 Good afternoon and welcome to likeable science here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host Ethan Allen. Thanks for joining us today. Likeable science is all about how science is a vital and interesting part of everyone's life, scientist or not, how we should all embrace and enjoy science. To help me explore that today, I have with me via phone Dr. Marco Rolandi, the co-founder of a group called CruiseFoam. Welcome, Marco. Fine. Glad to be on the show. Well, thanks for taking the time to join me. I know Marco's a busy guy. He's a head of the electrical engineering department at UC Santa Cruz. I knew him back in Seattle at the University of Washington there when we were both there. But he's also started this group called CruiseFoam. So maybe just start us out, Marco. Tell us a little bit about what CruiseFoam is. Oh, I see. So that's a very, very admirable mission. You take essentially crimp shells and that kind of stuff and process it so it's not rotting away and smelling and turning it into a packing material that you can then use to shipping materials back and forth and all that. The polysaccharide is called chitin and it does have many properties in common with cellulose. It comes from trees and we actually purchased chitin as a commodity and we transform it into a packaging form, fixate nitrogen in the soil. Wow. So that's got a lot of advantages then, particularly advantages over the plastics. We normally use their fossil fuel-based packing materials. So that's right. So where did this interesting idea arise? How did you come up with it? Material for implantable devices, for example. And among other things it won't because it has hemostatic properties. Absolutely. It's a huge problem. I know I had a guest on a few weeks ago who was talking about the issue and pointed out that there are estimates now that by about 2050 there's going to be by weight more plastic in the sea than fish, which is sort of frightening to think about. That means there's a huge amount of plastic and a lot of it, as you say, comes from just odd little sources like packaging material, which because yes, because we're now buying everything online and it's being shipped to us, there's more and more packaging material being used. So that's very interesting that you sort of found an interesting niche. So you say you buy chitin. So somebody's already collecting sort of shrimp shells and everything and producing chitin or do you have to process the shrimp shells yourself or some facility? Yeah, we purchased and there's a fair amount of production transforming it into... Interesting, interesting. I'd never, of course, heard of chitin in terms of a product I had heard in terms of, yes, insect exoskeletons mainly, but so I must have other uses too if somebody has bothered already to set up processing plants to recycle out of seafood waste, right? Yeah, no, it's very viable chitin. The one there is not very pure to make packaging because obviously we need the... Sure. So without going into too much technical detail or revealing any of your patentable secrets, what do you do to turn this chitin into this packaging material? Chitin comes in what form? I suspect our viewers wouldn't know that. That's our fool with the powdery... That sounds great. I mean in fact it sounds like a relatively straightforward and hopefully not too energy-intensive process, right? Right, right. I mean it's a classic issue with the water bottles that they actually use more water and making the water bottles and the water bottle holds, right? Right, right. One reason we should be avoiding that use. I see, so this is great. This sounds very exciting then. So you've just been really getting this going in the last couple of years, right? You said you started this process about two years ago. That's great. It's sort of been a business out of your lab and out of very much out of your research group. That's wonderful. It's sort of unusual. I don't think many lab groups have done that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. That sounds like a really, what they talk about, the triple bottom line, right? That you're looking for something that's doing good for yourselves, doing good for the earth around it and filling a human need, right? That's so good. That's right. Yeah, that's incredible. So you said this cruise phone is biodegradable. So at some point after it's gone through perhaps several cycles of packaging, somebody just can take and sort of throw it away and put it in their garden or what's the deal with that? Yeah, that's right. And I would say so we are, there are many ASDM standards that need to be met in order to be compostable, either what's called industrially compostable or we are in the process of obtaining these certifications because they actually take time. But what we've done are worms eating it. Yeah, that's great. But I assume it can go for several different uses. I know I typically will take that kind of packaging and get something in a package and when I'm sending something back I would all use that packaging again and go through several cycles, right? Yeah, I can see that might be a thing to look at in the future. I'll tell you what, I think we're going to have to drop off to a quick break here. I'm talking to Dr. Marco Rolandi, the co-founder of Crews Zone out of California here and this wonderful biodegradable packaging material. And we'll be back in about one minute. Until then, I'm your host Ethan Allen and join us when we come back. Aloha and Mabuhay. My name is Amy Ortega Anderson, inviting you to join us every Tuesday here on Pinoy Power Hawaii. With Think Tech Hawaii, we come to your home at 12 noon every Tuesday. We invite you to listen, watch for our mission of empowerment. We aim to enrich, enlighten, educate, entertain and we hope to empower. Again, maraming, salamat po, Mabuhay and Aloha. Aloha, I'm Gwen Harris, the host here at Think Tech Hawaii. A digital media company serving the people of Hawaii. We provide a video platform for citizen journalists to raise public awareness in Hawaii. We are a Hawaii non-profit that depends on the generosity of the supporters to keep on going. We'd be grateful if you'd go to ThinkTechHawaii.com and make a donation to support us now. Thanks so much. Good afternoon and welcome back to likeable science here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host Ethan Allen. Thanks for coming back and joining us for the second half of likeable science today. I have with me on the phone Dr. Marco Rolandi, the co-founder of Cruise Phone. Welcome back Marco. Doing good, doing good. So the first half, Marco was explaining to us about what Cruise Phone is, how it's made from shrimp shells. It's this wonderful biodegradable packing material that has a lot of the same properties as polystyrene or polyurethane structural foams, but is made not from a fossil fuels, but rather from a waste product from shellfish and talked about how we got the ideas going in his lab and brought some of his lab folks on in and they're making a nice go of this in a good company. So plastics get used for a lot of different things and the polystyrene they use for packing has to have certain kinds of mechanical properties, right? It has to be a bit compressible, but not too compressible. Yeah, expand the polystyrene for different uses. As a matter of fact, there's like this up, there's like polystyrene 2, 4, 15, and 9. The polystyrene that we try to match is the polystyrene used for packaging typically. And our material has the same compression strength, which is basically like how much can you push the material by until it breaks, right? Which kind of is an indication of how good of a packaging material it is as the expanded polystyrene. And we also, we can tune the mechanical properties of the material by changing the formula. And one of the things we can tune is how cushiony it is in that like for certain packaging application we need the material that is a little bit firmer, if you will, for other packaging you might need the material that feels a little bit more like a cushion. And so we can we can tune that to adapt to different applications. That's very interesting. And of course, it makes it much more valuable if you if you can make it variable like that and change its properties a bit without too much trouble at that gives you I would expect more sort of more markets for it more different uses for it, right? Oh, hey, one of these days you'll be putting it in surfboards again, right? Yeah, yeah, that's our dream. I think we're still we're still going to eventually we're going to do that. But for now, you know, you want to make sure that next time we go surfing, we don't find any spent any polystyrene packaging material floating around our boards. And so we want to tackle that problem first. Yeah, absolutely. So what happens, since you say it's compost, what happens if stuff gets wet, you know, packages being sent and it gets left out and you get some rain on it? Does your stuff hold up? Oh, that's great. So if it is water resistant like that and the properties can be adjusted, it would seem there must be essentially almost then a number of different sort of applications for it potentially, right? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It's critical as you start up a business that you keep it all focused on on a predictor niche and get that up and going well. So that's an interesting that brings up an interesting point. How how are you approaching companies who buy packaging materials or use packaging materials? How are you sort of selling this stuff to them? Because I'm sure they basically are like all the companies they want to do things the way they've always done them because that's a known trusted process. In the scale up process? What are you coming out to work? Oh, that's great. No, it seems very, very timely then because yeah, I know there is there's a huge movement these days to be on single use plastics. Hawaii recently has been plastic drinking straws. There's a constant battle here going on in Oahu right now about getting rid of styrofoam containers and making those illegal. More and more groceries or grocery stores and various other kinds of stores are of course stopping distributing plastic bags of any sort. So yeah, interesting timing that you found when this issue is reaching into broad public awareness and plastics are sort of getting it almost a bad name in a way, right? Plastics are amazing for many things, but plastics last for a very long time so those applications where they need to last for a very long time I think for a while it's going to make the entire ecosystem more sustained. Yeah, I mean that's interesting that you say there's a whole what we call a hui here in Hawaii a whole group of companies all focused around that issue of reusable, sustainable packaging materials. That's good to hear. Again, I'm often appalled that you get a product and yeah it comes in a plastic container and within that there's cardboard and within that there's still more plastic and you know humans sometimes it's quite a bit of overkill in the packaging. Yeah, that's right. We package everything with a lot of material and so we want to make sure that the material we use is sustainable and ideally compostable or anything like ruin the environment. Right, right because so many of those packages there isn't anything to do with them what you've used at once you know it is basically as you say it's a throwaway idea and we do have a society where that's pretty much been our go-to mode. You just use something once and toss it away so you're developing you're sort of working with people rather than trying to change their behavior exactly and get them to reuse things giving them something they can use once and throw away and it's not doing any harm. Indeed from what you said it's that serving as actually a fertilizer and actually help help their compost, help their lawn, right? Yeah, yeah. I'm testing out to my tomatoes right now and I'll call you back in a few months and let you know whether they're better than last year. That's great, now it is. As long as I don't taste shrimpy, right? That would be too weird. So where do you see this going? I mean what do you if looking down in a sort of an ideal world, looking down five years, ten years down the road, where do you see Cruz's phone going being? Well, I hope it's going to go. You know, substitute every piece of expanded polystyrene packaging with our material. That's what I think we can do and I guess the time will tell whether we're going to be able to do it but as you said the market seems to be ripe, there is customer demand and our material performs well and of course, you know, we started a company so we have to dream big and our dreams are big and I hope they can really make, you know, hurt the better place that already is because the less plastic is in the ocean, the better. Yeah, I mean this is actually, you know, a really sort of interesting story because when I knew you back at University of Washington, you weren't working on, I mean you may have been working on chitin but you weren't sort of thinking along these lines, right? You weren't talking about making packaging material at that point at all particularly so it seems like, you know, it's a very interesting illustrative study or case study of how you know, science research can find new applications, find new directions sort of. No, that is true. I mean, I think like, you know, what just sort of like the opportunity is like E1 wants to be ready for the opportunities that come about and if you know, when in science, science is knowledge, right? And knowledge lets you understand the opportunities or makes you ready for the opportunity when they present themselves. That's really what the power of science and knowledge is that if you understand things well then you can find a way to use them to solve big problems and sometimes these problems can be in very desperate fields like packaging or biomedical engineering, for example. Right, that's a great takeaway message right here is you had this stuff that you were working on for biomedicine, rather high-tech, fancy sounding enterprise and here you found this great use for it in a very sort of, seems like a pretty mundane thing is this packaging but it's potentially a tremendous good to the planet. It really, you know, can, as you say, replace all the styrofoam, all the polystyrene foams that are being used for to wrap and protect and shelter so many of our things. This has been just really wonderful to talk to you, I've learned a lot and I'm sure our audience has too. So I thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk to me here and it's been a wonderful truly likeable science experience that you've given us here. Thank you so much Marco. All right, you take care. Okay, bye-bye. And I hope you, our audience, will come back and see us next week here on likeable science, here on Think Tech Hawaii. Until then.