that being one of them let's talk about the alternative to cyanide so cyanides used in the manufacturing process how can you make an alternative to cyanide or cyanide has been a big issue in China as well if you heard of Tianjin explosion it happened several years ago in China so several hundred times of cyanide just went to the environment that could be detrimental to a lot of stuff but in the same time a lot of animal feed vitamins amino acids are manufactured from cyanide so we can we are coming up with new ideas that can use biotechnology use engineered bugs that can replace the cyanide process then in the future we won't be afraid of uh chemical plant near the city you never know what's going to happen in this kind of chemical plants they may explode and then there can be very very dangerous just like the Tianjin scenario what are we using cyanide for right now uh to introduce like some amino group or to activate some carbonyl groups for certain chemicals okay or to recover gold actually oh to recover gold yeah interesting and then what would you do to produce the alternative to cyanide is this again sugar in and then sugar in target out yeah no cyanide in yeah yeah yeah interesting and you have to figure out how to genetically engineer either yeast or E. coli to take sugar and make an alternative to cyanide yes okay that's one of the things the labs focused on too yes okay okay let's talk about also the alternative to roundup so right now we're spraying a roundup on weeds we have we spray lots of herbicides pesticides on our growing food and we don't know how it affects us down the stream when we eat the food and also how the the crops build resilience over time so what do you think is a similar process again where you've taken sugar into genetically engineered yeast or E. coli and they produce an alternative to roundup or that's one possibility okay so there are two possible directions maybe we can make some natural herbicides they are from some weird organisms but if we can somehow manipulate the cells the engineer cells they can make this natural herbicides much more efficiently and they they derive from nature they can be biodegradable then you can solve the roundup issue there's one direction and another direction is currently maybe there are good replacements of roundup coli faucet already but they are very expensive so if I can combine biotechnology and green camps to make this kind of roundup replacements more environmentally friendly and as cheap as coli faucet then the farmers can rotate to use different herbicides then the drug resistance won't be a big issue I think this is a global challenging global challenge it happens in China it happens in India it happens in the United States we we need to find a solution to this big problem and I believe we we will be able to do it yes how does you and your lab figure out how to genetically engineer the yeast or the E. coli to be able to find these alternatives to cyanide alternative to roundup what do you do to say okay if we engineer it this way maybe you'll produce this alternative that's a good question and tough question many people ask me this question at this moment I can only tell them and it's not easy you I have so many I had so many sleepless nights just to think about stuffs and because I got a change in chemistry I got a change in biology like all these possible organic reactions all these possible uh metabolic reactions in a cell are in my brain even so I need to try to combine this and that so that's not easy right now but I believe since artificial intelligence big data are moving on fast so maybe in the future I can work with the computer scientists to design some new process just in the computer first then we can yes like and now computer is better than at the place in chess and go and goes but in the future they can they can design some new stuffs for us as well I love the biosimulation space yes so instead of it all having to be in your head and you only be you know you have to sleep eight hours a day you have to you have less processing ability of all of the permutations the combinations and so you can leverage the artificial intelligence big data and you can potentially run a bunch of different genetically engineered yeast and E. coli um and simulate out if they produce good alternatives to cyanide and roundup yes so in at this stage I can we can only pick some uh possible targets but in the future this can be this can be much much bigger yeah and then our water can be much much better yes okay so let's do other examples as well so we have something that's also pretty popular is and we see this quite often I mean in the United States when you were there we were talking about this before we started that so many people have their own personal clothes drier in their homes and um when I was visiting Armenia two years ago in Yerevan actually reminds me a little bit of China in some ways very you know older places in the world and it's true that in China too just like in Yerevan that in the summer you hang the clothes outside to get dried by the natural sun instead of using the dryer and you you told me you said well Alan if we could design a clothes dryer that would use even one third of the less energy to dry the clothes think about all of the people in the world using that process instead in the same amount of time but one third the amount of energy needing to be used to dry the clothes wow that would be very powerful so there's all these different options for building the more sustainable industrialization yes so actually your problem is beyond my knowledge I am only good at chemistry and biology but that could be a physics problem how to like in the past 100 years physics provided nuclear energy it helps us a lot but how we how can we combine all these kind of physics laws to make our world better that could be more challenges as well so you this is almost a call to action then that if we can use physics to find quantum mechanics which then gives us smartphones computers gps mri etc we can use physics to make our drying machines a third more efficient which would make our sustainable economy is of the world better I like that I like that so you're almost a call to action to physics and math and biology and chemistry and a lot of the sciences to say identify especially things like these sustainable development goals of the united nations and find the ways that you can incrementally make a process can these computers have even more computational capacity and even less of the resources that we need to mine from the planet yes those questions like that can we grow the clean meat in the bioreactor instead of slaughtering the animals yeah yeah I like I like this this this idea this these ways of perceiving the world is very good is very important we also talked about this one before we started to this idea that if alibaba and amazon are shipping billions of packages every single year to people and that number is only increasing and how can we do something like make a material or a or even just a shipping strategy that is maybe doesn't require the packaging materials or very sustainable biodegradable packaging materials yeah this challenge can be solved by two different directions it can be a smart shipping so maybe you have some glass container or maybe metal container ship the steps and then you collect them to do the shipping again that's one possible solution another possible solution is maybe I can use my past knowledge in material design to make some cheaper and biodegradable or recyclable materials that that's just for shipping yeah yeah is graphing the widest and strongest right now oh actually I do not know the answer okay I think graphing and I don't know where that is with carbon fiber but um because graphing can be you can imagine like a little graphing box on the drone and then you open the graphing box take the object from inside and then close it and the drone takes the graphing box back if the drone does not use too much energy that's possible if the drone uses nuclear fusion for energy I just I love that idea I really want that to happen as soon as possible it'd be great if Westlake pushed further into fusion as a source of sustainable energy I'm not sure where they're at with that right now but that would be a really good also part of the multidisciplinary push here let's talk about forced regulation so this subject is very interesting like how do we advance people to make more sustainable paths to industrialization fastest and a good question is if a state or a province or a country or whatever bans the use of something like a plastic bag or a plastic straw or whatever it is does it then force entrepreneurs and people to innovate and make a more sustainable path faster or is there too much governmental control over the economic market forces sometimes not so good what do you think about that it's always a balance so sometimes if you close certain industries then it can affect the people's life for example the pork price in China has increased from 15 yen to 25 yen in just one year for half a kilogram of pork meat a pork meat 15 to 25 25 yuan for half a kilogram of pork meat yeah okay just in one year in one year wow because the government shuts down a lot of small farming places so so less people raise pigs oh is it because some environmental pollution one one issue another issue is like the rising price of soybean protein for example yeah was it were those smaller farms not doing the clean practice for growing the yes but in the same time so it's for the health of the people it's for the health of the people in the same time if you can develop new technologies new technologies that can replace this kind of environmentally friendly processes is win-win for all different parties involved yeah correct yeah like could maybe an incentive from the government like a big prize or from a private institution let's say like the x-price foundation or whatever maybe they could say hey instead of putting a regulation on plastic bags or plastic straws or or how we grow raised animals why don't we make a prize from the government or from private industry that says how do you solve the plastic bag issue how do you solve the plastic straw issue how do you solve the slaughtering of animals issue and then give them you know a million dollar prize and have a crowdsourcing of ideas for the solutions to the plastic straws the plastic bags the slaughtering of animals and then fund the best one and keep it building for five ten years and boom you have the solution the prize model is very interesting economic incentive is always the best incentive economic incentives towards sustainable industrialization i like that yes maybe there can be a sustainable industrialization prizes awarded more often i like that idea even for the cyanide stuff we talk about europe and china banned the expansion of a cyanide prize so nowadays if a company wants to make new more cyanide derived chemicals they have to do it somewhere maybe in south south east asia or maybe somewhere else china and europe banned the further development of cyanide plants yes interesting let's have us also get deeper into circular economics we've been talking about this throughout but it's eliminating waste and the continual use of resources from the system so what would these advancements mean for our world as we see africa and asia latin america all these other places in the world that are industrializing so fast that how can there be sustainable industrialization processes what is that circular economics that you envision so we like in the introduction to chemical engineering are taught out must be big land one if you do not have a balance you accumulate something in the middle so for example in the past 300 years for industrialization we have accumulated a lot of plastic microparticles in the ocean in our drinking water we accumulate a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere so it generates greenhouse effect our glacier is melting and we see a lot of dead fishes everywhere so this acidification of our oceans yeah so this kind of circular economy is very important for our economy our world and our future generations otherwise we don't even have a clean place to put our feet on in the future so this also kind of takes us back to that example of when you're you know when you're pouring this wastewater into the river you have to realize that the interconnectedness of everything if we are slowly adding more and more CO2 parts per million into the atmosphere creating a greenhouse effect melting some of the glaciers not only on land but also in the water the land ones causing the sea levels to slowly rise the oceans being acidified the coral reefs being bleached these types of things that are happening are in a sense it's us needing to awaken to the interconnectedness of everything we can't just do one thing and expect it to be in a vacuum it immediately starts affecting and butterfly effects happen for the rest of nature and so to us it's a wake-up call hey humans remember everything's connected you can't just do one thing the earth will show you a wake-up call like the parts per million CO2 rising and these are wake-up calls for humans and for us as a scientist we need to develop new technologies that can meet this kind of new needs yeah and more labs to pop up where young people are pressing the frontiers of developing those new technologies and having those be well-funded like Westlake having a both private public funding vehicle is very useful to building a world-class research center and I think I think having that strategy more prevalent around our world with institutions being funded like that for scientific research for building these tools for these sustainable development goals and all these types of things are crucial are crucial like you mentioned artificial intelligence and big data being applied so you can run biosimulation so you can most quickly find the alternatives to cyanide and roundup fastest yes and if we don't have those computational resources it's going to take us longer and so how do we fund for those computational resources most effectively so so important let's do a couple of the questions that we like asking on our way out so how can we inspire more people around our world to work together open be open and exchange ideas yes yes short and sweet like that there's an unhealthy change in around the world right now so we many countries become more closed more open and more sharing of the ideas in collaborative ways and especially on those great challenges facing every person on earth yes so the the the butterfly in amazon can can cause hurricane in the in the in minnesota right maybe a hurricane in no no in so in a sense it would be that all of these advancements that we're making towards the sustainable development goals could be open notebook science so it could be that if you make a significant advancement you can make it open notebook for non-commercial use so people from all different countries in the world that are scientific researchers could take and like use your genetically engineered yeast to continue that it could be one possibility yeah stuff like that yeah yeah what about what do you think is a skill that young people should know as we go into the exponential technology age you need to have some basic training in chemistry biology engineering for sure especially in my research direction and i think in this modern age you do not need to remember so many things you always have a computer that i can you have you can use google google can tell you everything by do by do so you search you can find the knowledge i think in this modern age the most important thing is how can you combine all different knowledge to come up with new solutions new devices new thoughts that a computer cannot do that anyone else cannot do is called personality you should be your own and your own may be able to change the world nothing else ah that answer landed so well with me yes how can you find the novel pieces of knowledge combine them into something that a computer or that other humans can't do that only you can do what is your unique gift that you can bring the world yes that's something uh chinese education system does not put too much and focus on in the past our west lake university can be a new model and i went to united states for education for my phd for postdoc and then for my starting career and this kind of personality training is big for me i think i i learned how to be my own yes how to have my own solution yes yes in a sense it's like the u.s has sat act china has gaokao and we have these funnels of young people that we think is most optimal and it's good in some ways but what about the social skills what about the emotional intelligence and the sustainable development goals and project-based learning and finding your unique gifts and finding those pieces of knowledge and combining them in ways other people can't and computers can't being an individual but also being a node in the collective and knowing how to do those things effectively otherwise you will you will be a machine and then you are not that valuable in the society yeah you're still valuable but it's not optimal yeah more replaceable maybe yeah and you want to be irreplaceable in the world yes yeah yeah i like that what would you say is the meaning of life of this big human experiment what's the point of it love help and fulfill what do you think is the role of love from my own experience from my own experience we need to love the planet planet just like we love our family i love that quote we need to love our planet like we love our family it also brings lots of warmth i love that one and then what do you think is the most beautiful thing in the world nature nature nature even i do science i still think uh science should serve nature we all come from nature we all breathe the air drink the water eat the food and when we lose a connection to that source of sustainability for us what sustains us we have many problems that evolve in the world so the more we can realize our and clean our interconnectedness with these little guys yeah the more we can live harmoniously peacefully sustainably yeah ketchum thanks so much for coming on the show this has been a huge pleasure thank you thank you alan thank you thank you in incredible work you've been doing here um over your years and we look forward to the advancements of your lab in the future thank you for your great work thank you thank you thank you everyone for tuning in we greatly appreciate it we'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below on the episode let us know what you're thinking have more conversations with your friends families co-workers people online about sustainable industrialization about circular economics about all the other topics we talked about in the show about a more sustainable industrialization path for asia for africa for latin america for all these developing countries around the world for greener chemical production processes of things like cyanide of roundup of how to leverage biological tools like genetic engineering of yeast and ecoline feeding them sugar all these really cool and interesting things about how you can dry clothes more effectively launching physics to help with the sustainable challenges making more sustainable polymers making more sustainable delivering of packages about how we can figure out how to best incentivize the sustainable industrialized paths check out the links in the bio to ketchum's work you can find the link to his westlake profile as well as more links in the bio below support the artists the entrepreneurs the organizations around the world that you believe in support simulation our links are below you can find us on paypal paypal patreon cryptocurrency you can design cool merch and get paid and also go and build the future everyone manifest your dreams into the world we love you very much thank you for tuning in and we will see you soon peace good job good job good job