Coffee ＆ Cement – ØF

Pablos: There’s this idea that was just published that you could produce concrete and make it stronger by adding charred coffee grounds to the mix. And this is some research out of Australia.

So concrete, if it’s not obvious, is like the most used material on the entire planet, aside from oil, which we burn. Cement, is in everything, and it’s this like staggering scale problem. Partly because of its contribution to greenhouse gases, right? So when you make cement, you’re burning some shit to make a bunch of heat to make the cement and you need that heat and there are ideas to decarbonize cement by electrifying cement plants.

But then there’s this chemical process going on, which is the bulk of the carbon emissions. And there’s just no way to get rid of that. So that’s kind of the lay of the land. Interestingly, about half of all the cement in the entire world is made in China. That country is basically made of cement. This is one of the major targets for trying to do reductions of carbon emissions. And these guys figured out how to use coffee grounds. It’s not totally clear to me that they’re using, uh, used coffee grounds, I presume that’s the case, because there’s 10 billion Kilograms of used coffee waste every year that mostly ends up as biomass rotting in landfills. So this is worth solving.

I thought this was kind of interesting. You can’t just take the coffee and throw it in the cement because the oils and stuff in it will seep out and actually make the cement fall apart. They invented this pyrolyzing process where you basically heat up the coffee grounds to a specific, pretty high target temperature, around 500 C, I guess.

That’ll get rid of the oils presumably, and makes it into an additive you can just throw into the cement mix and it makes it 30 percent stronger. So I got two things that are kind of interesting, related to this.

We Have a company our fund backed called DMAT, and these guys figured out how to make cement that’s lower carbon, but the way they do it, is they solved this 2000 year old mystery in material science, which is, how did the Romans make cement?

Ash: I was going to bring that up.

Pablos: Yeah. Cause they made the, the Pantheon to like two millennia ago and it’s still there. It’s unreinforced concrete in a seismic zone. And then they, somehow got busy, watching Netflix or something and got bored and forgot all about how to make cement. And then nobody’s been able to figure it out ever since.

Ash: They were just looking at the colosseum. They were like, Hey, I’d rather look at the lion. Maximus Aurelius or whomever. And then that’s it. They’re like, forget it.

Pablos: Look at the cool lion. Oh shit. The lion ate the guy who knows how to make the cement.

Ash: Literally probably what happened.

Pablos: That is literally probably what happened. So anyway, I got this team at MIT that figured it out.

Ash: It was self healing, right?

Pablos: We figured that out a little while ago. It’s self healing because what happens with cement is it fractures, water seeps into the cracks and then destroys the cement from the inside out. And that’s what’s happening to our bridges and everything else we made. And so to make it stronger and handle that, we load it up with steel rebar.

So it’s steel reinforced, and then it still only lasts 50 years. The Roman cements, apparently lasting at least 2000 years. And what happens is it just gets stronger because when it cracks, water seeps into the cracks and it activates these lime deposits that are trapped in there. And so then the lime fills the crack and seals it up and heals the cement.

Presumably the colosseum is just getting stronger over time. Now we know how to do that. So we can make cement that lasts virtually forever, use less of it, use less steel, and the kicker is, it’s about 20 percent less CO2, out of the box without even trying. That’s pretty dramatic considering the, the scale of the problem and the lack of other practical ways of decarbonizing. So these might be compatible, right? You might be able to also use this coffee additive.

What I like about this is that cement is such a big thing. Most people just take it for granted. They don’t know how. Intensive this is from a carbon emissions standpoint and the scale of it. this. You know like we can actually make things way, way better. with some of these ideas.

Ash: And the way they were doing it, the Romans had volcanic rocks, so they had this ability to automatically have the little bubbles in it. But I think what’s interesting is that, some people are like, oh, can we put plastic? Isn’t that where we just got in trouble with microplastics?

Let’s solve one problem and then really screw up something else. The idea I was thinking is maybe this is where the coffee ground becomes like the aeration, right? Cause the whole structure was that as the bubbles popped, that was how the lime.

Seeped back in, right? The water combined.

Pablos: I think that was one of the theories that was debunked. I’m not positive, but I think that was the, like the prevailing idea, or it was kind of a half baked idea of like how this happened. And I think that is not what actually, it’s nothing to do with the volcanic rock after all.

Ash: It wasn’t the volcanic, right? They had a couple , right? One was like some guy was trying to do bacteria. five, six years ago. That was the other crazy one, which was like, we will just have a living organism inside. The other question is, during production, can you trap, can you use it to just trap the stuff? Like, if you look at, was it clean, right? If you look at those guys,

Pablos: So that’s what DMAT solved. And they do it with this process called hot mixing. Which apparently was considered dumb for, I don’t know, centuries or something. And so nobody tried it. Apparently using hot mixing they can get the lime deposits optimally trapped in the cement. I don’t know all the details.

Ash: I like it.

Pablos: Yeah, so we’ll get them on the podcast sometime and have them explain all the all the ins and outs. But yeah, pretty cool stuff.

Ash: The challenge with almost all of these carbon reduction technologies is scale. Oh, hey, we’re going to take carbon out of the sky. And it’s like, okay, what did, what was the impact?

Well, it’s like half a car.

Pablos: Right because the sky is like the most entropic source of carbon there is. Literally, the number 400 parts per million. Well, let’s see. If you had a haystack, and you had, 400 needles and, a million pieces of straw, good luck finding a needle.

It’s literally, the hardest possible place to get carbon. If you want to, sequester carbon, the thing to do would be to just, leave the fucking coal in the ground. Where it’s, the highest density of carbon you could find. So yeah, it’s, it’s kind of idiotic.

Most of these things kind of solve themselves if you solve energy. If you had like a shit ton of free energy, then yeah, you could go do carbon capture from the atmosphere, but, otherwise it’s pretty painful.

Ash: The problem is, yeah, like you said, unless you can turn it back into like a diamond or something, like you said, put it back into coal.

These magma guys are, are cranking. Maybe we can use those guys. You’ve heard of the magma guys?

Pablos: What’s the magma guys?

Ash: These guys were doing the near magma experiment.

They’re like, we’re just going to go 6, 000 feet, like just a little over a mile. What’s a mile? 5,280 feet? So you just go a little bit into the mantle. Just tap into that hyper geothermal.

Pablos: I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Ash: Oh, so there’s a project, just came out a couple of days ago that they revealed that they have a timeline on 2025. They’re going to do two. One is an open magma bubble, it’s in Iceland and then they’re going to do another one on top of it. They’re going to build like a little station and they’re going to go straight down. This is poking the bear, I would say.

Pablos: So they’re basically trying to do a man made volcano.

Ash: Yes, yes, that’s the, that’s the way to think of it.

Pablos: Iceland doesn’t have enough volcanoes.

Ash: There’s not enough problems where you could just suddenly drill a hole and burst the pimple of God, right? I don’t

Pablos: People are worried about AI, and here we are trying to make a cousin for Eyjafjallajökull.

Ash: I like it because someone’s like, “there’s infinite heat.” And I’m like, “yeah, but it’s kind of down there for a reason.” Didn’t work out too well for a lot of people, right?

Pablos: I don’t understand, I guess if you succeeded at drilling that hole, then I think you would have basically the same thing as the makings of a volcano.

Ash: Yeah, but they’re trying to contain it, right? They somehow feel like, like they could drill in a place…

Pablos: You’re going to have to cycle it because if it cools, even if the magma comes up and cools, it’s just going to plug your hole.

Ash: So the point is that they have to get a turbine to magma, magma rotating. It’s wild. It’s going to be interesting. just liked the idea that, that someone’s literally poking the bear.

Pablos: Oh, they definitely should try.

Ash: Cause you know, we talk about fusion being risky, but this one I just feel has a lot more problems.

Pablos: Yeah, I think they’re just gonna, the magma is just gonna plug the hole.

Ash: No, they’ve got, they’ve got, some ideas. Yeah, well, it is pressure. It’s under pressure. That’s why I keep calling it a pimple.

Pablos: Yeah, that’s why volcanoes get made, right?

Ash: That’s why they gotta go to Iceland. But, the interesting thing is, if you could technically, if you could maintain pressurization all the way up to the top, right, then it can stay magmatic and you could technically build some sort of, high velocity magma drive.

That’s, what they’re thinking of. And that will just keep cycling. Cooling, but just spinning this turbine.

Pablos: What do you do with the magma that comes up hot?

Ash: It becomes like a, a river.

Pablos: You run the turbine, but then where does it go?

You gonna pump it back down?

Ash: Yeah, it’s as if you were in a magma flow, right? So magma continues to move.

It continues, it has a lot of movement, which people don’t realize. Look, the minute I heard drill 6,000 feet into a thin crust lava magma I sort of went, Hmm, this cannot end well.

That’s, that’s the way I looked at it. But who knows?

Pablos: But it’s just Iceland, so you know, there’s only like 130,000 people there. They’re tough though. If anybody can handle it…

Ash: Don’t you remember? Didn’t, they stop all transatlantic flights? You remember right? There’s like a little Ash: cloud and, so just Iceland, but it’s, it’s literally on the jet stream. We Have a few airplanes crossing right over Iceland.

No more going to Europe or vice versa.

Pablos: Yeah, well, we overdid it anyway.

Europe is basically just like a suburb of the U.S. now.

Ash: And Brexit. So, you know,

Pablos: There’s a lot of people who are trying to figure out how to decarbonize cement and it stalls out in part because there’s like four or five thousand cement plants around the world, and they all cost $100 million to build in the first place. A lot of the ideas for decarbonizing cement require building a new plant.

And even if you could build one, you’re not going to build 4,000 of them. They’re Just non starters. And that’s part of why I like DMAT is that they can integrate in any cement plant with basically zero capex. You can just go in and upgrade, turn some knobs, and make a new formula. So, that’s super cool, and hopefully this coffee based additive would have that property as well.

Ash: I think what’s interesting is just the coffee part of all this conversation.

Pablos: If I go back to that article, it says that there’s, 10 billion kilograms, which is 22 billion pounds of coffee waste a year. I presume this is post consumer grounds.

Ash: This is probably commercial coffee grounds that they can track using, like, Starbucks. It doesn’t include what we take home.

Pablos: So it’s at least something like three pounds of coffee grounds per human, for every man, woman, and child on Earth. I don’t even drink coffee. So somebody else is doing double.

The other one that we, got excited about and backed is this, startup called Marvel Labs. What’s exciting there is they figured out how to use the used coffee grounds as an input material for 3D printers.

That sounds like kind of a cute thing, but the truth is it’s staggering implications. And it’s because 3D printers, they’re called rapid prototypers because we used them in labs and they were very expensive and impractical for a long time. And then in 2007, one of my buddies helped start MakerBot, and I was an advisor for MakerBot, which was the first consumer 3D printer. And so we thought we were gonna eventually build farms of these things like AWS, you’d just have a data center full of MakerBots and you’d wire them up to the “buy now” button, and whenever you clicked “buy now,” a MakerBot would print your stuff and then print a box around it and then print a FedEx label on it. It would show up in the mail. Obviously that didn’t happen, and here we are 15 years later, and you don’t buy anything on Amazon that’s 3D printed. There’s two big reasons. One is they’re one pixel printers, so they’re super slow, and that makes it expensive. And then the other part of it is that the input materials are expensive, so you’ve got these high quality filaments, plastic filaments and things that are expensive. At the end of the day, you’re competing with injection molding, which is like the cheapest way of making anything on Earth. And so, it hasn’t worked out.

There’s a couple of exceptions. So for example, with metals, 3d printing of metals has worked out pretty well for two reasons. One, they’re higher value parts. So you’re printing, you know, jet parts and rockets and stuff. But also the technique in the printers is it’s a powder bed, so you have this bin of powder, you run over it with a binder, like glue, from an inkjet head or a laser or something to sinter it together, and then, you pick up your part and shake it off, and you’ve got this part that was printed in a bed of dust.

It’s actually a very elegant way of making a 3D printer, and it’s faster, because they’re more like layer at a time instead of pixel at a time. Anyway, so what Marvel Labs did is they adapted that style of printer, which is fast, but the input material is these used coffee grounds and what the effect of that is, is now they can print stuff out of coffee.

They’re making all kinds of stuff. Sinks and light fixtures and bicycles and things. And the parts come out of the machine. They’re made of coffee and then they just powder coat them with paint or metalize them so they look like metal and you can’t even tell that it’s made of coffee. And so this whole thing works awesome, but the main reason that it’s important , and the reason that we invested, is that it flips the economics.

So now, these parts that Marvel Labs is making, they’ve reshored manufacturing, they manufacture stuff in the U. S., they do it fully automated. And the parts are cheaper than doing it in Asia. That’s what’s exciting to me. They’re also printing with seaweed. They’re printing with sawdust.

All the technologies they invented to make it work are about, printing with biomass in general. They’re kind of the kingpin. Now we can get this whole vision together of producing things on demand in 3D printers in the U. S.

Ash: It’s interesting because several things, right? One is, like you said, it’s not just, the on demand. All of our strategic risk starts to change, right? Think of what happens when, we get to a point where we’re having another pandemic or, I don’t know, they go after Taiwan.

Supply chain changes if you’re suddenly local, right? As long as we can get enough coffee into the system, we have enough of our own source material.

Pablos: Ha, Ha, ha, ha. As a matter of national security, Americans are being asked to drink

more coffee.

Ash: It’s a national security imperative that you get a frappuccino.

Pablos: Well, I found out China just surpassed the U. S. as having the most Starbucks locations.

Ash: China did.

Frightening. I mean, Japan, Starbucks, whole different story. I was just looking at the botanical

Starbucks in Japan,

 Starbucks is its own, own different conversation. But I was going to say that when you think about all of this, the implications for logistics, and one thing I wasn’t sure on, on the way that they produced, what was their binding material?

Because I know they’re, one of the things they were talking about was biodegradability.

Pablos: Marvel Labs has invented a variety of different binders. One of them is entirely sugar based. They use it with seaweed and they can make these biodegradable parts. Which is really cool, and then they have some top secret binders they invented that are super cool and they’re not ready to announce them yet, but it’s awesome.

Ash: I saw some of the pieces.

Pablos: Yeah. Oh, that’s right.

Ash: I got to actually play around with it. I, I think what’s amazing to me is that the idea that you can cut production time. I don’t know if it was an experiment or if they still do it, but remember there was Amazon Now. Where like they had little trucks going around and, and they had like USB cables or like whatever you needed, like that minute.

Pablos: circulating your neighborhood With, that was loaded with the things that they predicted, were going to be bought.

Ash: Yeah, 100%. That’s what it was, right? They predicted that, everyone in Palo Alto needs like an extra USB cable. And they had one and you could get it like one hour delivery.

Pablos: But that truck could just have a 3D printer in the back.

Ash: That’s exactly it. Right? Like imagine, how big are these things? How big are the printers?

Pablos: The printers are, I’d say like 80 percent of the printer is the print bed by volume. So, if you have a printer the size of a refrigerator, 20 percent of it is gantry and other crap. And that’s pretty typical of 3D printers, I guess you could say.

And at least in a powder bed style printer. And the rest of the volume is printable. So, these printers are actually quite large. And one of the nice things about a powder bed printer is that you could just print a whole bunch of parts at once. You just fill up the bed with parts because they’re just floating in powder because the powder is like the support

material as well. It makes it easy to do big batches of stuff. If you’re printing coffee mugs, you can print it and you got a fridge size printer. You can print, a couple hundred mugs or whatever all at the same time. And then, they just come out of there.

I’d say 3D printing’s future, over the next 10 years or so will be really focused on figuring out how to make multi material printers. There’s a little bit of work on that now, especially trying to be able to do conductive materials. It’d be great to be able to print something like a game controller or a pair of headphones or something, have some of the wires printed in it.

Ash: Maybe you have the recycled aluminum just like get blasted and powderized.

I know of a magma plant coming up that might be able to…

Pablos: Can we make a magma, printer?

Ash: You take the aluminum, you feed it into the magma god and it comes out powderized.

Pablos: Well, most aluminum comes from Iceland anyway. Aluminum is essentially made of electricity and they have access to cheap, clean

electricity,

Ash: That’s the, the, secret, right? So we have infinite power and then they’re just producing the conductive dust. One of the things I was thinking is like, how do you market this, right? Because we have to get a behavioral change on consumption.

It’s so easy to go with fast fAsh:ion, fast goods. We’re addicted, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Wish?

Pablos: Oh, uh, I know what it is, but I’ve seen Temu. I signed up for Temu. I ordered some shit before I found out it was obviously Chinese spyware app. And I um, I, bought some shit Temu cause it was so cheap. They’re like paying you to take this stuff. And then it was like worse than infomercial products. Like I got these things and they’re the cheapest possible things. And they had used like trick photography. I bought this bottle of, a cleaning product, I have it right here. I’m looking at it. It’s this bottle called Foam Cleaner. I’m like, oh cool, I’ll use that to clean the shower. I don’t know what, kind of bug eye lens they must’ve used to photograph this thing. But when it showed up, the bottle itself is literally a 60 milliliter bottle, which is, that’s like the size of, it’s like a large bottle of nail polish,

Ash: It’s like, It’s like, not even a perfume bottle.

Pablos: And then it’s got the full size spray head that you’d have on a bottle of Windex or something on it. So this whole thing, it looks like a joke. Nobody would ever do this. I’ve never seen a bottle this small with this big, like the spray head by volume is bigger than the bottle.

Ash: So basically you’ve got a bobblehead cleaner.

That’s what you’re saying. Bobblehead but foam cleaner. That’s it. That’s it. We can market it.

Pablos: Yeah. I mean, I’m afraid to spray it because you know, like if I pull that trigger more than three times, the bottle will be empty.

Ash: I’m sure it’s not a neurotoxin or anything.

Pablos: Okay. But anyway, the point being. Yeah, it’s Temu and Wish and all this bullshit. I don’t know about consumer behavior change. You would know more than me. What are the odds that we’re ever gonna be in a world where people buy less shit?

Ash: It’s not that we buy less. I’m trying to figure out if we can shift them, right? Think about it. At one point, we were all obsessed around Gore Tex, it was like the magic, right?

We had just left our class on osmosis and we were like, wow, it’s like osmosis in a fabric, we were excited.

Pablos: Maybe explain how Gore Tex works.

Ash: Gore Tex’s whole idea was about breathability, where the pores on the fabric were supposed to for air to go out, but water not to come in.

Pablos: Which works because…

Ash: It’s surface tension allows the droplets to hold more together, so they’re bigger than the water vapor molecules going out, right? So, so the molecular sizes are different. So you can create this sort of barrier. Now there’s 50 versions of this to Sunday. But, Gore Tex was, was something which became a brand name, right?

I don’t know if it was before Intel Inside, but it was kind of the same concept, right?

Saw a little label on Gore Tex.

Pablos: It’s like the Dolby of outerwear.

Ash: It is. It was the Dolby of Outerwear.

So I think somehow we’ve got to build that kind of reputational or brand concept, For example, if it’s the seaweed and sugar and everything nice, right?

Pablos: Okay. I see. Full circle brand where it’s like “buy as much of this shit as you want. Whenever you’re done we’re just gonna turn it into the next shit you’re gonna buy.”

Ash: it’s not just recyclable…

Pablos: It’s like infinitely recyclable.

Recycling is a is a joke.

Ash: And the amount of energy and stuff that it takes is is sort of crazy, on that as well, right? So that’s that’s one of the, the sort of big, big problems that that happens with it. And I think one of the challenges is that we’ve got to figure out a way.

That, something like what we’re talking about in terms of, this new product, this new mechanism, this new process can be Gore Tex’d. Or Dolby’d, and a little bit more than like this is recyclable. I think we’re kind of over it, right? Like we’ve seen the little symbol, we don’t even know what’s going on anymore. I know that in most countries they have like, at least like five bins. I think most Americans can’t figure out like. What’s up? There’s a blue box.

Pablos: You could imagine a version of this where, ultimately everything is just made of, some atoms, right? They have to come from somewhere. And then the energy it costs to, move them around and stick them together. So. You know, if you sort of just take that approach, you could say, okay, this stuff is made of this much joules and, this many atoms, like you could basically measure everything that way.

 Then you could say like, all right, well, the total cost of ownership in a given product could be added up that way. The cost of like mining all the shit, the cost of transporting around the world, the cost of, burning stuff to make it, whatever it takes. If you added that up for any object, it would probably be staggering.

In the long run, you would, you, what you would like to do is track things that way and then be able to say, okay, this is kind of a full circle product, like an apple is probably like the closest you get maybe to a product that is low impact, it grows, we there, there’s some energy cost in transporting it from a farm to your mouth, and then you eat it, you throw out a quarter of it as biomass.

Ash: When you say an Apple, not your iPhone.

Pablos: Oh yeah, I’m talking about like an actual physical apple. The kind you can eat. Yeah. Not an phone. Granny Smith, not a Macintosh.

Ash: But maybe that’s the score, right?

Pablos: I think your Intel inside becomes…

Ash: is it net negative? Is it net positive?

Pablos: It’s net negative or it’s like close to the threshold of about an apple instead of being, at the threshold of like about a Tesla.

Ash: That may be the interesting way to do it? So maybe a dynamic symbol is the way to think of it, right? So instead of the old Intel Inside or Dolby Atmos or whatever’s going on, or Gore Tex, maybe it’s about the level. Is there a number? Is there a score?

Lasered in or 3D printed into the object itself or, or anything that you look at, it just tells you that this has a small number or a small something that people can understand that’s better or higher or whatever.

Pablos: Energy star.

Ash: I look at something like calories. Like years and years ago, we all started getting obsessed and that definitely the generation that grew up with cereal boxes, who had nothing better to read. And we didn’t have a iPhone to scroll. We read cereal boxes. We knew more about niacin and potassium in your cornflakes than any human should ever know.

Pablos: It’s true. I read a lot of cereal boxes.

Ash: That’s what you’d read. You read, you’d read the cereal box. When they changed the USDA standard for what you can see inside, the bigger format I remember that was like a big change on the packaging design. That was something where we could see the calories and then we realized, per standard serving size or whatever it was. And I think that at some point, the same thing has to happen, right? Each object that we consume or buy, can have that. There’s actually a company. That we’re looking at, called Love, like seriously called love.com. Uh, uh, I won’t go into much more about that, but they’re actually trying to change this, like specifically change this idea. They’re trying to build an Amazon. First of all, they have love.com. I sort of tossed out the idea that it’s powered by love.

And that way, it can have a score, each thing you’re buying. They curate what’s allowed to be sold on there. So it’s like an Amazon, but like, we’re going to get rid of

Pablos: So all you need is love. Love is all you need?

Ash: It’s true. That’s their eventual goal is to go head to head with Amazon. A billionaire multi time, entrepreneur who’s kicking this off. What’s interesting, though, is I think people will start to recognize this.

Pablos: Yeah, you could do some big branding campaign around, certified green or whatever, but it seems so like all these things are so gameable. I mean like calories, even like, I understand this as a kid, but now that I know what a calorie is like…

Ash: It’s totally gameable.

Pablos: Oh my god, that’s a totally fake thing that we made up that’s, like, barely a measure of anything.

Ash: That’s why I picked it. I was going to say that with good numbers come good evil, right? Are you drinking a 12 ounce can of Coke? Was it like eight ounces? What did they do? It’s interesting how it became a complete nonsense number? It mattered. We learned later that maybe the mix matters, and it wasn’t about the sodium. And there’s a lot of little bits that didn’t matter. The question becomes, can you build something genuinely?

There’s another company, we invested in, Dollar Donation Club.

And what’s interesting about them is, when Seth, who’s the founder, said, “Hey, I’m going to see if we could create the world’s first super philanthropist.” The idea that if we all gave a dollar a month, technically it’s billions of dollars. You can make a lot of changes.

He said,” where am I going to give the money? I don’t want to be another money place. I want to be something where I can see the impact.” So he built a giant impact map of things he wanted to do. And he said, “okay, I want to know exactly how many kilos of microplastic are removed for my donation.”

Like, I don’t care that I donate $1, $2. I was like, I’m willing to go and take out a kilo. Well, it turned out he can only get to like, I forget what the number is like 11 or 20 charities. It took that long and that his professional teams, like when they vet out what the charity really does.

Pablos: Yeah.

Ash: Almost no one qualified. So I think this is the unfortunate thing that’s going to happen, right? So if our coffee friends bring it full circle, if Marvel can really like just crush it. Like they can demonstrate there’s an actual true cost reduction I’m talking about from Guangzhou to, Columbus. By the time it gets there, like what actually happened and then the return leg, right? Like what happens on the back if, if that’s actually a real score. That we can defend. Maybe that’s what Marvel has to do.

Pablos: The way it should be done probably is kind of like, consumer reports. There ought to be, like, life cycle metrics made for, the product coming outta Marvel Labs versus its competitor that came from Guangzhou. Here’s your Samsung versus iPhone versus, Nokia or whatever and somebody does the research and figures out; this is the mining footprint; this is the shipping cost. This is how much, energy was burned. The factory is running off of a coal plant versus a nuclear reactor or whatever.

Ash: Like Energy Star, but like it actually makes sense as opposed to Energy Star.

Pablos: Yeah, and that could be given a score in joules that just ranks these things against each other.

Ash: But we’re talking about three ideas here, right? So that one idea is to get somebody to come out there and say, look, fundamentally, product life cycle measurement is something someone should go build, like someone should, whether it’s independent of Marvel or not, somebody should do it. And then different manufacturers or, or whether it’s a 3D printer of type company or someone else should go in and say, look, let’s show you why we are the lowest score, the highest score, whatever the, whichever one’s considered the better thing.

And then we have to create education and marketing on that, to say, Hey, if you’re not doing this, you, you are literally creating damage.

Pablos: There must be initiatives like this that we don’t know about. An interesting thing to consider is an iPhone is made of whatever, 2000 components. Some of them are like screws that Apple sourced and didn’t manufacture. Where was the metal for the screws mined? Where’s the factory for the screws? How far are the screws traveling to get to the iPhone factory? All that kind of stuff. And so you would, eventually if this were fully played out, when you design an iPhone and CAD, it would just tell you, where your screws are coming from.

We already have the environmental impact score for those screws. Pick the ones that have the lower score.

Ash: So this is like an SAP thing. So go back to, Fast moving consumer goods. So in the FMCG world, one of the things that’s really interesting is something called, smart label and smart label is interesting because it said, Hey, like ingredients don’t cut it.

I want to know like really what’s going on, it goes really deep, you can dive into the label, but where did you source it? Like, is it really honey from here or what was going on? I think Nestle, I think some of the biggest players all support it.

Procter and Gamble, all these guys are on smart, smart label. Now that’s interesting because you’re almost already there, for those guys, you’re pretty close, but that’s for food.

Hopefully that’s mostly biodegradable. Otherwise we have other problems in life.

Pablos: Yeah, that’s interesting. Maybe that could be extended so that all the, the ingredients of my, headphones…

Ash: Exactly. Could you extend that construct? I actually think back to another company, from years ago, it is one of my patents, from a while back.

it was a company called, Black Duck Software. You were talking about, as you’re sitting there with your CAD, I was thinking of, open source. Remember it was like, “”are you using something that’s gonna infect the rest of your project?” When you’re coding in Eclipse or something and you’re like, oh, let me just grab this little…

Pablos: You accidentally scoop up some GPL library…

Ash: Yeah, it’s an LGPL or something. It happened to Fidelity. Their entire mortgage calculator, their entire mortgage algorithm had to be open sourced because they used a website plug in. So, they eventually invested in the company. Obviously, they invested in us.

But what was good is that, when you, were able to sit down and look at the project, it would tell you immediately, like, if you put this in there, you will like, have to open source your print driver.

Pablos: All that should just be in CAD. A lot of CAD software has a plug in to tell you how much it’s going to cost to machine that part that you made based on the design. And it could easily tell you how much material it’s going to take and how much material cost there’s going to be.

But you could extend on that and say, you chose these screws. Here’s how much they’re going to cost. Here’s what the lead times are. All that’s in SAP already. And then it tells you, this is the environmental footprint of the screws you chose.

Ash: And now you can tie that into some exchanges or B2B sourcing companies and just say, okay, give me a scenario. I want to automatically reduce my carbon or my, my total footprint. Where else could I source, right? So maybe instead of titanium screws, I have to manufacture for this new titanium iPhone from like some Russian mine where the titanium lives.

Pablos: be seven Web3 companies trying to do this already.

Ash: I think what they miss. And this is something that I think is an interesting part of the journey, right? That you and I also take is it sometimes great technology and great back end stuff doesn’t hit the front.

The only reason calories don’t matter today because we woke up and realized that somebody paid off the cardiologists to get us to eat margarine and told us that sugar was, okay and fat was terrible.

That was programming, right? That was maybe we need some good programming. I mean, we got programmed the wrong way. Maybe we need to program people. To see the right thing. And I don’t know that we could be seen as altruistic or that we’re necessarily not, not commercially motivated.

I think that there’s some way that today because of information and speed of information, I think we can create some level of transparency, like you said. And then we can turn around and say, back in the day, I couldn’t tell you where my, millet was coming from for the food.

Today we can, Smart Label will tell you literally where that food comes from.

I think we could do something fun, fun with that. Someone should go do that.

Pablos: Yeah. Someone should go do that, which is, one of the main points of doing this podcast is that hopefully we’ll come up with ideas that somebody else should go do.

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