#161 Bylon, Recyclable Fibers, Ag Waste to Threads, Innovating Past Mistakes, & More w/ Oliver Shafaat (Sci-Lume Labs)

Fast fashion is destroying the world. Imagine if we could make threads that are fully recyclable ... over and over... Well, that's what Oliver Shafaat is trying to do with Sci-Lume Labs. 

They use agricultural feedstock, and are using low-heat methods so they aim to be able to achieve cost parity. 

What they are working on is difficult, but would be world changing. 

Enjoy the episode! 🌱🌎

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Topics:
**01:16 Intro
**02:16 The Challenges of the Apparel Industry
**04:34 The Inspiration Behind Bylon
**11:45 Evaluating Polymers
**13:59 Starting a Company
**15:22 Funding the Company
**18:45 The Process of Making Fibers
**23:19 Sourcing Feedstocks
**25:27 The Sustainability of Bylon
**28:31 Recyclability and End-of-Life
**30:21 IP and Business Model
**32:04 Scaling Up and Challenges Ahead
**34:58 Pilot Conversations
**38:49 Interest from Clothing Manufacturers

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Links:
**Oliver Shafaat | Sci-Lume Labs
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**@Silas & @Somil_Agg on X 

Transcript

Somil Aggarwal (00:01)
Alright Oliver, welcome to the show. How are you?

Oliver Shafaat (00:03)
Yeah, I'm good. Thanks, man. Thanks for having me.

Somil Aggarwal (00:06)
Really excited to have you on. Fiber and decarbonizing that space is not something we get to talk about that often. So really, really happy to be talking with you today. Just give us a quick rundown. What do you do today?

Oliver Shafaat (00:18)
Yeah, so I'm the founder of Siloam Labs and we make Bylon, which is our circular fiber for apparel and other applications. So yeah, that's what we're doing, which we're trying to sort of actually make a scalable, sustainable solution to the apparel industry, which is difficult to say the least.

Somil Aggarwal (00:37)
I think one of the things that really stands out about fashion and apparel is it's a clear emission sector. There's really a lot of problems with it, but it's also not that easy to tackle despite how big of a market it is. So I'd love to just hear what your thoughts are, how big of a market it really is and why is it so difficult?

Oliver Shafaat (00:57)
Yeah, I mean, I think that it's incredibly difficult, but I would say it's probably just as difficult as all the other industries. You know, it's not necessarily as big or as flashy as like cars or planes or something like that. And I would say that we don't really necessarily think about it as much, or at least I never did before I got into the industry. So at Sci-Lume Labs we're making fibers. And so I sort of think about the [textile] industry as the fibers. That's like the polyester, the cotton, the nylon, the wool that goes into your clothes, right?

And so, you know, that industry, We make over a hundred million tons of fibers for apparel every year, and that's just for apparel. And you know, half of that, a little over half of that is polyester, then you have cotton, and then you sort of go down from there. And so it's a huge amount of material, and you know, a hundred million tons isn't a number that I can like comprehend. So I sort of, I've done the back of the envelope calculation. And if you think about just synthetic textile, so like your nylon, your polyester, your acrylic,

You make over 20, the equivalent of 20 747's worth of synthetic textiles every hour, like global. And so, I mean, we're making a ton of fibers. And so, you know, one challenge is we have to replace that amount of fibers with something else, right? And it's a huge amount, right? But then the other challenge, another challenge is that, you know, the industry is incredibly fragmented and, you know, we don't necessarily know where our fibers come from and there

on this and everybody talks about the transparency and transparency is gonna be key across sort of the climate sector, but that's especially true in the apparel industry as well. And I think that also makes it hard to, for brands to choose better solutions, for example. And so it's just, it's an incredibly complex and fragmented industry that also is at scale, right? And people don't think about it because you don't really think about where your clothes come from.

Somil Aggarwal (02:55)
I think being within Climate VC myself, I see a lot of attention going towards circular economy, reusing fibers, reusing materials. There's also now what you're talking about, which is a creation of those materials and tackling it from that side. How did this side of the problem come on your radar?

Oliver Shafaat (03:15)
Yeah, so I'm actually, I'm a chemist by training. And so I got my PhD from Caltech. It's I'm like, I'm like a super nerd, right? And then, you know, I, I spent, you know, six years in the sub basement in Southern California, right? That was my happy spot in Southern California, not the beach. Right. So, you know, that tells you a little bit about me. Um, but like, yeah, so I moved to Japan right after, and that's, I support for biotech and I started making fibers and I really liked it personally because we had this like physical thing that I was like making after designing it, you know, on the computer or whatever. Right.

And then I got reading about the science of it. And like, as a science there, and I was like, there's so much cool physics and chemistry and, you know, engineering that goes into making fibers. And so that got me really excited and really wanting to, you know, make fibers. And that's sort of how I got at it, because like, I'm not fashionable. I don't care about that. Like, you know, it's sort of like not at all. It's comical to me that I sort of operate in the fashion space because like, I like.

this shirt that I'm wearing is over 10 years old and I bought off of like Nordstrom's rack like at like, you know, a heavily discounted, which maybe also speaks towards the problem that I just wasn't aware of initially, right? And so that's sort of how I got into it. And you know, it's just sort of, I really liked the fibers and the science behind it, but also I was just absolutely shocked by the scale of it and how, you know, nobody is really willing to compromise because frankly speaking.

the fibers we make are really good and really cheap, whether it's polyester or cotton. Brands have a fiduciary responsibility, most brands do, to their shareholders and that's to make the most amount of money. I think that what we need to do, there's a lot of talk around recycling, and I think that's incredibly good because we've already put a lot of energy into making that material.

not have to completely discard that and then put that amount of energy in again is much better in terms of footprint. But practically speaking, less than 1% or 1% of clothing gets recycled back to clothing. It's often downcycled or recycled polyester often comes from the bottle industry. And now the bottle industry wants their clothing back or their bottles back. And so we have to find a different way. And so we need to make...

Somil Aggarwal (05:33)
Right.

Oliver Shafaat (05:36)
the material, not using oil, but also not using significant amounts of other resources. And you know, that we need to, for example, grow food because while I think we all need clothing, I think I would argue we all need food more than we need clothing. And so we need to make sure that we're not sort of disrupting that as well. And it's just, it's an interesting problem. I mean, you know, it's like, how do we, how do we basically replace a perfect material that is cheap and

Somil Aggarwal (05:53)
Right.

Oliver Shafaat (06:04)
really high performing and really versatile with something that's better. And it's just, I mean, it's challenging and that's sort of, I like it.

Somil Aggarwal (06:06)
Right.

Right. The bottom line is a major concern. The usability is a major concern. Siloom Labs, your name to fame. I think this is a perfect transition. You call it Bylon. So what is Bylon?

Oliver Shafaat (06:26)
Yeah. Well, bylon came out of, you know, a night of few too many tall boys of PBR and I was like, Oh, but I did have the wherewithal to write it down on my phone. And so, you know, I, at least, you know, it wasn't that many PBRs. Um, so bylon is our bio-based, biodegradable, recyclable, thermoplastic polymer. And so I think the coolest technology to me is

It's a thermoplastic. And so what that means from a technical side is we can use the exact same infrastructure, the exact same machines that are used to make nylon or polyester fibers to make bylon. You know, we make 80 million tons of these fibers and so we know it's technology that can scale. Basically, all you do is you put in a solid, you heat it up, you push it out tiny holes and you get your yarns. I mean, that's effectively how synthetic fibers are made. And so

It's incredibly land efficient. It's incredibly energy efficient, water efficient. So it's like, it's the most efficient way to make fibers and we know it can scale and it's the cheapest too. And so that was sort of what I wanted to do in creating Bylon was make sure that we had a way to scale the fibers to the million, 10 million, 100 million ton, right? And I'm under no delusion that I'm gonna be making 100 million tons next year, right? But you know, that technology exists. And I think that was the key part.

as well as being able to sort of have responsible sort of beginning and end of life characteristics, which is also important.

Somil Aggarwal (07:55)
So let's go back a little bit to the inspiration behind Bylon. Of course, you now have identified a problem. The technology is really cool. Was it easy to see that this is applicable in this case? Because I think you'll see a lot of people in climate, I think materials is a big discussion, new biodegradable, biogenic materials for construction, for example, a lot of times you're looking at a blank slate and it's actually pretty cool how AI is identifying, oh, this compound might work, this compound might work.

I'm guessing you didn't go through that kind of process because you might've been your own genius in this matter, but how did you really go about identifying material to use case and scoping out that scale, like you said?

Oliver Shafaat (08:34)
Yeah, I mean, I did not use AI. I think that genius is probably way too generous of a term. Fool is probably foolhardy maybe. So, I mean, literally how [bylon] started was I, I put my infant son at that point down, they were toddler son down to bed and then I would get on my computer and read 1930s patents and papers just being like, okay, like there has to be a better way to do this [make fibers]. Like what have we done in the past?

Is there any inspiration that we can take from that? A lot of the original polymers were made from bio-based feedstocks because we didn't actually have the oil or coal or petrochemical industry back in the 30s like we do today. They took these monomers from bio-based feedstocks and they would make them. There's a lot of development of polymers that was done. I started there and I'm like, okay.

Well, and also for me, you know, I came from a fiber, you know, textile apparel background, you know, for my professional life. And I'm like, you know, that's my experience. I'm like, okay, what's a polymer that could make a good fiber? And then, okay, maybe these maybe these four polymers could make a good fiber. Okay, let's read more. Okay, this one can be bio based. Okay, maybe this one can't. This one is biodegradable. This one's not, you know, stuff like that. And I just sort of

narrowed it down from there and that's you know sort of how I came to the idea for what is now violin on paper at least.

Somil Aggarwal (10:09)
So you mentioned knowing polymers. Actually, I would love to hear at a high level. None of us are really experts here, but how do you evaluate a polymer? How does that really work, especially here?

Oliver Shafaat (10:23)
How do you evaluate? I mean, so you can think about it all you want on paper, in the cloud, or whatever you want to call it. Right? And I think there's no way to know until you actually make it and you test it. And we're sort of at that next phase where we can make a little bit of the art and we can do some tests, but really we need to make more so we can test more. Right? But there are some... I mean...

chemical intuition, for lack of a better word, which is not necessarily my favorite term. There are classes of polymers that behave better as fibers, and there are classes of polymers that behave better as films, for example. You can look at those general chemical underlying molecular structures and be like, okay, this is maybe going to be an okay fiber. Let's run with it.

Silas Mähner (11:15)
So I'm kind of curious, when you were in your past role, were they not working on sustainable fibers and they were just working on different kinds of fibers and you're like, hey, this is crazy, I actually want to do something more sustainable because I want to understand the transition if you were already working in sustainable fibers, why start your own company?

Oliver Shafaat (11:33)
Yeah. I mean, I think that, uh, I mean, you know, hebrus maybe, uh, no, I mean, the, so I was in fibers, I was running the fiber R and D team that doing sustainable fibers and, you know, it sort of comes back to this scale thing. And it's just, can we make enough fibers because we need to make, we need to have scalable technology in order to have adoption because the costs need to go down.

We need to have scalable technology in order to make significant, impositive environmental impacts. And I think that something that frustrated me was I saw a limitation to the lack of scale, um, in the process. And it was coupled with a bunch of other stuff, you know, personal and other professional things. And we moved back, I moved back to Japan, uh, from Japan to the States. And that's, you know, sort of when I was like, okay, I'm going to start my own company or at least, you know, give it the old college try.

Silas Mähner (12:15)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And did you have any major, I guess... I always like to understand the gap between having a job and then going to start your own thing. Was there a lot of hesitation there where you're just kind of like, you know what, I'm going to do this? And it just kind of sent it straight. I want to understand how you went from not doing it to doing it, that gap.

Oliver Shafaat (12:44)
Yeah, I mean, you know, it was coupled with a lot of like, I moved across the country, I moved across the world, I moved, you know, was resettling, you know, I didn't actually I'm based in Oklahoma City area right now, I didn't actually grow up here. And so like, there was the culture shock of like moving back to the States after five years and moving to a new city, you know, I grew up on the west coast. And so it was very different. And I think that there's just all of these things that made it just be like, oh, like, it was just another thing, right? Like, these are all very large life sort of.

things and it's like, Oh yeah, I guess I'm like starting a company now. And you know, it sort of started out, I was shocked how easy you can like form an LLC by like typing a few buttons on, you know, in a form like typing, you know, into a form online. I'm like, okay, I have an LLC. And then I'm like, all right, like, I guess I'm going to do this. And so, you know, I spent some time, um, you know, on the computer, like reading like all of the blogs that are like, how to start your own company and stuff like that, um, I'm like, okay, I think I can do this.

And so it sort of was like a thing that happened. Wow, you know, I also was undergoing a lot of other major life changes.

Silas Mähner (13:50)
Yeah. And how did you fund it? Like, how did you get the funding to continue? I'm assuming at some point you raised money. I just want to understand, like, you know, because it sounds like you didn't necessarily plan to do this, but there has to be funding to make it work.

Oliver Shafaat (14:04)
Yeah, so we, yeah, so in Japan, you know, I worked in Japan for almost five years, we paid into the Japanese pension system. They actually, if you work a certain amount of time and under a certain amount of time, you can take your pension out as a lump sum. And so I got a lump sum of my pension back and my wife did too. And so that was sort of our bootstrapping, you know, like

Silas Mähner (14:22)
Ah, okay.

Oliver Shafaat (14:29)
I obviously had some very serious conversations with my wife about this. And you know, like, okay, this is like the amount of money we're comfortable putting in ourselves. And you know, and so put in some money and then a friend of mine who's a professor, like let me come and work in his lab on the down, he's a chemistry professor. And he like, let me like come and use like his equipment and work on the lab on the download to like make the original material and like sort of suss out the idea of like, is this polymer like tractable?

Silas Mähner (14:38)
Yeah.

Oliver Shafaat (14:59)
And, you know, that I was like, okay, like, I guess, you know, it might be. And then, so that's sort of like how we initially got started. And then, you know, sort of with the bootstrapping, I was able to do the first proof of concept or MVP or whatever you want to call it. Right. And, you know, I was able to make the material and then I was able to turn that material into, you know, melt process it, right. So I was able to like push it out a melt processing machine and get, you know, something that doesn't really work.

I mean, like 3D printing filament, but like super like not even. And then, you know, and then with that, I was able to raise a little bit of angel money from a friend of mine, which was, you know, I mean, he was our first, you know, investor and that really gave us a little bit of breathing room. And you know, it's all it's all got into sort of pushing the technology. You know, I mean, everyone's like, Oh, you got to get to your MVP. Well, it's not really you don't have one MVP. You have like.

Silas Mähner (15:30)
Yeah.

Oliver Shafaat (15:56)
your first one and then your second one, then your third one, then your fourth one, right? Especially I find in lab. And then, you know, we also were part of the, then that led us to being accepted to the generator accelerator, um, in Oklahoma city in the first cohort. And, you know, sort of like a little bit, a little bit of steps, like these are, you know.

Silas Mähner (16:13)
Yeah. Well, at the early stage or something like this, what is the major cost, right? Is it just renting a lab? Is that the cost or are there a lot of other like major costs initially while you're doing R&D?

Oliver Shafaat (16:28)
I mean, it's all R&D costs. You know, I've found we have some really good consultants that have been amazing. And you know, and I mean, that's where all of our money basically goes. I mean, we have like the Google G Suite or whatever, right? But that's like $12 a month or something like that. I mean, you know, we're yeah, it's all it's all R&D. You know, I mean, we have to buy the material, we have to test the material, you know, and this is, you know, it's not like cheap necessarily to do this. And there isn't there.

Silas Mähner (16:43)
Yeah.

Yeah, okay. Yeah, I'm just always curious because people talk about this and if you don't work in a lab and you're not doing this stuff, it's kind of like super unknown, like what your actual costs are, right? A tech startup is one thing because you're like, oh, we've got to have software and pay people, right? That's about it. But this is good. So I appreciate you kind of giving us some transparency there and helping us understand that. I'm really curious to just get into the tech a bit more. So obviously, we're not experts at this, right? So can you kind of explain very broadly speaking...

how does this technology work? You take, I mean, I want to understand the conventional and then what you're doing. So X raw material is done this too, and then this happens, and then it becomes, you know, it's sold to the person who then turns it into clothing. Can you just walk us through that process and then how you're different?

Oliver Shafaat (17:41)
Yeah, so traditional, we'll do synthetic. And we can do cotton as well. So we get oil out of the ground. And you know, this is sorry, this is a tangent, but you know, people are always like, oh, we used to use all of the like sheep or whatever back in the day. Well, I mean, we use all of the oil that we suck up out of the ground, we use every single last microliter of it. So like we got we're really good at using that resource. But we you know, we take oil out of the ground. We do some.

chemistry on it and then we make polyester that's then made into a yarn. That yarn is then, or the polyester could be made into bottles. People don't necessarily realize this, but you're like hot bottles are the same material that your clothing is. So that's always interesting. It's the same polymer. So yeah, so we make yarns. That yarn is often sold to somebody who then does one value added.

thing onto it who then passes it down the chain and eventually it is, you know, branded and you can go into your store and buy a t-shirt for example. Cotton, you know, is a little bit different where we're growing it, right? And so, you know, we have your farmers, you're putting a lot of pesticides, water, fertilizer, all of that stuff. You grow the cotton, it goes, you know, gets ginned, it gets, you know, spun into yarn and then it sort of is the same, right? And you can always, you can mix and match sort of.

you can mix cotton and polyester, which is very commonly done. So what we're doing is we are taking agricultural waste, so something that is a byproduct of large industrial agriculture. At bioethanol production, so for sustainable air fuel, they have a huge waste stream, and so we can take that. Chicken feathers, for example, is another one that we could theoretically take.

So we take that and then we put it in the pot. We do our little chemistry on it and then we do that a few times and then we make a polymer that is bylon. And so we're doing chemistry. We're not doing synthetic biology. We're not doing fermentation. We're doing just chemical reactions using standard. Well, right now we're doing five gallon buckets literally, which is great because five gallon buckets are a lot cheaper than reactor vessels and also sort of proves the scalability.

So we make basically a polymer that then can drop into the exact same downstream processing as polyester and nylon or cotton, right? Where, you know, for we make a yarn just like we would polyester and nylon. And then, you know, we made, we made, uh, one yarn right now, and then we dropped it into a standard knitting machine and it knit up and then I dyed it on the stove with my, you know, five-year-old son. And then I put it in my washer and dryer because we're Americans and we wash and dry and you know, it's like.

And so the point is that we're combining the best of both the synthetic and natural fibers where we're using bio-based renewable but waste feedstocks, which is important. But we're doing highly efficient chemistry that has the infrastructure out there that can scale, that doesn't take a lot of energy. So it's like the feedstocks are natural, but then the chemistry is all similar to the synthetics and then it drops in.

you know, to the same, you know, infrastructure that's there. And I think that that's incredibly important, primarily to keep costs down, which will then drive adoption, right? Because it's, you know, frankly speaking, it's all cost related, mostly.

Somil Aggarwal (21:16)
Right. And so I think it's very clear to see there's some retrofitting going on. This sustainability of it, I think is going to be really cool to see where that comes from. Before we get there. I mean, one aspect of it is definitely the retrofitting of the waste, like you mentioned, um, from, you know, agriculture and then other sources. I want to walk through your experience so far and maybe what you're thinking going ahead about sourcing that. Has it been an easy process? Has it been something that you have to think about? What is that like? And how does that factor into the growth of this material?

Oliver Shafaat (21:46)
Yeah, I mean, it has not been an easy pro, like it's not something that I am at all sort of have experience in or, you know, have done in the past. You know, thankfully, you know, I'm in the state of Oklahoma, it's incredibly, you know, agriculture is a very large part of the economy here, all throughout the plains. Industrial ethanol production is also huge in the plains as well. And so, you know,

you know, there, there is that like low cow, which is very nice. And so I've started to, you know, talk with some of the people at the, you know, the local like farm board and everything like that to try to figure out how to do this, but like, I can like go online and, you know, buy chicken feathers or whatever, right? Like that is something that I can do right now. Um, but you know, going forward, like we need to do this at scale. And so I need to talk with those people who understand that. And that's, you know, definitely something that is out of sort of my comfort zone or experience.

Silas Mähner (22:43)
Got it. So there's not an existing necessarily massive supply chain for these alternative feed socks is what you're saying.

Oliver Shafaat (22:52)
I think it's out there. I just don't think I know where it is yet. This is a commodity that is traded. It is a commodity that is traded. You can look up a price and it might even be on the USDA website. USDA has commodity prices for very common stuff. But I just don't know where it is yet.

Silas Mähner (22:57)
Yeah.

Okay.

Okay, interesting. Okay. So you just got to find the person who is trading and he'll know who ships it around. But okay, interesting. So that's pretty fascinating. We could probably talk about supply chain more, but it sounds like it's there. It's just a matter of like getting plugged into the system and getting that infrastructure, which is usually not connected to making clothing or fibers. They're just disconnected currently, right? You just got to couple them up. But I want to understand in your process, what aspects...

Oliver Shafaat (23:16)
Yeah.

Silas Mähner (23:38)
makes it sustainable. So you said it's better with energy. I'm assuming there's a bit better with water usage. How is it more sustainable and what specific ways?

Oliver Shafaat (23:49)
Yeah, I mean, I think that it depends on how you define sustainability, right? And, you know, I want to be fully transparent. We don't have a pulmonary LCA. Like we're still a little bit too early to even for even that to be possible or informative in the future. That's something that we're looking at doing this year. You know, I think that how I've looked at that right now is, you know, we can use waste as a feedstock, which is good.

what they call a Gen 2 feedstock. And so we're not taking away arable land. But if you look at LCAs of, for example, clothing, if you look at the ones that have been published in academic journals, they compare polyester, nylon, cotton, whatever, you see that cotton is really good on sort of the feedstock front, except for water usage.

because it comes from bio-based renewable feedstocks, and nylon and polyester are not because they come from oil that we're digging up, right? So we're a depletion of resources there. But then if you look downstream, nylon, polyester have basically zero impact on, have zero emissions, for example, for the yarn formation, right? And I think that is because of the processing method because it is incredibly efficient. They don't use any water or stuff.

I think that is sort of how I am looking at the sustainability. And then on the end of life, you know, we're designing recyclability into it. And we're working on that at least lab on the lab scale, trying to, you know, establish that technology, but also sort of I'm.

I'm not an influencer, I'm not a fashion person, I'm not gonna pretend that I can change how you behave with your clothes. And right now, almost all clothing is thrown away. And so I want to make sure that if or when it does end up in our environment, it doesn't stay there forever. And so, you know, it is also biodegradable. And I think that that's sort of how I'm thinking about it, right, we don't want it floating around, you know, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch for hundreds of years, right, and so that's sort of the other aspect.

Silas Mähner (25:37)
Yeah.

Yeah.

So just to kind of put this in perspective, the first on the front end, you'll have more sustainable inputs because you're not having to grow them. These are kind of byproducts that are being wasted or probably used in some other cases, but generally they're waste. So it's already, you can see, as more sustainable. Yes, it was grown with water, but otherwise, it'd be going to waste. You're taking that, that's more sustainable. You're putting it into a process which is already relatively sustainable, even in the conventional sense.

Oliver Shafaat (26:19)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Silas Mähner (26:30)
very low water usage and energy usage is also quite low as well. It sounds like, okay. And then so the big thing for you will be the output. So you're now walk us through that. So you said it could be biodegradable or recyclable. Can you talk more about that? Is that, is that the objective is that you can basically turn it into the aluminum can of clothing so you can recycle it as many times as you want.

Oliver Shafaat (26:33)
Yes.

Yes, energy uses really well.

Yeah, I mean that is what I see the apparel industry going towards is recyclability. I think that we've had big recycling initiatives in a variety of different industries and it really depends on where you are in the world, whether or not those are efficient or actually used. But we do need to make sure that it can be recycled because that is so much less energy required to make it.

again, right? If we can take a Bylon t-shirt and make a new one out of it, we don't have to go through the microbes and then grow crops and take the waste from that and everything like that, right? So that's something that we're pursuing. I think something that I'm particularly interested in is making sure that we can recycle it, but not down cycle it. So making sure that we get virgin grade material out of it. And so we're looking at some...

Silas Mähner (27:30)
Mm-hmm.

Mm.

Oliver Shafaat (27:48)
will hang fruit sort of in the lab to, you know, establish some chemical recycling technologies that would be, you know, plug and play to sort of some other standard ones.

Silas Mähner (27:54)
Yeah.

So that's the main next kind of figuring out is whether or not it can be fully recycled. Cause it sounds as though you've gotten the front end figured out where you can drop in without, you know, messing up the existing machinery, but you now you're just identifying the backend. Can it be recycled?

Oliver Shafaat (28:11)
Thanks for watching!

Yeah, I mean, it's sort of we have that's definitely one of the bigger unknowns right now. But we don't need to just focus on that we can focus on many different parallel processes, right? So we can work on scaling up the front, you know, making more fiber, but also, you know, and that's completely decoupled from figuring out the recycling. And so I think that is, you know, helpful, helpful to have those problems decoupled. But you know, I want to I want to establish that. And then, you know, it is also

Silas Mähner (28:19)
Okay.

Yeah.

Oliver Shafaat (28:44)
We need to do the certifications for biodegradability as well, which we'll do.

Silas Mähner (28:46)
Got it. Okay. And then, so when you're building something like this, is this an IP play where you're going to get it figured out and then license it, or do you aim to eventually become a producer of these materials?

Oliver Shafaat (29:00)
That's a great question. And I don't have like a good answer. So we're, um, we are at this early stage, we're protecting IP from like feedstock in to yarn out as well as the recycling technology. Like I don't want to be an apparel brand. I don't want to make textiles. So we're not really touching sort of that intermediate space. Um, so that's where our IP that we're developing and protecting, you know, through your traditional needs like patents and trade secrets. Um,

So that's what we're doing. You know, we need to be able to produce like we need to have an R and D lab to be able to iterate and optimize. And that will likely lead to some small scale production just because these, it's so easy to produce with these types of processes, whether or not as we scale up, we produce ourselves or license is unknown. And I mean, I think that, uh, with the ability to sort of drop into existing machinery, it really allows us to, uh,

license and I think that might you know also facilitate adoption and everything like that but I think that is something that we don't know at this stage but we're setting ourselves up to be able to do.

Silas Mähner (30:02)
Mm-hmm.

Got it. Okay, very good. Well, that makes sense. I think it's pretty clear then that obviously, the business model is kind of, there's a couple of what pass forward, I think, with a lot of these technologies. There's various possible ways and I assume just like everybody else, you'll have to build a pilot that's large enough to demonstrate that the technology works, you can get the guarantees, etc. But I guess I think that, I mean, we've covered quite a lot. I guess one just kind of thing to wrap up here would be...

Where do you see yourself going in the next couple, let's say next year? What's the biggest challenge you're chasing down and how are you tackling that?

Oliver Shafaat (30:43)
Yeah, I mean, I think it's all about scale, right? And so, you know, we can make, you know, five kilos today using, you know, five gallon buckets. So we're like trying to target 50 kilos next. And you know, this is it's actually because the plastics industry is so large, it's actually really hard to work with very small quantities. And so, you know, if we get to 50 kilo, you know, sort of scale batch, whatever you want to call it.

We can now drop into the next sort of size up. So we go from like an R and D sort of machinery to like a semi pilot machinery, right? And so that is nice just to sort of make sure that we're still, you know, dropping in at these larger scales. It also provides us more material where we can sit and iterate and optimize and, you know, improve our manufacturing process. Um, but I really want to be able to make more so we can.

you know, learn more about the material, right? So we can make your standard textile knit or woven textiles, do all the testing. Like how strong is it? How does it die? How does it behave, you know, when you, you know, next to skin stuff like that. So we can really see the properties now where we need to improve and, you know, target sort of our initial, you know, prototypes, right. To.

Silas Mähner (31:48)
Mm-hmm.

Oliver Shafaat (32:02)
types of garments that it's suited for, right? Is it gonna be a jacket, outdoor jacket? Probably not right away because we need super strong materials for that, but maybe it'll be a nice t-shirt or maybe it'll be a nice close to a base layer, underwear or something like that. So that's what I'm really excited about, is just sort of scaling up and understanding what we have and what we need to improve and doing all of the sort of ancillary things like...

I think that at that point, we can start to run a preliminary LCA to see our impact, but also where our hotspots are so we can try to mitigate those as early as possible. We need to start thinking about end of life. It's scaling up all of this technology because if we can't make it at scale and in a cheap way, then it's not going to be adopted.

Somil Aggarwal (32:51)
I think one thing, I know we're almost at the wrap up, but I think you mentioned one thing that I really wanna tap into really quick, which is when it comes to actually figuring out and working on the pilot for something like this and setting yourself up for that, I think pilots within Climate Tech founders are obviously very confusing. And a lot of it is because a lot of things we're seeing are new. So even the corporates and the partners haven't really figured out what they're looking for. I'm curious, before you even engage in these conversations.

How are you thinking about the pilot? How are you thinking about pitching yourself? Of course, like you mentioned, there's improvements on the bottom line. There's reuse opportunities and things like that. But what really drives how you think you're going to walk into those pilot conversations?

Oliver Shafaat (33:37)
So, yeah, I mean, I think that I have found it is very hard to picture yourself as I am a replacement for X. I think that that's bad. I think that is very hard because X, Y, and Z are incredibly good and cheap, right? Like nylon, polyester, cotton, wool are really good, really cheap, and we already know how to make it and use it at scale, right?

can't do that. It's taken a while for me to learn that, but I definitely recommend you don't narrow yourself into that corner. When I talk to apparel brands or manufacturers, it's like, okay. It's really, and I talked to the development team, the material development team. I think that at that point, we sort of often speak the same language, we're polymer chemists or whatever.

I am making a melt processable fiber from agricultural waste. They're like, okay. And so I think that it's trying to position it so that they understand that our feedstock inputs are waste feedstocks as opposed to taking arable land. And that's a big thing, especially in the industry right now, is making sure that we have sustainable, scalable feedstocks. And then emphasizing to them that we're using standard.

chemistries and we're using standard manufacturing methods so it will also drop in. We're only changing the polymer. We're changing one wheel on this incredibly complex cog. We can use your preferred spinner. We can use your preferred textile mill. That's the point. We don't necessarily have to control all of that technology. Like I said, the more we know about our material, the easier that conversation becomes.

because I'm like, okay, it's this strength that's, you know, it behaves like sort of like this for, you know, moisture, but it behaves like this other thing for abrasion, right? And so I think that just helps that conversation. But you know, I think that it's really, you know, emphasizing sort of that we can scale and that we have this new material that will be, you know, a good replacement.

Silas Mähner (35:56)
So it sounds like in that case then, you're mostly referring to talking to strategic then, right? Not necessarily VCs because VCs may not... I mean, are they the ones who are against you saying we have a replacement for X or is it the strategic?

Oliver Shafaat (36:12)
No, that's definitely more like the brand side of things. You know, talking with VCs, you know, and I'm still learning this, right? I come from a very technical background. It's more about the money. It's more about, you know, sort of, okay, like, you know, this is like our cost right now. This is our cost, you know, at scale. I get this because, yeah, we like improve our yield a little bit, but also like here are the costs for these manufacturing processes that I found. They're like, you know, stuff like that. And I think it's...

Silas Mähner (36:13)
Got it.

Oliver Shafaat (36:39)
definitely driven by cost and just the plug and play drop in sort of ability of our.

Silas Mähner (36:46)
Yeah.

Oliver Shafaat (36:47)
of our technology.

Silas Mähner (36:48)
So sorry, I know we're going to wrap, but I do have one more major question, which is, is there already substantial interest from the clothing manufacturers? Is there demand to become more sustainable, even if you can't recycle what you're doing? If your feedstocks are... We didn't clarify this, but is it at scale going to be the same cost as conventional inputs? Okay.

Oliver Shafaat (37:16)
Yeah, yeah. So I think that at scale, you know, our best sort of conservative estimates, you know, at scale, we can, you know, be, be cost or be at cost parity with conventional.

Silas Mähner (37:23)
got it. So given that circumstance, even if you didn't figure out the recyclability, is there still strong interest to do that, assuming that they can figure out the supply chain?

Oliver Shafaat (37:38)
Yeah, I mean, the apparel companies have a lot of apparel companies have made very public and very ambitious sustainability goals. And part of that is sourcing preferred materials is a very generic term that a lot of people use, right? And so I think that part of that is switching from virgin materials, and that also includes virgin cotton, right? To you know, more preferred materials like recycled materials or

Silas Mähner (37:52)
Mm-hmm.

Oliver Shafaat (38:07)
other new bio-based materials. I think that there is a lot of interest just from that, especially given our waste feedstock.

Silas Mähner (38:13)
Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I mean, it's just interesting. I guess I think back to what you said, just a comment on the companies needing to make money for their shareholders, right? I think we had a conversation a long time ago, I think it was almost two years ago now, with Rod James on kind of the idea of, will companies ever seek more moderate profit, right? Rather than just selling as many things as possible. Again, that's like a whole discussion around structuring companies and things like that.

I don't think we're going to change that necessarily. Maybe that will change over time. But anyways, well, this is pretty fascinating. Obviously, really, really loved hearing about the new technologies and like hearing about the journey and how you get there and excited to just continue following your path. But do you have any kind of final thoughts or where people can reach you?

Oliver Shafaat (39:03)
So yeah, I mean, thank you first. Thank you for having me. It's been fun to have this conversation Yeah, so we're the company is called Siloom Labs. That's s ci dash lume Lab s calm we're also on LinkedIn is primarily I don't understand social media So we did is like the like sort of my understanding of social media We you know, we have a company there and then we also do we do have an Instagram which my main

thing and my main love of that is Fiber Fridays, which we put out very infrequently. But on Fridays where I tell you about interesting fibers, my favorite is the muscox fiber. So this is like a, you know, a sort of a cow looking thing that lives up in the Arctic, but they have really cool, really like soft fibers. But anyways, that's, you know, that's the fun thing that we do on Instagram because I've told that is not acceptable on LinkedIn. But yeah, so yeah, I mean, we're, you know, come to the website, you can learn more. You can.

email me. It's oliver at cywomblabs.com. And you know, if you ever are interested, but yeah, thank you again so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Silas Mähner (40:07)
Yeah, absolutely. No, no, super glad to have you on. Thanks for coming on again. Super excited to see where we go. So you have a good rest of your day. Cheers.

Oliver Shafaat (40:14)
Yep, yep, bye.

Somil Aggarwal (40:14)
Thank you.