Influencing Change in Children who live in countries succeptible to and suffering from the effects of Climate Change
7 billion tons of plastics currently. By 2050 there will be 4x that much. There’s already a pile of plastic the size of Texas in the ocean today. Imagine 4x that amount.
Gavin Pechey with Sporadicate just might have a solution – that is 800 million years old. He and his team of researchers are using mycelium to break down plastic and create organic compost as the byproduct.
What’s his big ask?
- Funding partners to help them scale this solution to more places
- Partner sites to adopt their technology
Podcast Transcript
Jacob: So we have a love-hate relationship with plastics. It’s hard to imagine modern life without it, and yet plastic waste is choking our ocean and clogging up our planet. Plastic’s not going away anytime soon something’s gotta give.
Gavin with Sporadicate just might have a viable solution. They’ve developed a process that uses plastic as food for mycelium a fungus. The byproduct is actually organic compost soil, and they currently are doing a production trial with the city of Pocatello to process all of the city’s plastic. Let’s jump in and better understand their story and find out what allies they need to help make the change they wanna see in the world. So with that, let me welcome Gavin Pechey with Sporadicate.
Gavin: Hi Jacob, thanks very much for having me on your show.
This is an exciting opportunity, it’s a lot of people that are involved [00:01:00] in the environment that can actually see the problem with plastics. And once you start researching it, gets larger and larger.
Recycling has always been that, oh, it’s okay if I use this plastic ‘cause it’s recyclable, there’s a number at the bottom. But unfortunately, as you get into it, you kind of realize that it’s a bit of a lie and maybe only one of the number one on the plastic recycling triangle can actually be recycled. And then, of course, you can only recycle it once or twice and it becomes useless again.
Plastics is one of the things that is just not going away. It’s a really cheap and fantastic product, but recycling and the whole plastic environment still remains plastic. You recycle plastic, what do you get? You get more plastic and the cycle just keeps on growing and growing.
When you think that the world is producing 354 million tons of new plastic a year and that is predicted to go up to a billion tons of plastic a year by 2050. Imagine what the status of the earth will be at that stage [00:02:00] if we don’t find a decent solution.
So that’s where we are today, looking for an answer. And out of all my research, I found mycelium was actually using plastics as a food source. It’s the same old mycelium fungi that grows on your tree when it falls over in the forest. And degrades that whole tree down so it can be reintegrated in that forest in the soil.
Those type of mushrooms eat carbon as part of its food source. Plastic is just another carbon molecule with a couple of other elements. But, if you grow mycelium and mushrooms, it gives the opportunity for the mushrooms to turn to the plastic and uses this food source. Which reduces any opportunity for microplastics or any other, harmful byproducts.
That’s one of the problems with the recycling or any of these, other processes that are coming out. There’s a lot of microplastics and other contaminants that are leaking out and getting into our groundwater, into the soils, and of course into the ocean.
Microplastics are found in the brain of all [00:03:00] places. And once you start hitting that, you start getting a bit worried about what are we going to be in the next 20 or 30 years? Half of our body is gonna be plastics, so we gotta start finding a solution. And I think we have it and could be one of the cogs in the whole plastic solution.
Jacob: You’re no doubt a fun guy, but how did you come upon this technology?
Gavin: It’s a bit of a wild story. I was in Guatemala and we were on a banana plantation. It was interesting to see how this farm was quite eco-forward. They were, chopping down pits of the plants and using earthworms to, break down some of the outstanding banana plants that were causing trouble for them to break down quicker.
There was this blue plastic covering the fruit as it grew. I said, oh, where does the blue plastic go? And they were, but sheepish. And they said, unfortunately, they can’t recycle that plastic. It was too much effort to bring that plastic back into the processing unit to then ship it out again.
So the reusability of that wasn’t good. Unfortunately, it [00:04:00] turned out they were throwing this plastic into the river and washed out into the ocean. Just imagine the size and the quantity. It’s just multiple and multiple plastic getting tossed into the ocean and just for a small thing. You see the big farms in Guatemala of over 10,000 hectares and they were doing the same sort of thing. This is just a massive, massive problem.
Jacob: Where did this technology come from?
Gavin: After I came back from Guatemala, I was in a pub and met a mycologist and he said, oh, did I know mycelium mushrooms fungi, break down plastics. I was definitely not a believer and went back home and did a bit of research. And in 2014, Yale did a great study of the degradation of plastics using various types of oyster mushrooms. Within 120 or 150 days, they were able to degrade this plastic. And that’s kind of started my thought process, if Yale put this publication out there, who else has got this technology?
As you explored it, multiple universities around the world are doing this research, but no one else was actually commercializing the opportunity. And there [00:05:00] are definitely times when I think I’m being a bit stupid because the problem is so huge. We can’t solve the plastic problem today, but maybe in two three, or four years, we should have a good head start and making an impact to where we need it to be.
Jacob: If this technology, information is widely accessible, why haven’t other people adopted it? What are the barriers right now to commercializing this?
Gavin: That’s always been an interesting part of the university and research life. All these great researchers out there dedicating their life to research, but when it comes to actually turning it into a commercial opportunity, it’s where it falls down.
They don’t have the skills, they don’t have the interest. They’re interested in research, they’re a focused group and their focus is solving problems. But that problem can stay on the shelf for many years and that’s as far as it goes.
If you can partner with universities and researchers, you can find so many solutions that you can, take to market. You just have to be the yes man, as I call myself. Will you do this? Yes, I will. And away [00:06:00] we go. You get support from all the researchers and the universities and great solutions for present-day problems.
Jacob: In your mind, how would you respond to the skeptics that say, is this technology actually scalable? Can you actually make a dent with this? maybe one city in Pocatello, can do this, but could we adopt this worldwide?
Gavin: Absolutely, that’s, one of the issues that we came across and the basis of our smaller, efficient processing units that can process 20 tons of plastic a week. If you were to go into Pocatello, they do just under 20 tons of plastic a week. We can degrade all their plastic in one week, that facility will just be standalone.
As we get into bigger cities say we come to Portland where the population is a bit higher and maybe you’ve got a hundred tons of plastic a week. So for ease of use, we are thinking, okay, instead of just having one facility we have five separate facilities that continue to do the 20 tons of plastic a week. Basically, it’s a measurable, understood, researched component where we [00:07:00] can deal with that 20 tons a week. And the multiple of that will then increase the volume of the degradation on a monthly basis.
And it saves on transportation. You can allocate them into different parts of the city, so your transportation for your recyclables is much more efficient.
Jacob: Fill in the blanks for me on this question. If we only had X, then we could do Y. What are you trying to accomplish and what do you need to get there?
Gavin: At this stage more time. If we had more time, we could solve a bigger problem at a faster pace. That is the situation we are facing, I have to wait for summer for the plant to operate in Pocatello. That’s another three or four months before we can start. Then once we get that up and running, that has to operate for another, six months. So I can show everyone that that’s working. Then once I’ve got that out, I’m gonna start rolling it out to other cities. Once I start rolling it out into cities, I won’t be able to come to all the cities at one time and say, Hey, here we go, let me build millions of dollars worth of plants around your city. It’ll be basically saying, [00:08:00] Sorry, I’ll be coming to your city in maybe five or six years.
So, it’s a slow process but if you’re gonna do something right, take the time in the beginning and make sure that you’ve done the right research instead of creating a whole lot of opportunities that you can’t fulfill.
Jacob: Talk to me too about some of the other applications outside of plastics for mycelium and the potential there.
Gavin: As we go into this adventure of mycelium, it’s amazing the actual properties and the resources that it can provide. So currently we’ve got an environmental arm of our business. We are using trees infused of mycelium at a seed stage where there’s a symbiotic relationship between the trees and the mycelium. As they grow it absorbs nutrients and problems out of the soil and stores them in this tree. Some of the contamination that it deals with, serious heavy metals, even arsenic, big problems that you don’t really think about.
We’ve got a couple of great test sites in Butte, Montana, that’s had hundreds of years of copper mining and some of the largest contamination on the planet. You [00:09:00] can plant these trees and you’ll find that the first six years it’ll absorb a lot of nutrients, but that’ll continue absorbing nutrients and contamination for over a hundred years, depending on which type of tree you use.
It’s that continuous remediation of that land for a hundred-year solution. Definitely hope I won’t be around in a hundred years, but I know that I’ve started something now that will continue to make generations able to live in better conditions, make the soil health a lot better, and then create, sustainable earth in the future.
Jacob: Yeah. So what would an ideal connection be for you right now?
Gavin: We are always looking for people to say this is something that they would like to get behind. Once we get community involvement, you’ll find that people start talking about this. Start asking questions, start talking to their neighbors and their friends about it. Have they heard about it? This is kind of where you need to be, you need to build that community interest, that community support. From there we can develop relationships and also, build our, support base.
So, [00:10:00] when I want to move into, a new town, they would’ve already heard it, because the people will be talking about it. I’ll walk in and say, I want to do plastics in say Salt Lake City. And they’ll say, yeah we’ve heard from the community and this is something that we want to adopt as quickly as possible. So I think community support, communication Is our best ground roots operation for our future.
The supporting of the environmental community does give your business that credibility that excitement on the ground. And that leads to people saying, Not only do I want to, support the business, I want to invest, I want to work for the business. I want to, develop this as an opportunity to franchise the business. I want to get involved. And, that involvement then will just make my life a lot easier.
Jacob: Lovely. I’m guessing too, if there were interest in terms of investment that could move faster and go farther, if there was more capital to deploy,
Gavin: Absolutely.
Jacob: How would you describe an ideal investor for you right now?
Gavin: An [00:11:00] ideal investor at the moment, would be somebody that can see the long-term benefit. I mean, it’s a lot of research still to be done, a lot of time that takes to develop these mycelium bunkers, where we are gonna be degrading the plastics. So it’s that, faith that they are changing the world one small step at a time and not really saying, oh, well, where’s my return? Because our business is that long-term vision and the results are not immediate, but our solutions comparable to great returns.
So let’s put that into a financial aspect. At the moment I’m dealing with two, one outside of Pocatello and one in Butte. A small component of those have allocated $150 million for remediation of that land. So I turned 1,340 Superfund sites at a minimal investment to basically, a $201 billion possibility. it doesn’t seem to be too bad if we started off the project now and in 10 years we had 20%, 30% of that business. That’s a really good return and we are also doing something [00:12:00] wonderful for the planet.
it’s not just when can I make money tomorrow. It’s how can I make sure that my kids have an environment? How can I leave my legacy going forward? To make sure that, you know, the planet can continue to heal itself, make it viable for my children’s, children’s children, and it’s not just another investment. It’s a condition, it’s an involvement in the community.
Jacob: Perfect. So if someone was interested in learning more about Sporadicate, where would you point them?
Gavin: Definitely to our website. There’s a lot of contact details on that. There’s a wonderful video that somebody you know did. And really it has changed everything about our business. So if you’ve got an extra five or 10 minutes to watch, that really tells our wonderful story and. what are our next steps? From there reach out and contact us just to say, Hey.
Jacob: Fantastic. Excited to see where you go with this and would love to see, more momentum in this solution starting to make a difference us and for everyone. [00:13:00] So thank you for the good you’re doing and keep up the good work.
Gavin: Thank you, Jacob. It was a pleasure being on today and I’m pretty excited to get this out to everyone.
Jacob: Thank you.
Gavin: Thank you.
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