 Bionic is a mission-based company and our mission is to remove as much single-use plastics from the environment as possible. My business partner and I were very much into backpacking. Although we lived in New York City, we were the types of people who overly teched out riding the subway. We go out of our way to step in a puddle, test our Gore-Tex boots. Loved having Patagonia and North Face Gear. The way we got started with Bionic is that we began with a backpacking company, so we were making tents and sleeping bags and in the process of building that company we discovered recycled textiles made from plastic bottles and we were like imagine what the future of something like that could be and not knowing anything about textiles. We basically just dove headfirst into the US textile industry with no knowledge. We figured it out after failing a couple times, after people were generous enough to teach us things and redirect us and eventually we landed on something unique. We conceived the idea of Bionic, this raw material component and we now supply some of the leading environmental brands around the world with fabric. Unlike a traditional fabric company, we start from the yarn and we ask them which line in your company can we dedicate to embedding as much plastic as possible into your fabric and then from there we figure out all the variations in style that this raw material can make. But the primary goal is to use these brands as a carrier of the problem in our oceans and in our environment. We have this really unhealthy relationship with throwing things away and the concept of trash, of when something becomes trash and I think it's just too soon. The idea that something becomes trash after you use it once and put it in a bin, that's an unhealthy relationship. We want to change that relationship with trash and make it into something that you really want. So you want to make sure that while you're creating and existing in the world that you're not just leaving a racket behind you. We decided that we really wanted to embed ourselves in a community that was threatened by the problem. Costa Rica has a special meaning. The people here are special. The landscape here is special. When you go to the beach it's like unlike any other beach I've ever seen. So the natural progression for what we were trying to do, it felt right to have the place that we work out of be here, to have the place that we're helping with the plastic pollution problem be here. There's a lot of human beings here that are doing a lot of great things. So you know when we organize a beach cleanup we work with a bunch of partners. Not too long ago we had a beach clean up with 62 people and everyone was really enthusiastic about it. In a few hours we collected nearly a ton of plastic. Right now we try to collect about 10 tons a month. Yeah 10 tons a month. And we could collect more if we had more trucks and we had more businesses who bought into this but that's going to take more time to spread our bin and get the message out there. But soon we'll be up to 30 tons. Being in Costa Rica and seeing the reaction of people here when we show them a product that we've made with the plastic that we're collecting here with plastic that they would have deemed trash a moment ago to see their face light up like these are full grown adults but they have a child wonder when they see a product that is completely outside of the realm of what they thought possible with something that they thought was trash that makes it worth it. Stronger threat greater good originally purely meant a stronger yarn or thread but over the last few years it's taken on a totally different meaning as we've started to go into communities and build these infrastructures to recover plastic and we've had to really interact and bring people together. It's where the little but I mean it's where the total as person is que se go in con nosotros putting some material afuera siempre y en a guy pregunter que podemos el prudestes entonces de la fuerza que tiene esto. I want us to serve as an example for what the new paradigm of production can be to transcend environmentalism and transcend sustainability. And have that just be the way that things are done.