Microplastics are the new asbestos, with Adam Root of Matter.

Remember in the mid 2010s when we were all talking about microplastics in things like face creams, and brands were making a big deal about being micro-bead free? Well although the media attention has gone away, the problem of microplastics has definitely not. Adam Root is the founder and CEO of Matter., which is tackling the problem of microplastics head on at one if its key sources—your washing machine.

Matter. has just raised $10 million, with participation from big names like Leonardo DiCaprio, Ashton Kutcher, and the Walton family (Walmart) through their various investment vehicles.

#climatetech #microplastics #laundry #cleanwater #plasticfree

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Transcript

Ryan Grant Little: 0:06

Welcome to another Climate Tech podcast interviews with the people trying to save us from ourselves. Remember in the mid-2010s when we were all talking about microplastics and things like face creams and brands were making a big deal about being micro bead free? Well, although the media attention has gone away, the problem of microplastics has definitely not. Adam Root is the founder and CEO of Matter, which is tackling the problem of microplastics, which he calls the new asbestos. Head on. I reached him in Bristol, england. I'm Ryan Grant. Little Thanks for being here, adam. Welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you here.

Adam Root: 0:44

Absolute pleasure. Thanks so much for the invite, Ryan. Lovely to hear what you guys got going on.

Ryan Grant Little: 0:48

You're the founder and CEO of Matter and it's got a flagship product called Gulp. I love the names. First of all, can you talk a little bit about what Matter does and what product Gulp is?

Adam Root: 1:01

Sure Matter is a company that focuses on the capture, the harvest and the recycling of micro pollution. We're looking at anything smaller than 20 millimeters in size. We have our first product that we bring into market, which is called Gulp. As you mentioned, gulp is the world's first retrofittable washing machine filter, which is a bit of a mouthful for capturing micro pollution from your laundry. It's a device that you can plug into the back of your washing machine. It captures the microplastic and then can be removed from the water. You can use your laundry wash synthetic textiles and do it with a clean conscience as well as a clean load.

Ryan Grant Little: 1:42

All of those things could be slogans for the company. You're very good on the branding side. I have to say I was fascinated to read a bit about your background, which is both as a mechanical engineer you worked at places like Dyson, you've won some innovation awards but you're also a scuba diver. It sounds like being underwater and seeing the plastics down there is also what kicked you into gear on this project. Can you talk a little bit about that and that connection?

Adam Root: 2:08

Sure, scuba diving is probably one of my great passions in life. I dive in the UK, which is you have to be pretty passionate about getting in the water. If you'd get into the UK waters, we get it pretty cold, we have pretty big swell and can be pretty gnarly at times. Scuba diving has taken me all over the world. I've done cave diving, shit wreck stuff, penetration wrecks and stuff. I really enjoy it. I love it.

Adam Root: 2:36

I think I saw a murder and created and founded matter. Really because there was this intersection for me where I had this skill set. I'm very fortunate. I worked really hard on what I've done and become very good at being an engineer. When I was first out in the business about 2017, I was looking around for people to work for and I just couldn't find anybody out there. Really looking at some of the challenges that we face as humanity, I think that micro pollution, ocean plastic it fits through a lot of gaps. For me, having that engineering background with that passion of the scuba diving piece really allows me to really understand that the work that I'm doing is directly related to what's going on the real world. I've seen that through my time in diving, seeing how that world is changing. Seeing the acidification in a coral, seeing what's happening in the ocean pollution, I really wanted to get in there and make some tangible difference.

Ryan Grant Little: 3:33

It fits through the gaps both as a topic but also quite literally, with the micro plastics and microfibers Interesting parallel there. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what these are. You said there are things that are less than 20 millimeters, but what are microfibers, micro plastics in the? I think a lot of people have read about this, have heard about it but might not know in a material sense what these actually are.

Adam Root: 3:57

Yeah, sure. So I think when we think about microplastics, people often think about microbeads, which was the big campaigns that were launched a couple of years ago with. It was the kind of like the bits of plastic they were putting into face scrubs. So you were rubbing your face with a cream and it was had plastics in it and that was exfoliant, which is kind of crazy. They were doing that. You were just washing that down the drain. So as a bit of kind of a technical piece, I'll be shot at by the academic community if I don't mention it. So you have microplastics are considered to be anything less than sort of five millimeters in size really, and normally there are plastics. So sometimes there are big bits of plastic that are broken down into small pieces. So you think about carrier bags or plastic bottles. Those kind of things can then break down into smaller pieces and then sometimes they're specifically designed at that size and particle size. Micro fibers effectively they're fragments of your clothes. Now around 60% of all fabrics are synthetic and that basically a fiber is the length of five millimeters in size.

Adam Root: 5:03

If you ever want to see this, go literally go to any white surface in your house look at the sink, look at the window seal and you'll see these little tiny squiggly lines. Those are from your clothes. There's more those in your house and that you know. We think of dust. That used to be skin cells and now dust is microfibers and microplastic. So you're breathing this in all the time. It's in your environment, is what your carp it's made from. It's what your curtains are made from, it's what the beds are made from. It's also in your gym clothes, it's in, you know, your sportswear. So it's a very, very pervasive thing and you're kind of like well, if it's everywhere, what's the big deal here? You know what's the problem, but unfortunately this is. We're talking about the new asbestos. It's a material choice that we've made and now we're in this where it's environment, where it's continually around us and the effects it's having is pretty scary.

Ryan Grant Little: 5:56

And so you mentioned somewhere that each wash load there's up to 700,000 microfibers and that that are getting through, presumably then into the water system, into the oceans, and this is particularly a problem with synthetic clothes. So most clothes are, on average are, 60% synthetic. These days. I'm thinking like gym shorts, but also like just day to day wear, and so this is basically plastics that are coming off of your clothes, going down the pipe, making it their way to all kinds of places we don't want them to be and we don't intend for them to be.

Adam Root: 6:27

Yeah, so the big challenge here is three major areas. So one of them, which is the thing that is kind of really coming to light I'm most scared about, is the chemical pollution side. So micro plastics, micro pollution, is the vessel, it's kind of like the ship and all the chemicals are getting attached to that. So things like fire retardants which we put on clovings or waterproofing as a key example. So there's a chemical called PFAS it's really big in the states at the minute talking about it forever, chemicals being a real challenge. Now that is attached to the micro pollutant, the pill.

Adam Root: 7:04

So when this is being released, you're getting a waterproof jacket which has got the waterproof coating that's attached to that material that is being eaten and ingested by some of the smallest organisms on the planet. And the thing that I care about the most is fighting plankton and zoo plankton. So these guys Represent the largest question of carbon on the planet and they also produce a majority of oxygen. So these are like the bees of the sea, if you like. Right? So there I'm in that regard.

Adam Root: 7:34

You get any organisms eating these micro pollutants and then the chemicals transfer into the fatty tissue. The animal that compounds goes up the food chain. So if you had something like a tuna or like a big predatory fish that we eat, they would be in a compound amount of that. So ten thousand bits of what's the plan to be eaten by a macro. And then I'm saying macros get eaten by tuna and we the tuna.

Adam Root: 8:01

So that chemical composition and we've seen that mercury, mercury that was done in the nineties, so we're seeing this kind of repeat. So those kind of the ingestion, the chemical pollution, and the final part is about when it's getting transferred into us. So in the UK we capture some micro pollution in waste water treatment plants and then we spread that material onto the fields where we grow our food. So we are literally just like pouring the material with all the chemicals involved in the waste water treatment process as well as like things like the different kind of parts of our code goes in our water system, that attached to my position, that runs into the food and then we're eating it. So it's been shown to cause cancer, it's been shown to mutate your DNA and it also Breach the blood brain barrier, which basically means that these particles are small enough that it can go into your blood and into your brain.

Ryan Grant Little: 8:58

so generally, is a micro pollution is like Is a category, and there's about twelve, thirteen thousand chemicals that are being attached to different types of plastics and they're acting and being treated in some pretty terrifying ways and so, regardless of whether your diet is omnivore or plant based, either way, you're getting exposure to these, because, whether it's from fish or animals eating the feed or eating the eating this in the sea, if it's being spread on fields, then it's in your broccoli as well.

Adam Root: 9:32

Yeah, I think you know, if you talk about the indoor like we spent like ninety percent of our time indoors and I just talked about you know, I come see the air pollution side of that as well it's really challenging. So there's some fact that some work has gone on said that we can shoot me up to five grams plastic per week, which is about a credit card. Yeah, so these kind of numbers, when we hear about these and this, you know people challenge different parts about quantity and the effects and the harm. But you know people are challenging the fact of like p-facces dangerous or the particular chemicals we're talking about dangerous. This is just a case about how much can your body deal with, and that baseline is increasing.

Ryan Grant Little: 10:14

Yeah, it would be the brave lobbyist who argues that you know, some amount of plastic ingestion is good, or you know, try to limit to half a credit card per week.

Adam Root: 10:24

Are you wouldn't believe the opposing force. Yeah, yeah, there's big money in this and you imagine the cleanup bills gonna come there. There are a couple of companies I can talk about. Court cases that are in the billions already.

Ryan Grant Little: 10:36

Yeah, yeah, no for sure. I mean, it feels to me like all of the former tobacco lobbyists are now in oil and big egg these days and making some pretty ridiculous Cases, but using the playbook you know to so doubt quite effectively, unfortunately. But on that point You've mentioned a few times, with the legislation that's coming out in France about microfibers, maybe specifically in washing machines, and I wonder what, if you could talk a bit about what that looks like in France? Is this something that slated to be kind of you law in general, and what maybe you think that will catalyze as a movement?

Adam Root: 11:14

yeah. So so far, really early on a national campaign and they basically banned sale of washing machines from twenty, twenty five or a plastic filters. The answer, the challenges, this is this is actually quite it's technically very challenging to do it well, but the base principle is not is not rocket science. You know you can capture my classic with all sorts of kind of standard filters. So there's really people from France and then they move forward and that catalyze the whole washing machine industry. The reason we're talking about washing machines Is because they represent about thirty five percent of global micropacic emissions and I want to make it sources. So car tires, about twenty eight percent, sympathetic textiles, washing the manufacturer, the whole process. That's around thirty five percent. So washing machines you wouldn't think a big thing, but there's about seventy million people in the UK about the same. In France we got about twenty four million washing machines running four or five times a week. You got kids, you're running your machine every day and those washes released that grab a micropacic pot wash. So it's super challenging to actually build a filtration system in a real high flow environment like a wastewater plant. It's really expensive. There are solutions out there but it's. You took in six, seven hundred million plus. In some of these scenarios for building a wastewater treatment plant was a microfiber filters are you know ten, fifteen, twenty pounds being installed in a washing machine. So much more distributed cost and it is an easy win.

Adam Root: 12:44

So there's talk about that going into the e is currently put the bill together. I have to go to you, why the talking about twenty twenty seven? This standard using I'm sick, I see Is the standard standards american standards, and I see standards european standards. So I'm on the mic team and my company is on the board of like helping write those standards and tell them Please don't make, please don't cheat. So we're kind of like trying to make sure that everybody's saying nice and, you know, working for the environment, making sure that we develop a good product that will go wide, which is twenty seven plus countries. And we also talk about the us, california. California actually was the first to move. New York has also got bills in place with a kind of look in the rebate schemes. California was copy in the french legislation and there is significant pressure right now From different lobby and bodies to try to kind of drag these back which, talking about what?

Ryan Grant Little: 13:40

washing machines probably now.

Adam Root: 13:44

I think it's just. It's just a power they have is pretty amazing, you know, I think I thought that these guys would be just sort of quite excited to talk about. You know, put some new technology in this. What's the white boxes, glass doors the name really change really last twenty years. Pretty boring really. You know, someone walks alone and say, hey, you got like customers that care about this. This is a great opportunity if you'd innovate in this space. And their responses crush legislation, which is. You know. They say that on one foot and the next foot they're innovating and they're doing it anyway. They just want to slow it down so they can do it in their own time.

Ryan Grant Little: 14:19

You need briefcases of cash to show up. That, I think, helps.

Adam Root: 14:24

Yeah, yeah, you would believe, I think I am we joke, we joke. I don't know who these people are. They kind of asleep in a coffin upside down.

Ryan Grant Little: 14:32

It's really crazy, I mean you know I work a lot in, obviously, in climate and food, and you know I always knew that there would be technical challenges to try to solve climate change or work against. I didn't expect the headwinds of these, like you know, like the bad guys from the lord of the rings and stuff like that, which is, I mean, basically the world we're living in. So the challenges you come up with something that makes a lot of sense, technical sense. You know consumers wanted it seems like a slam dunk and you have to spend so much of your time just fighting these, like you know, these very cynical arguments.

Adam Root: 15:01

I mean fundamentally is like it's like shower the sky. You know the changes coming, like they are, like it is coming, and you know myself from a company and what we do it like when do you like I mean there is no shortcut for doing the work. I'm a big believer in that. You gotta get down, get down. But in the day, like I mean there's no way that these guys gonna be able to let this go, because it's not gonna happen. We are gonna push through, we're going to win, we're gonna get there eventually and it is Is the case that, like, the best technology will win, we will out compete them, we will drive this forward and the guys are crying about it in the background will be left behind. And you know, I think I think with this, like I don't want to villainize the entire industries different ways, because there are a lot of really like we do a lot with the engineers on with the companies, and the engineers are so passionate and they so want to make this happen. It's just really there's a couple of key individuals really and other really kind of Question for this and in different ways, and I think those opinions are changing. You probably see this cross your podcast and what you talk about.

Adam Root: 16:08

But work and the employment sector has changed so much in the last five to ten years. You know, I think the new work force coming in, they don't accept this. This is not not acceptable to them. To go work for a company that's this putting mandates out and you're talking about like internal mutiny and somebody big companies it's quite. It's pretty amazing to watch like what's happening. So maybe gonna be off piece there.

Adam Root: 16:34

But I think you know I think we have a huge responsibilities employers to really make sure that we represent the values of our business, also represent our employees. You know the people who want to work for my company and also we see some of these big businesses like that, opinions changing. People are just lying down anymore and letting it go. It's becoming. It's becoming a really full after piece. So you're not just got pressure from your customers anymore, your presses from your employees and they're not afraid to say why. So I have hope. I'm very optimistic about the future. I think it will be painful, we will. The future we're building will be, will be better than anybody ever dreamed of.

Ryan Grant Little: 17:16

Right now, the product gulp is sort of an external filter on a washing machine. But you're doing a lot of work on kind of the internal stuff as well, and you know, when I used to be in a software space, I would always look at things as you know. Is this a feature, a product or a company? And maybe you're looking the same way. Are you worried? Is this a challenge or an opportunity that they're going to be internalizing this stuff? Do you have IP that you can be selling into companies like Bosch and I don't know? I was going to say Siemens, but it's the same company now, right?

Adam Root: 17:45

Yeah, good knowledge I mean. So our business is fit into four major areas. Two parts are laundering. So we have Gulp, which is the retrofit product, which is a standalone product that's going to market. Now we're doing a final stage of the production line that's going to be launched later this year with big partners we're looking to launch with. Then we have what we call the Matter Inside program, which is like imagine Intel inside. It's our technology in other people's supply chains.

Adam Root: 18:11

So we're working with washing machine brands. It will come included in a. You buy a new washing machine and you have matter included inside the washing machine, which for us that's got to be the ultimate goal. I mean, the retrofit allows you to buy this washing machine like they're a 10 year life cycle. So if you've just bought a washing machine, I don't want you to throw your washing machine away. I want you to buy a Gulp, fit it to it and then you can have 10 years of my capacity, free laundry, before you buy your next generation of washing machine, which will have a matter product in it already. Then we have matter industries.

Adam Root: 18:41

Now this is really where I'm really excited about this right now and I put a lot of focus moving into industrial side. So we've scaled our technology to work a million litres of water per day and we're scaling into work multi-million to litres of water per day. So this is talking about waste water treatment plants. I'm interested in textiles, so the manufacturer and a production of textiles and also other applications in here as well, there's so much pollution sources that we can get at and most of the technology on the market.

Adam Root: 19:10

A waste water treatment plant currently at the minute takes around 25 hours to filter water.

Adam Root: 19:16

I can do it in minutes and that is we refer to it as dynamic filtration rather than, like they use, settling at the minute. So it requires time and that speed means that the water can process faster, which means they can do a higher flow rate, which means that they won't dump so much in the rivers and then whenever it rains in the UK, we just dump our sewage into the river. So I'm looking to tackle some big chunky pieces with that and they're millions and millions of pounds projects, so they're big chunky stuff and the final piece is materials. Now, materials is the long holy grail here, Like we have to innovate some different materials to what we're currently using. Also, we need to figure out what we've got to do with all the material that we're capturing and what it looks like. So we've been working on the material side for a number of years and made some really clever little headway. I think it's kind of the future of matter must be in these scale positions, and that's really what I'm kind of looking at as the next piece.

Ryan Grant Little: 20:10

And you started matter with Grant from the Princess Trust with a princely sum of 250 pounds. I'm assuming that you haven't just built the whole company on that. You've probably taken in some more money. What's the fun funding journey looks like to date and are you raising now?

Adam Root: 20:29

Yeah. So as we currently stand I mean the big news is kind of public is we raised $10 million last year. It's a little bit more than 250 pounds. I must admit, like I am my team tell me I'm tight, I've been strapped my way through and I don't like spending money on things that. I'm always pretty keen to make sure that we run in as lean as we can.

Adam Root: 20:52

$10 million is a lot of money and when we raised it, it was because we really realized that our ambition was to change the world and we were looking at, we were trying to look, we're targeting an 87% of global micro pollution. That's the plan and I was like we did not have the funding capabilities to achieve that mission. So really, when I'm on the right, it's all about how do we build the right partnerships and do that, and the couple of key people that we've bought on just been instrumental to our journey. So I'm a few names include and Sg benches, which is very well known in this space, if you know who they are like I'm they're very big and food and I'm lucas waltons runs it and part of the water family and he's incredible guy, really super intelligent, lovely to me, is lovely guy I met a few times and he's just done, really super humble and just really get it, gets it and kind of build and he pretty much is the most of the ocean space.

Ryan Grant Little: 21:52

Walmart, walmart, waltons yes, yes.

Adam Root: 21:55

So I'm there for a few pounds, a few dollars behind them and he made a commitment. You know they want to move forward with us and they've been phenomenal. Like I'm always a big fan of making sure that we don't just take cash from people in. Cash is important, but you can get cash from other places. What's more important is the smart money we took on regeneration bc, another company that came in and I'm a firm and I'm called a.

Adam Root: 22:18

There's some big names of the black number. When I first met them, I said, like you know, I really love what you guys do. I'd love to meet one of the lps. And then what are you please? Was the capital, and he was all. You know what's the deal. I'm not gonna be built, so don't. Wanna is one of my heroes. Like I'm a massive fanboy and he's a hero co-wrote cradle cradle, which Anyone who starts my company gets a copy of, cradle cradle.

Adam Root: 22:44

So I'm it's. Yeah, I think it's a solution to all the challenges we face me. Yeah, so I'm, it's a. For me, it's a how to guide, how to change the world, and I'm so yeah, I mean, I think some of those backers and some of those people we had some ways. Join us co-leading around with asian kutcher guys here. They're very, very smart cookies. They know what they're doing. They've invested in a lot of you know the early vests in uber and bnb and they've done some pretty raising stuff. So the team of very driven you know.

Adam Root: 23:15

So when you got those kind of backers behind you, you know that you must have done something great. But you know, fundamentally like for me it's about size and scale. Like we have to do, the next chapter of what we're building has to be Sustainable in a design, which is fundamental. But then the next piece really is about how do you scale? And there's no point selling a thousand gobs, you know, in A bristol, in a shed, lovely job, fantastic, great. We got a thousand people in there, but that is not gonna Move the need, all global pollution. So we need to talk to people at government level and I'm currently working on projects in Saudi Arabia and if you have a bit of pieces and it's kind of like that's really who we brought on this round amazing.

Ryan Grant Little: 24:05

so, from the king of England to asian kutcher and everything in between, so some household names there. Where is the best place for people to find you online?

Adam Root: 24:16

I'm sorry I'm not in the streets. For website. You can hit us up with an instagram account and linkedin. I'm a big fan of. I think linkedin is probably my platform. I think it's where you get the most disruption. Go talk to those leaders and go speak to people. You can go Knock on anybody's door, which I love. I love coming and kind of see what's going on. So, yeah, hit me up on linkedin or you know the matter, matta linkedin as well. Check us out. We're always posting what are wonderful things. Reason cs last week. We've been in back years of inia. We've been all over the world. Are we in Malaysia today as well? So, yeah, it's up with coming to us in the.

Ryan Grant Little: 24:53

Awesome, believe it there and thanks a lot for being here really appreciate it.

Adam Root: 24:56

Thanks, lovely to check you out.

Ryan Grant Little: 24:59

Thanks for listening to another climate tech podcast. It would mean a lot if you would subscribe, rate and share this podcast. Get in touch anytime with tips and guest recommendations at hello at climate tech pod dot com. Find me, ryan grant little, on linkedin. I'll be back with another episode next week. Bye for now.