Plastic that Won’t Last Forever: Kristin Taylor and the Radical Plastics Story

Paul Shapiro: [00:00:00] Welcome to The Business for Good Podcast, a show where we spotlight companies making money by making the world a better place. I'm your host, Paul Shapiro, and if you share a passion for using commerce to solve many of the world's most pressing problems, then this is the show for you. Hello and welcome to episode 72 of the Business for Good.

Podcast. I was heartened by the reaction to the last episode, which featured my friend and colleague Donny Crook's journey from ascending the Ranks of Goodwill to ultimately becoming the Executive Vice President of the Better Miko. If you didn't listen to that, please do go back and check out episode 71.

Paul Shapiro: I think you'll really like it. One listener Maya rode in saying and I, and I'm quoting her. I really appreciated Donny's story, especially that she left the comfort of a stable job for the insecurity of life at an early stage. Well, Maya, I certainly agree with you. It can be a harrowing experience to join startup land at any point in your life, but especially after an established career with guaranteed benefits that just don't often come with early stage startups.

Now, that is a bold move, and that is [00:01:00] exactly what our guest in this episode did as well. After a multi-decade career in the plastics industry, including working at a small company you might have heard of called ExxonMobil, Kristin Taylor decided to take the entrepreneurial plunge and form her own startup radical plastics to help plastic manufacturers make their conventional plastics actually biodegradable.

Now, if you're already listening to this podcast, you likely know all the concerns there are about the gargantuan quantities of plastic that humanity is producing and how nearly none of it gets recycled and it lasts in the environment. For c. In fact, pretty much every piece of plastic we've ever made that hasn't been incinerated still exists, whether polluting our waterways or highways, beach shores, or in our landfills, because you already know of that.

We don't talk at all in this episode about the problem of plastics. We only talk about the solution that Kristen is pursuing. Radical plastics is essentially asking the question, What if all that plastic lining our hides or sitting in the ocean would actually biodegrade? That is the promise of the technology that they are pioneer.[00:02:00]

They've discovered a mineral concoction that when added during the manufacturing of conventional plastic, at even less than 1% will eventually convert that plastic into food that microbes will recognize and eat. In other words, they can make conventional plastic once it's in the environment. Actually, biodegrade.

The name Radical Plastics has a double meaning, one of which is obvious, but the other relates to the fact that the degradation of the plastic they're enabling comes from a free radical reaction that degrades the polymer. It is an exciting story, but I don't wanna steal Kristin's thunder. So let me let her tell you all about it.

And please do me this favor. If you find this podcast useful, please tell your friends about it, whether in person or on social media or anywhere. Who knows, maybe they'll be inspired to start their own company. That will help ameliorate a serious social problem, and they'll have you to think, maybe they'll even give you some equity before their big ipo.

So share away. I now bring you Kristin Taylor of Radical Plastics. Kristin, welcome to the Business for Good podcast. Thank you, Paul. It's great to be here. Great to be talking with you. I understand. I am actually [00:03:00] talking with a fellow runner, but it sounds like your, uh, like your running career, maybe, uh, a little bit more prolific than mine, but tell me, you're, you're a chronic marathoner, is that what I understand?

Kristin Taylor: I'm a chronic marathoner. I started running marathons. One, I turned 40, figured it was a good time to start. Wow,

Paul Shapiro: nice. Yeah, and at the risk of, of being in polite. How long ago was that? That was about

Kristin Taylor: 13 years ago.

Paul Shapiro: And what's your best time? So,

Kristin Taylor: Oh gosh, I haven't won any marathons, so there's that . Ok. Alright.

I can tell you that much. I wouldn't be any, you know, any Olympic times that you've seen,

Paul Shapiro: so they're pretty impressive to see these folks getting down, like in the women to like under two 30 and the men down to two. It's like, you know, it's very awesome. Yeah, it's pretty amazing.

Kristin Taylor: I just used it. I as an excuse to travel, sign up for one.

Six to 12 months in advance, and then you have an excuse

Paul Shapiro: to go there. Yeah, I, I understand that. Well, I am a, uh, one and done marathoner, so I which one? I'm curious. I did the Marine Corps marathon in 2013. It did not go as [00:04:00] expected. I had all these grandiose visions. My father had run it like 30 years prior, and I had these grandiose visions of beating his time, and sadly, I just really caved, like mid race, so it wasn't even at the 20 mile point.

I, I run 20 miles several times in Prepar. But for whatever reason, I started cramping up. I never walked during any part of it, but I dramatically slowed down during the, the back half and, and it was, it was not good. And so it's always unpredictable. I've done, uh, dozens of halves though, at least, so I don't know if that counts, like as a few whole marathons to doing dozens of haves.

I don't know. That's how it feels like to me.

Kristin Taylor: I guess. I hear you. Hals are great. There's much less chance of dying. So .

Paul Shapiro: Yeah. Yeah. I, I like reducing my mortality risk. So, you know, it's pretty interesting though because, you know, you made this, uh, pretty substantial lifestyle shift after 40 into the world of long distance running.

You also made a significant lifestyle shift into the world of entrepreneurship. You know, you hear a lot of people who are entrepreneurs who are coming straight out of college, or maybe they went to get an [00:05:00] MBA or something, but you know, you have a traditional career in the plastics industry that led you to at a different time of your life to actually get involved in entrepreneurship.

So lemme just first hear Kristen, about your time in the plastics industry. Like you're not new to this at all. What was it that got you into plastic and what have you done in plastic for the last couple decades, or really few decades, I should say? Right. ,

Kristin Taylor: I, I actually went into school as a computer science major, and then I happened to walk by the plastics lab and I saw that they were making hula hoops and ice scrapers and Nerf footballs, and I thought, This is really fun.

I actually do this instead. I went to University of Massachusetts at Lowell, which is kind of renowned for their plastics program. So I have a master's in plastics engineering and I spent the first half of my career with a, a little company called Exxon Mobil. You might have heard of them. Have you heard of them once or twice?

I think it's a startup, right? It is. Its, it was actually, I went to work for Mobile chemical company, which was then used by Exxon. It was great experience actually. I met some fantastic people, just some amazing talent, and I got to really get [00:06:00] a, a very broad view of the plastics industry. I started out in tech service, climbing all over equipment, troubleshooting issues.

My territory was North Central and South America, so it was quick go to Brazil and solve this problem and don't come back until it solves. It was a really fun indoctrination into the plastics industry, and then I moved into account manage. Particularly in the flexible packaging space. So ExxonMobil at the time was making oriented polypropylene films, which are the primary flexible packaging substrate.

So I got the call on Coca-Cola and Fred Olay and all of these great companies trying to do innovative things in the flex Pack. So that was a lot of fun. And I left ExxonMobil around 2001 when I had my first child. I had three kids in three years, figured that would be efficient. I helped my husband start a business and then, you know, when I went back into the plastics industry, which I was excited to.

I didn't really wanna go back to kind of a big established company. I wanted to do something different. So there was a bioplastics company that was an MIT spinoff in Cambridge, Massachusetts called [00:07:00] Metabolics, and so I was there. I went there and was in charge of business development there for about seven years.

And that's where I met my co-founder, Yona Kahn, Uh, and Dr. Conn, she's just an incredible polymer scientist. Really innovative, really creative, and just a brilliant PhD polymer chemist. So we had a lot of fun at Metabolics trying to commercialize bioplastic materials, uh, which seemed really awesome. Oh, it's made from corn, you know, isn't that fantastic?

It's biodegradable. But we learned through that experience that it was a lot more challenging than we expected. First of all, the material didn't look and active perform like conventional plastics. It was a lot more brittle. It was incredibly hard to process. It had a very narrow processing window, so if you went over a certain temperature, you would melt it and then if you went over a certain temperature, it would start to smoke.

And it was really, really challenging to process. And in addition, it was around five times more expensive than anything we were trying to replace. So the gamut of applications that were available to us really got a lot more narrow as we went. Given the price point. So we realized that anything [00:08:00] that really would solve the plastic pollution problem had to be cost effective.

It had to be a drop in replacement for what people were using now. It had to perform the same and Biodegradability just had to be an added benefit. So, uh, we, uh, left that company around 2013 and I went our separate ways. Uh, I went to, which is the old GE Plastics, another big oil company. And then I spent a few years at Huntsman Corporation.

Uh, so I kind of went back to the big established plastic company, but you know, we kept longing for a solution for this plastic pollution problem, and Elaina and I felt strongly that it needed to be solved from inside the industry. So Eina made this fantastic discovery around 2017. She was reading a patent for this fine mineral matter, which is a waste product that comes from the mining.

Basically when they mine things like coal, you know everything with caloric value. All the carbon goes in one pile, and then all the dirt, minerals and everything else they dig up, goes in another pile. They were trying to find applications for all of these waste materials. [00:09:00] And this unique fine gray powder they found had a really great balance of transition metals, alkaline, alkaline earth metals that were healthy for the ground.

So they were selling it into agriculture as a soil conditioner, and farmers would blend it with the soil to make their soil healthier and make their plants healthier for the next growing season. But she looked at the chemistry of this fine mineral powder and said, kind of had this aha moment and said, I can use this to degrade plastic.

So she got some of this material. Again, it's just a fine gray mineral powder, and she blended it with conventional plastics and made some, some very thin film. Laid it out in her backyard in Marblehead, Massachusetts over the summer of 2017. Literally, this was her test plot of land after around three months.

It still looked like film. It was a little more brittle, but it still looked, It felt like polyethylene film. She said, Well, that was a fun experiment. And in September she folded it up and put it in an envelope and put it in her cold, dark basement and forgot. And she came back around six months later and looked in the envelope, happened to find the envelope, and [00:10:00] there were these just fine waxy flakes left of the film.

And she thought, Wow, this is really interesting. Maybe this did work. And she checked the molecular and the chemical composition of that material, and she found it had degraded into essentially what was a biodegradable wax. So that's when she started filing, um, a provisional patent on the technology in early 2000.

And she gave me a call and she said, I think I'm really onto something. And we joined an accelerator program called Cleantech Open, which is a fantastic national program for young startup companies. And it was really like a startup boot camp because both of us had been with kind of established companies our whole career and we didn't really know how to go from there to 60 on a brand new company, a brand new concept.

So we did clean tech open kind of just nights and weekends while we had our, our regular day. And, uh, we were a finalist in the fall of 2018 in the Cleantech Open Northeast Division. So we got to go to nationals in Los [00:11:00] Angeles, which was super fun. And at the end of January of 2019, we actually won the national competition.

Wow, congratulations. Yeah. Based on this technology. And a lot of it came from the fact that we were from the industry, so we knew the players, like we knew the problems we had. We had been there, done that before, so we had kind of a, a leg up on some of. Of younger, more new entrepreneurs who didn't know a lot about their market.

So that's when we started talking with investors. We raised a small round in August of 2019, and that allowed us to quit our day jobs and do this full time. Nice.

Paul Shapiro: Kristin, what's a small round? How much was this round?

Kristin Taylor: We did an $800,000 convertible note, and we had been talking with larger VCs who are willing to give us larger chunks of money for larger chunks of the company.

Who had maybe very specific ideas about where to go with the technology, but we ended up going with a smaller, um, VC called Good Growth Capital because we really felt that the woman in charge who was just absolutely fantastic. She [00:12:00] really understood our technology. She understood us. She's a PhD from mit.

She really is, you know, cares about the environment, but also cares about women entrepreneurs and really boosting women entrepreneurship overall. And she just really trusted us, trusted the technology, and trusted our knowledge in the market, and was just such a great supporter of radical plastic. So we went with a smaller round with good growth capital and it was a fantastic.

But that really launched us around two years

Paul Shapiro: ago. That's awesome. So, uh, considering, you know, you're talking about that your investor really understood the technology, help me as a dummy who does not have a PhD in plastics or from MIT or anything like that, I was smart enough to not even apply to mit, so I would not have gone in.

So help me understand though, like, is this a chemical process? Is it a biological process? Like I've seen, for example, there are some. Fun guy that are supposed to be able to like digest, uh, plastic. And I don't think that's what you're doing though. So what is it that is actually degrading the plastic? And then [00:13:00] after that, I wanna talk a little bit more about just what are the, the applications here.

So first and foremost, like how does this actually work? If I were to go look up that provisional patent that you mentioned that your co-founder submitted, what would it say in layman's?

Kristin Taylor: So what we're doing is we're using this fine mineral powder as a natural catalyst to degrade plastics. We're starting with a family of plastics called polyols, and that's made up of polyethylene and polypro.

And polyols are essentially long carbon chains with hydrogens hanging off them. It's a pretty simplistic plastic. It's also around 55% of all plastics made and 65% of all plastic waste that's found in the environment are made of polyols. Um, so it's a really good place to start because it's a huge market.

And solving that problem would be very impactful in the pollution. So what this natural catalyst does, we add it, we blend it with these conventional plastics, just around one half to 1% in the manufacturing process. So we buy base resins from all the major manufacturers, polyethylenes [00:14:00] from all the major manufacturers, and we formulate with our catalyst and very specific co catalysts and inhibitors and antioxidants because it's really, it's not just a abs magic powder to anything, and it will become biodegradable.

It really is in the formulation. C.

Paul Shapiro: So to be clear then, Kristin, this is not a solution for plastic that is currently made. Like you couldn't take a whole bunch of plastic and put it in a, in some industrial plant and compost it with your mineral powder here.

Kristin Taylor: Right. Although we're looking at the use of this catalyst in chemical recycling, because we have found that in gasification, for example, it can reduce the energy requirements for chemical recycling by almost.

So we are looking at this catalyst in chemical recycling, and not only in gasification, but also in pyrolysis. But our initial entry into the market is blending it with conventional plastics when you're, when you're making them, so that they're kind of a drop in replacement for what people are using now.[00:15:00]

And the way that the catalyst works is it's, once it's in the environment, it looks and acts like a regular plastic. If it were sitting on the shelf in a store in your house, it wouldn't. But if it leaks into the environment, it would cause this two stage degradation process. And the first stage, the abiotic stage or chemical stage of this degradation, this catalyst kicks in and it starts to reduce the, those long polymer chains into the very, very, very small polymer chains, what they call a liers.

But it also changes the material chemically. It adds oxygen groups onto the backbone of the polymer to make it go from a hydrophobic material to a hydrophilic material. So it really changes the chemistry of the plastic and breaks it down, breaks down that molecular way. It breaks down those long molecular chains.

Until it's in a state that it can be digested by microbes that live in the environment. So that's the second stage of degradation, is the biotic phase where microbes, whether in in the soil or in the ocean or in fresh water, can actually consume this [00:16:00] material. They see it as a food source, as a carbon source.

They consume this material and they degrade it into co2 and. And there are these trace minerals left over. But again, these are just minerals that have come from the ground that were returning to the environment and it's only around one half to 1% of the formulation.

Paul Shapiro: Cool. So, you know, I'm wondering here then, Kristin, like let's say I have a plastic lawn chair that is out in the environment, like it's in my backyard.

Is that gonna biodegrade?

Kristin Taylor: It could. So that's not a great application. , you know, sometimes the most sustainable option is to make things more durable so that you don't have to replace that lawn chair every five years.

Okay.

Paul Shapiro: So, so this is really for indoor plastic use, which of course, I'm sure is nearly all plastic use, but you know, you don't want this to, you know, I don't wanna get into my lawn hair and just fall through it.

And you, you probably

Kristin Taylor: don't. You probably don't. But we're really targeting applications that like packaging or like agricultural film. That are used short term and then have high incidents of leakage into the environment.

Paul Shapiro: So let's talk about that first application, cuz I know [00:17:00] if you drive by a farm sometimes you'll see like they have this black plastic film that is there to prevent weeds from growing and, and to retain the moisture in the soil and so on.

Those are just regular old plastic. They're not going to biodegrade. You're saying that you can put when they're manufacturing that you can put it in at our M one. And then it's in the sun all day in the soil. So what's gonna prevent it from degrading? Or is it just that it'll take too long to degrade that it's not inhibited for the user?

Great

Kristin Taylor: question. So yeah, we add around one half to 1% into regular black polyethylene. So the film looks and acts and performs just like the plastic mulch film that growers are used to. And the way we design the formulation is we include not only the catalyst but inhibitor. So we can include different types and amounts of inhibitors that save off that degradation reaction as long as we want, we can control that service life of the material anywhere from around two months to around two years.

So the film we're making now, um, is designed to last outside for [00:18:00] around six months. And then once that inhibitor is used up, then the catalyst kicks in and starts to degrade the material. Cool.

Paul Shapiro: So why would a farmer use this? I mean, of course they environmentally conscious. Person who is farming would say, I'm using this cuz I, I don't wanna create plastic pollution in the environment.

But is there an economic benefit? Like is there some other tangible benefit to the user aside from not damaging the planet?

Kristin Taylor: There's a huge tangible benefit and that's, that's why we're starting with agricultural films right now. Farmers pay an average of around $180 an acre to put down this film, and then they pay an average of anywhere from 150 to $250 an acre to collect and dispose of it at the end of the season.

So it's a really big expense, um, depending on labor rates and shipping. This material can't be recycled cuz it's covered in dirt and chemicals. So it's extremely hard to recycle and expensive to recycle. So farmers either have to landfill it or incinerate it, and some of them do that on the farm, which certainly isn't good for the [00:19:00] environment.

And others pay to have it incinerated, which again produces greenhouse gases. So with the radical plastics film, they just till it into the soil where it degrades in a matter of months. So it really is a cost savings for them at the end of the.

Paul Shapiro: That's great. And is the actual plastic going to cost more or less to purchase?

Like does your half to 1% increase the cost of goods sold for the manufacturer?

Kristin Taylor: There's cost and there's price, Right? So , the good news is, is that it is very cost competitive right now there are other biodegradable mul films on the market that are around two to three times what normal polyethylene film is.

But many of them are very hard to handle. They're very thin, they're very fragile. They get sticky with moisture. They're really hard to handle, but, but growers are trying to use them because they wanna be environmentally friendly. They wanna avoid that cost at the end of the. And those are two to three times more expensive.

Our goal is to make something that's more like one and a half to two times more expensive because it's still very economically favorable for the grower [00:20:00] because they're saving all that money at the end of the season.

Paul Shapiro: That's interesting. Of course, you want to make sure that the doing the right thing doesn't become too cost prohibitive, and presumably if, if in the long term they're saving money, it'll still be an attractive thing for them to.

Kristen, you have talked about the, what is typically the three R's, right? Reduced, reuse, recycled, and you've added another R here. And so tell me why is reduced, reuse, recycle not sufficient? What should we be adding here? Well,

Kristin Taylor: most plastics were designed to be super durable, whether or not they need to be super durable.

I mean, my typical example is a loaf of bread. If you've ever gone to the grocery store to buy a loaf of bread, what's the first thing you do? You look at the expiration. Which is in like a week or two, right? And yet we're packaging that bread in something that if it leaked into the environment would last for a hundred years.

Like that doesn't make any sense at all. We should be redesigning these materials that are used for short term applications. So that they are still [00:21:00] recyclable, right? So that they're still performed the function that they were designed to perform, but if they leak into the environment, they shouldn't last hundreds of years.

My co-founder, Elaina, she, again, she's a brilliant PhD scientist, and she went specifically to this university to study under this gentleman Norman Billingham, because he was kind of the guru, really the the pioneer in terms of polymer stabilization and degradation. And she worked the first half of her career making polymers more.

For applications like automotive where you don't want 'em to break down, and then she spent the second half of her career designing them to be degradable. So we always say reduce, reuse, recycle, but redesign, let's, let's redesign these materials so that it makes more sense. If it's packaging, it doesn't need to last forever.

It needs to last for maybe six months or a year. Needs to perform, still needs to be recyclable and support the circular economy, but we all know that these materials, some of these materials are going to leak into the environment and there's no reason we shouldn't be designing them to degrade if that happens.[00:22:00]

Got

Paul Shapiro: it. So it's a very interesting analogy that you use with regard to the LOPA bread. So, you know, first off, I'll say, when I buy a LOPA bread, I look to see not just the expiration, I look to make sure there's some type of preservative in there, so it will last longer than a week. So I'm like, I'm purposefully looking to make sure there's something that's gonna keep it, uh, longer for me because I may not eat it within a whole.

But what I do then, so let's say I buy that loaf of bread and I take that plastic bag when I'm done and I put it in the trash, and then presumably it's gonna go into a landfill. So if that plastic bag had the radical plastic magic mineral powder in there and it goes into a landfill, will it still biodegrade?

Right. That's a

Kristin Taylor: good question. And it really depends is the answer. It depends on how the landfill is run in a, in a properly run landfill, things are really just in tuned. There's very little oxygen, very little sunlight. And you can dig down in a landfill and find a newspaper from 50 years ago that's still legible.

You can find a carrot from 20 years ago. You know, Whereas those things are thought to be [00:23:00] biodegrade. So if it ended up in a landfill with no oxygen, no sunlight, no, you know, no temperature, it would stay inert like a regular plastic. And sometimes that's what you want, because things that degrade, like food waste produce methane, which is a very potent greenhouse gas.

So sometimes you just want them to stay inert. But our goal really is to send these materials to recycling. Our materials still fully recyclable along with conventional plastic, but if they escape recycling, if they escape the landfill and they end up in the ocean in the environment, again, they won't last forever.

They'll degrade in a reasonable timeframe.

Paul Shapiro: Got it. So it, it doesn't require soil microbes, it could be even oceanic microbes. Correct.

Kristin Taylor: And we're working with two labs on really defining the ocean degradability of our material. So we, it's a very long test, as you can imagine, because the colder temperatures make degradations slower.

But we're working with Woods Hole. We're hoping to work with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Uh, we're talking with them right now. And also there's another lab up in Maine called Bigelow Lab for [00:24:00] Ocean Sciences. And they've provided such great information and they're so eager to find a better solution because they understand what plastics are doing to the ocean environment.

So they're excited to look at different options for materials that don't salute the ocean long term. That's

Paul Shapiro: cool. So when do you think you'll be in the market? Like when are we gonna see actual radical plastic out on some agricultural field ?

Kristin Taylor: Well, we are on our second summer of beta testing, so we have a formulation.

We tested in seven different locations around the US last summer, including from Florida to California to Maine, all different climates, different crops. Uh, this summer we've tested in 14 different locations, again, expanding our crops, our expanding the, the climate to really get a lot of data points in case studies.

And we'll be selling the radical plastics biodegradable mulch film by the end of 2021, so it will be in the market by the end of this year. We're working with a company called Charter Next Generation. And they sell regular polyethylene mulch film now, and this is just going to be a much [00:25:00] greener, much better option for them to provide to their customers.

So we're selling the pellets to Charter Next Generation and cng Charter Next Generation will be selling the Mulch film and they're just a fantastic partner. They really focus on highly engineered, sustainable solutions. That's really their wheelhouse. Is things that are truly sustainable, that provide outstanding engineering properties.

So, and they have just a wonderful female ceo, which, which is an added benefit. So Kathy is their ceo. So they're just a great partner to work with to bring this first product to

Paul Shapiro: market. What's very exciting, It's very exciting. So are you going to, then, once you start selling, go out and raise another round of funding?

Kristin Taylor: We likely will because this product is pretty easily scalable. It really is quite a drop in replacement for, for regular polyethylene. But we really need to build our team because there's so much interest beyond agriculture. We've been really super focused on agriculture the last two years. But we have a lot of interest from packaging industry, from bags, paper coating, polypropylene [00:26:00] fibers.

I mean, you can imagine over the past year or so, how many masks you've seen, and a lot of those are polypropylene fibers that are, that are not degradable. We can render them degradable if they end up in the environment. So there's so many applications that are suitable for this, this type of technology, and we need to grow our team in order to do that.

So yeah, we'll likely be raising it next around

Paul Shapiro: next. Okay. Uh, that's great. Well, we'll be looking forward to hearing and, and seeing how that goes, Kristen. So lemme just ask you, you know, you are now a few years into your entrepreneurial journey after a multi-decade career in the conventional plastics industry.

So have there been any resources, Kristen, that have been useful for you, that you'd recommend? Like any things that you read or any speeches you heard or anything else that was particularly useful that you would recommend to other people who were thinking, Geez, what she's doing sounds really cool. I'd like to maybe put my hand at it.

Kristin Taylor: Absolutely. You know, I mentioned to my brother-in-law who's, you know, kind of Harvard MBA guy that I wanted to start a company and the one book he recommended that I read was the EMyth Revisit. Michael Gerber and it's subtitled. [00:27:00] Why most small businesses don't work and what to do about it. And it's just a super practical hands on guide to starting and running a small business.

So the EMyth Revisited is definitely one I'd recommend. And then I also heard, I heard a TED Talk by this guy, Chip Conley, and then I bought his book called Peak How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from MAs. And it talks about Maslow's hierarchy of needs and Chip Conley. He founded in his, when he was in his twenties, he founded this boutique hotel group called Ju.

That he sold in 2010, and then I think he became an advisor to Airbnb. But he's just super creative and innovative and an out of the box, big picture thinker. And I remember him saying, Don't tell me that you can't motivate your employees to your big vision. Half of the people who report to me in my hotel group clean toilets for a living, and if I can motivate them around a grand vision, you can motivate your employees.

You know, I mean, he's. A really a practical entrepreneur, but also just kind of a visionary and he provided some [00:28:00] really good insight. Yeah,

Paul Shapiro: that's nice. Yeah. It reminds me of the story when JFK was touring, like one of the NASA facilities, and he asked, uh, a guy who was, who was mopping the floor, what his role was there, and the guy allegedly responded to him helping put a man on the in

Kristin Taylor: exactly.

Yeah, I love that mentality.

Paul Shapiro: I hope that story is true. It sounds kind of apocryphal to me, but I hope it's true. . I do. It's a good story no matter what, and it's a good lesson. What everything that we do is gonna have an impact. Well, I'm very much hoping that you have a major impact. You know, obviously plastics are a huge, huge environmental problem, and I'm hoping that the technology that you are pursuing, Kristin, is going.

Hope to ameliorate some of that problem at least. But if you weren't working on this and you were thinking about maybe other companies that you hope somebody else will start to make a difference in the world, whether on this issue or on others, what other ideas, uh, would you suggest to somebody seeking to start their own company about, uh, [00:29:00] whether it's on plastic or anything else?

Kristin Taylor: Yeah, that's a great question. My pet peeve, honestly, is people who litter and, and trying to change that behavior, I think is so challenging. I mean, I was, when I went over to run the Tokyo Marathon, I was just so incredibly amazed at how clean everything was. And I, I've always thought, you know, how can we create either some kind of force behind anti littering, you know, whether it's a product or service or, or, or marketing message or incentive or system that really changes people's mentality around littering.

I know I always thought, you know, maybe if I could create some super duper incredible plastic that we can incorporate into cigarette, but for example, like when someone drops a cigarette, but on the ground, it should like come back at them in high velocity. It. You know, , if we could, I dunno if I, if I could kinda start a company or create something that would really prevent people from intentionally, you know, destroying the planet through, through littering, that would be, I think an incredible, incredible [00:30:00] company.

That's

Paul Shapiro: interesting. Yeah. You know, I know cigarette butts like make up a huge portion of litter, especially on the beach. And it's so much that even there are now, uh, birds who are utilizing those cigarette butts in their nest because it has like an anti-parasitic effect so that they've actually learned that including those cigarette butts.

In their nest is likely to make their little hatchlings even, uh, healthier. So it's a really amazing, uh, case of like interspecies upcycling, I guess. . I love that. I guess that's good. There is like a little bit of a silver lining, although a very faint one, but Yeah, I know. Um, I think in, uh, in Singapore they have like really serious littering offenses.

Like I think it's like a thousand dollars for a first time offense for littering there, which is one reason why so few people. Yeah, I mean maybe, maybe there's some technology though that if the litter became biodegradable, it's once in the environment, it wouldn't be as big of a deal, So, All right. Well that's really great, Kristin.

Thanks so much. It's wonderful to talk with you. I will be rooting for your success and I can't wait [00:31:00] to see, I can't wait to see, uh, photos of, or video of the radical plastics mulch, uh, liner in the field. See the news about your big fundraising round as well. So, uh, we'll be looking forward to that. And if people wanna find you online, where can they.

Kristin Taylor: They can go to radical-plastics.com. All

Paul Shapiro: right, well, thanks so much, Kristin. Great. Thank

Kristin Taylor: you so much. I appreciate it.

Paul Shapiro: Thanks for listening. We hope you found use in this episode. If so, don't keep it to yourself. Please leave us a five star rating on iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. And as always, we hope you will be in the business of doing good.