On today’s show, we have Jonathan Trent. His 20-year stint at NASA as a Senior Research Scientist has included research in marine science, microbiology and cell biology, medicine, nanotechnology, engineering, and environmental sciences. After doing 7 TED talks about his career in science, he is now leaving NASA to form his own startup which will pivot from the offshore system to an onshore design that he is calling UpCycle Systems. It will be the only patented technology that accepts wet waste as is, without initial treatment, and then converts it to renewable assets, clean water, steam, electricity, gas and minerals.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Did the US ever land on the moon?
- What has changed at NASA over the last 20 years?
- How likely is it that we will soon go to Mars?
- What is the big picture of the environment?
- What are the United Nations Sustainability Goals?
- What is an economy based on waste?
- What is Bio-asset recovery?
We would like to give a special thanks to Victor Wang who is the Founder and Chairman at China Silicon Valley hosting the delegation that led to connecting with Jonathan Trent. Without Victor this interview would not have been possible.
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Books and Resources
- Jonathan Trent’s LinkedIn
- NASA AMES Research Center
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Disclaimer to the Transcripts:
Intro 00:00
You’re listening to The Silicon Valley Podcast
Shawn Flynn 00:02
On today’s show, we have Jonathan Trent. For the past 20 years, he has been a senior research scientist at NASA, conducting research on marine science, microbiology, medicine, nanotechnology, engineering and environmental sciences. After doing seven TED Talks, he is now leaving NASA to do his own startup called UpCycle Systems, which accepts wastewater and converts it to renewable assets like clean water, steam, electricity, gas, and minerals. In this episode, you’ll learn if the US ever landed on the moon, what’s changed at NASA over the last 20 years, how likely is it that we will soon go to Mars, what is bio asset recovery, and much more.
Intro 00:44
Welcome to the Silicon Valley Podcast with your host Shawn Flynn who interviews famous Entrepreneurs, Venture Capitalists and Leaders in Tech. Learn their secrets and see tomorrow’s world today.
Shawn Flynn 01:07
Jonathan, thank you for taking the time today to be on Silicon Valley.
Jonathan Trent 01:11
Hey, Shawn, I’m glad to be here.
Shawn Flynn 01:13
Can we hear about your time at NASA and all the amazing things that you worked on while you’re there?
Jonathan Trent 01:19
Sure. I’ve been at NASA all this time, in part because I’ve had such an interesting time there. I basically have done three careers while I was there. You know, I came to NASA in the context of what they call astrobiology, where astrobiology is this study, or the attempts of studying life in the universe. Could there be life in the universe and what might it be like? I had been studying the biochemistry and biology of organisms living in really extreme environments. And so, when NASA hired me, they wanted me to do biochemistry about organisms living in weird places. Geothermal hot springs… Living in basically boiling sulfuric acid, trying to understand what an organism does to adapt to under those conditions. And that fit well in their agenda for astrobiology.
Jonathan Trent 02:10
But I found early on in my career at NASA that they were really excited about engineering, and studying microbes and molecular biology is… I was really doing nanotechnology. I was studying how organisms’ function on this nano scale, how things happen on a molecular level. And so, I could apply what I was doing on the biology of these extreme organisms to nanotechnology. And I started a nanotechnology group at NASA and worked on that for nine years. And we basically looked at how a molecule could use molecular recognition, that is how they knew each other and how they knew other structures. We try to understand how they could interact. So molecular recognition. And we use genetic engineering to modify self-assembly in a way that we could build useful devices on a nano scale. And we did this for a long time. But then about 10 years ago, I started my third part of my NASA career, which was looking at sustainability, how can we apply what we’ve learned about going to space, which is the most resource-limited environment you can imagine. How we could apply that to problems here on earth. And that’s, that sort of brings us up to the startup. But I’m happy to talk more about my NASA career if you’d like, Shawn.
Shawn Flynn 03:36
Yes, please continue. And also, could you talk a little bit about going to the moon, the history of it, and when are we going to go to Mars?
Jonathan Trent 03:46
I’m actually really excited about the idea of going to the moon and sending humans to the moon and Mars, and Mars exploration, but not for the same reasons that most people are out excited about it. So, Elon and I would be completely at odds about why we should go to Mars. But let me tell you a little bit about the conditions on the moon and on Mars. So, you have a reason to understand why I’m not that interested in ever sending people there. So, you need to understand that on the moon, the daytime, which lasts about 13 and a half Earth days, the temperature at the surface of the moon gets to about 260 degrees Fahrenheit, that’s about 127 degrees Celsius. And then the following 13 and a half days, the moon’s night, the temperature goes down to minus 280 degrees Fahrenheit, we’re about minus 173 degrees. The atmosphere on the moon is about a few inches a few centimeters thick, there’s no atmosphere on the moon. And if you’re in the sun versus in the shadow, the temperature difference can be 200 degrees. So, the human body on the moon is really at a loss for survival.
Jonathan Trent 05:01
But let’s talk about Mars because everybody talks about Mars is that we’re going to build a colony there. So, you need to understand Mars has an atmosphere. It’s about 100 times thinner than the Earth’s atmosphere. And it’s made up of 95% carbon dioxide. So, in contrast, the earth has about .04% carbon dioxide, and we’re worried about it because it’s going up and it’s causing greenhouse gas. But Mars has a little bit of nitrogen in the atmosphere about 2.7%, so less than 3% nitrogen, whereas the Earth’s atmosphere is 78% nitrogen. Now here’s the key. The Martian atmosphere has only trace amounts of oxygen, almost unmeasurable, whereas the Earth’s atmosphere is 21% oxygen. It has a tiny bit of CO2. So, what does this mean? This means we will never breathe the Martian atmosphere and of course, we can make oxygen by stripping the oxygen out of the carbon dioxide which is CO2 and we can take the O2 out of the carbon dioxide. But you know, in the Earth’s atmosphere we breathe mostly nitrogen.
So, nitrogen is the carrier gas. So, well we can get oxygen from the Martian carbon dioxide. But where are we going to put the gas? The gas has to be carried by another gas. And in our case, it’s carried by nitrogen. So the Martian atmosphere is really a problem not only for breathing, but also because it’s so thin. What does this mean? This means that the pressure at the surface of Mars is much, much lower, 100 times lower than the pressure on Earth. What does pressure do? It influences the temperature at which water boils. For example, on the Earth, water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit or 100 degrees Celsius. On Mars, water boils at about the freezing point on earth. It boils between 32 degrees and 40 degrees Fahrenheit. So what’s body temperature? Body temperature is 98.6, right? 37 degrees Celsius. So our blood, all the liquids in our body, once exposed to the Martian environment, would boil. We would suffocate because we can’t breathe the atmosphere, our blood would boil. Oh, and then the temperature on Mars, because Mars is considerably farther away from the sun. The sun’s radiation is about a third of what it is on the earth. The temperature on Mars is really low. So, let’s think about this in summer around July, the hottest time in summer at noon, the temperature gets out 68 degrees Fahrenheit, and you know about 20 degrees Celsius. That’s not so bad. But that same night, the temperature will drop to minus 100 degrees. So at night on Mars, that’s 100 degrees Fahrenheit, which is about minus 78 degrees Celsius. This is excruciatingly cold. So overall, the average temperature in a year during the day, may get up to about 21 degrees Fahrenheit, which is still below freezing. And it’s about on average, somewhere around minus 63 degrees Celsius, overall day night.
Jonathan Trent 05:01
So the temperatures, the pressure, and the conditions on Mars are really, really difficult to try to make human habitation. So why do I say that I’m incredibly excited about human exploration and Mars and the moon? Because imagining what it would be like to put people in that resource-limited environment, in that place where there is no water and there’s no atmosphere to breathe, and there’s nothing that remotely resembles food… That place where there is none of what we can take for granted as what we call ecosystem services… Imagining what it must be like to live there means that the resources from the waste products of the humans that go there are more valuable than anything we find on the moon or on Mars. And that process of trying to envision how people would survive in these resource limited places, teaches us a lot about how somehow come to terms with the resource limitations that we’re starting to experience on Earth.
Shawn Flynn 08:29
You’re telling me the excitement for you have for Mars and the moon is the difficulty and the challenge to make it actually work?
Jonathan Trent 09:44
I’m telling you that it’s a lesson. It’s an object lesson in recycling. It’s a way of thinking about a harsh condition, and it teaches us about conditions that will be available to us here on the earth, that we take for granted completely.
Shawn Flynn 10:04
How has NASA changed over the last 20 years?
Jonathan Trent 10:08
So, you know, NASA changes a lot during its history. I mean, it goes up and down with the political winds that are blowing. So, depending upon the government, NASA will change. But it’s an incredible institution. Imagine a place where you can go to work and go down the hall and talk to people who worry about what it’s like on the moons of Jupiter, who try to understand what it would be like to have people permanently in space, and what the physiological impacts are, or what organisms live, or could live on the surface of Titan. It’s an extraordinary environment to be in and it’s really exciting to be around the people who work at NASA all the time on a day-to-day basis.
Shawn Flynn 10:53
How do people at NASA feel when there’s all these naysayers?
Jonathan Trent 10:58
Yeah, NASA has been basically doing a retrospective looking at what it was like… I have to tell you, it was amazing that we got to the moon in the 1960s. I mean, if you think about it, the cell phone that you have in your pocket has probably a million times the computing power of all the computers that NASA had at its disposal in 1960s. A million times more powerful. And we got there by just audacity, ingenuity, and determination, right? It was R&D. It was risk-taking and determination that got us to the moon. And it took us about eight, nine years and there were 400,000 people involved in the process. And it was a big deal to get the Apollo to the moon and back, and the maximum budget that NASA had during the Apollo mission was about four and a half percent of the federal budget. During all the time I’ve been at NASA, the budget has been less than 1% of the federal budget and during the last five or six years, it’s been less than half of 1% of the federal budget. And yet NASA’s been doing remarkable things. I mean, everybody knows about NASA’s pictures of the earth, its exploration of other solar systems, and looking for other habitable planets. And just the whole discovery of how black holes might be forming and what they might look like and all the cosmology. This is all done on less than half of 1% of the federal budget in the United States.
Shawn Flynn 12:30
What about SpaceX? Is there a rivalry there?
Jonathan Trent 12:32
It’s true. Elon and not just Elon, but Bezos, and also Branson, all of those billionaires are looking at the possibility of spending their excess money to go into space. Certainly, there’s a rivalry there. I find them a little naive in the way they’re discussing colonizing Mars, for example. When Elon Musk is talking about bringing 100 people and setting up a city on the Martian surface, he doesn’t seem to be taking into consideration some of the things I told you earlier about what it’s actually like on Mars. How difficult it is… I was just scratching the surface.
I was only talking about the atmosphere and the temperature. But the surface of Mars is covered with toxic chemicals like perchlorate, which is 1000 times the concentration that will poison the human thyroid. There’s nothing that remotely resembles food on the surface of Mars. And nor does it seem possible that we’ll ever be able to grow food on Mars and find clean water. I mean, water at all on Mars, Mars has been drying for billions of years. I mean, Elon’s concept that we want to be exploring beyond the earth is sort of, you know, naive. I mean, it’s extraordinary to think that we can colonize other planets, but the notion is really almost unthinkable, if you really dig into the details. And any engineer will tell you that the devil is in the details. And these details that I’m telling you about that make Mars and Mars an uninhabitable space are just the tip of the iceberg. The radiation fields, the solar energy that’s there. It’s not a possible scenario in my mind. But as I said, it’s wonderful to think about what we can learn by contemplating this being on the surface of Mars. And as far as I’m concerned, the billionaires like George Soros, Bill and Melinda Gates, Bloomberg, Zuckerberg, Gordon and Betty Moore, to mention a few that are focused on the humanitarian uses of their money are far more rational in my world. Somebody like Manoj Bhargava, whose Five Hour Energy has given 99% of his $4 billion to charity. Those are people who are in my mind spending their money in a more correct way than trying to contemplate the impossibility of putting people on Mars.
Jonathan Trent 12:35
And by the way, if you’re going to Mars because you’re wanting to do the science associated with it, and you really want to send robots there the way NASA’s been doing, I mean, we’ve been sending rovers to Mars since 1997. And that’s been extraordinary. We’ve learned so much about that planet. I mean, the things that I was telling you, the temperatures I was quoting, those are actual temperatures, we’ve got the day night temperatures from the Gale Crater since 2012. And so, we actually know what the conditions are like on Mars. We’re not just guessing about it. So, it’s wonderful to learn about Mars, but you’d never put people on the surface of Mars to learn about it.
Shawn Flynn 15:46
Can you talk about the history of resources in a global aspect, and what should we know now that could help us make decisions?
Jonathan Trent 15:55
Well, you know, one of the things I did while I was at NASA, I was asked to be part of a team of government people under the auspices of the Office of Science, Technology and Policy. And we, as a group of 44 different people from all the different organizations of the government. And that is, you know, the Department of Defense, Department of Agriculture, and the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, NOAH, and NASA. And I was the NASA representative. And in this group, we had people even from the CIA, and there were 44 of us, and we were all looking at resources in the year 2030.
So, we were trying to play scenario games about what the world will be like in the year 2030? And with population growth estimates over 8 billion people by that time, the distribution of resources that we were anticipating and the changes in the climate that are consistent with all the models that are out there. With that data in hand, we were trying to understand what the world would be like, would there be water wars? Would there be food wars? How much more food, water, and energy do we need to maintain the status quo? And it looked like from the models we were looking at, we would need about 35% more food, 45% more water, and 50% more energy to maintain the status quo. And that data and understanding how this is all going to be influenced by population growth, urbanization, affluence, and of course, climate change… We were trying to understand what we could do to change what seemed to be an inevitable problem of running out of resources. And here’s where Mars comes in. We were thinking about a planet where resources are completely limiting. And we were trying to understand how we could build a recycling system where human waste become a resource rather than a waste product. And that I think is what led me to want to leave NASA.
Shawn Flynn 18:06
I have to go back to what you mentioned about the environment. There’s a lot of people working on it, such as the girl in Europe, Greta Thunberg. And you’d mentioned many billionaires. Would you say their mission is on point or are they missing something?
Jonathan Trent 18:21
Yeah, so Greta Thunberg is a 16-year-old Swedish girl who’s been leading a movement among the youth. And you know, she’s been doing wonderful things and mobilizing a lot of people around the climate problem. And that is definitely a problem, we see that as one of the key issues in our future. But it’s combined with other problems. That is the population continues to grow globally, we’re at 7.7 billion now. It’s suggested that we might get almost to 10 billion by the year 2015. We have this mass movement of people to cities, so urbanization reached 50% already in the year 2012. And it’s predicted by 2015, it may be as much as 70% of all people live in cities. That’s a supply chain problem. We have a problem which we could call affluence, in which we have a consumer mentality in which our world economies are based on built-in obsolescence or use and discard kind of models. I mean, all of those represent serious issues related to environmental problems. But for me, the crux of the problem is going to come back to what do we need for surviving? And that goes down to the foundation of Maslow’s pyramid: food, water, and energy. Of course, we also need shelter. But how are we going to maintain not only the supply chains that provide us with food and water and the energy we need to move them around? But how are we going to maintain those levels of food and water that are needed to maintain this population, keep our urban development going and help to support this affluence that everybody is moving towards? And that, to me is the crux of global problems that we need to address. And we need to address those problems with the same kind of audacity and ingenuity that we used to get to the moon, that we’re using now to think about putting people on Mars.
Shawn Flynn 20:29
So the United Nations has 17 sustainable goals. What are a few of them that your company is going to work towards?
Jonathan Trent 20:38
Well, yeah, the sustainability goals. It’s called the Sustainable Development Goals from the United Nations. And these are really highfalutin concepts that we’re going to, by the year 2030, have no poverty, zero hunger, good health, and well-being for everybody, quality education, gender equality, clean water and sanitation. We’re going to have affordable and clean energy, a decent work and economic growth for everybody. We’re going to have industry that is innovative and supports infrastructure, reduced inequalities, that has been the economic world, we’re going to have sustainable cities, we’re going to have responsible consumption and production, climate action to help control our impact on the environment. There’s going to be an important focus on life below water, so we don’t pollute our oceans and our waterways. Life on land will be a focus of our activity, peace, justice, and strong institutions, and partnerships for the goals. So those are the 17 goals. I guess I should have numbered them for you, Shawn, but you can look them up on the internet. And what we’re focused on has to do with life below water, life on land. We’re talking about Climate Action because what we’re proposing has a big influence on the climate. And we’re going to reduce inequalities and have a decent work and economic growth. And, of course, we’re going to have clean water and sanitation and good health and well-being, as well as the zero hunger. We impact a lot of the goals in what we’re proposing.
Shawn Flynn 22:21
And you had mentioned the distribution of the human population. How has that played a factor on the environment throughout history? And how will that play a factor moving forward?
Jonathan Trent 22:35
Well, that’s a huge question, Shawn. So, let me give you the not quite huge answer on this. If you look at the distribution of people in the world, and we can do this with data we’ve had for a long, long time. If you look at where the people are in the world right now and you draw a circle, from India, on the west side, to Japan on the East side, to Mongolia or northern China. And then in the south, Indonesia, that circle represents about one quarter of the inhabitable space on the earth. And yet for the last thousand, even the last 2000 years, over half of the world’s population has lived inside that circle. Right now, about 51% of the people in the world live inside that circle, the US is only 4.3% of the world’s population. But that circle that I described to you is 51%. So you could ask, why are there so many people in that circle? And why have there always been so many people inside that circle?
And the answer is the Tibetan Plateau, the Himalayas, this huge mountain range that has glaciers, hundreds of glaciers. And what does this mean? It means as those glaciers melt, they provide fresh water and topsoil to the Indus Valley, to the Ganges, to the Mekong Delta, to the Yangtze River, to the Yellow River. They represent food, water and energy for that whole region. And that region has been so successful for so many years, because of this massive amount of water stored in glaciers. And one could argue then, that the most devastating, the most dangerous, and the most threatening aspect of climate change is that the Tibetan Plateau is melting. And we’re not sure from the models when it’s going to disappear. But the predictions are that it will dwindle significantly in the coming years. And what happens when people run out of food, water and energy? They leave, they migrate. We know this. We’ve seen this happening right now with Syria where there’s been a 10-year drought that led to a civil war that led to mass emigration into Europe and destabilization of European governments, right wing movements concerned about immigration. And here in the United States right now we’re having big discussions about immigration. So this is happening due to climate change. And we look to the future as a time when there’s going to be a reshuffling of huge numbers of people. And we need to be ready for this. And I think it’s going to all boil down to this question of food, water, and energy security.
Shawn Flynn 25:24
So right now, in that area, that geographic area you’d mentioned, if food, water, shelter became an issue, is there the technology right now to replenish it so that people don’t have to migrate?
Jonathan Trent 25:37
Yeah, exactly right. Food, water and energy problems are really the issue. And what I’ve decided to do and the reason I’m leaving NASA is to focus on how we can optimize this technology around food, water and energy. And it can be in Asia. It can be anywhere in the world. The system that we’ve designed, which we’re calling UpCycle systems involves taking advantage of the waste from animals. If we look now, at the earth, it’s 29% land and 71% water. But if we only look at the land, then it’s about 71% of our land on the earth is usable, 19 or 20% of it is barren, and about 10% of it is frozen. Of the 71% of usable land, 50% of it is already in agriculture, about 37% is left in forests, about 11% is scrub, 1% is covered by freshwater, and about 1 to 3% is covered by cities. Now, what’s interesting is that if you look at the agricultural land, about 77% of our agricultural land, three quarters of it is dedicated to growing livestock. Now some of this land can’t be used for any other thing than livestock, but only 23% of our agriculture land is used for growing crops. Now of the 77% that’s used for livestock, the livestock are only providing about a third of our protein, at about a fifth of our calories. So why is this interesting? It’s interesting because the livestock are on these huge grasslands.
Jonathan Trent 27:18
In the United States, about 41% of all the land is used for grazing cattle. And there are huge areas that are now used, or having concentrations of animals, dairies or feedlots. People don’t realize this, but there are now 19 billion chickens in the world with a life expectancy of 45 to 60 days. It’s a huge number of animals.
There are an additional 6 billion cows and pigs and goats and sheep. So, we’re looking at massive numbers of animals. And what we’re not taking into account is the huge amount of waste that they’re producing. So, we’re feeding them 40% of our grain. We’re using about 80% of our water to grow agricultural crops that are supporting them as well as us, and they use about a third of our energy. So, what can we use from these animals that will help us to improve the security of water, food, and energy? And the answer is that we use their manure, we use their waste. Now you need to understand that in order to make food, we’re growing these animals that we’re feeding them, it takes about eight to 10, even 20 kilograms of feed to make one kilogram of beef. It takes about four kilos of feed to make a kilo of pork, but it only takes about two kilos of feed to make a kilo of chicken. Now, we also need fish and shrimps and other aquatic animals, and they’re much better. If you look at tiger prawns, it takes less than two kilos of feed to make or kilo of tiger prawns, and it takes 1.4 kilos of feed to make a kilo of Atlantic salmon. So, what we’re proposing is to combine aquaculture and livestock.
Shawn Flynn 29:10
Let’s hear about the startup right now. You got me curious.
Jonathan Trent 29:13
Okay, great. So, what we’ve envisioned is building a circular system. And how does this work? Well, we take manure from animals, which we will know can be made into fertilizer. But in addition to using it for making fertilizer, we put it into what’s called an anaerobic digester. It has been known for a really long time, because anaerobic digesters, if you put manure in them or other organic materials, they can be used to make bio gas, which is methane, and methane can be burned to make electricity and heat. But that’s anaerobic digester and burning a bio gas makes a greenhouse gas called carbon dioxide. Now, we can use the carbon dioxide and the fertilizer that’s made from the anaerobic digester and fertilizer. We can use that to grow the fastest growing plant on the planet, which is micro algae.
Jonathan Trent 30:07
Now micro algae are interesting for a number of reasons: A. they’re really fast growing, B. they’re the most efficient plant in the world. And C. they make a substance called omega three. It’s a fatty acid that we need to eat in our diets. So, what do we do with the algae? We feed that back to our animals. If you feed algae to cows, they put omega three in their milk. If you feed it to chickens, they put omega three in their eggs. If you feed it to pigs, they change the ratio of omega six to omega three, making the meat of pigs more wholesome for us to eat. We can also use the algae to make feed and oxygen to support aquaculture and the waste products from the aquaculture go back to feed algae. So, you see I’ve made a loop. People have known for a long time that you can make manure into fertilizer, and you can use manure to make bio gas and that you can get the bio gas to grow bio gas and the co2 to grow algae with fertilizer from the manure. We’ve known this for a long time. But what UpCycle Systems is going to do is it is going to use what we call augmented intelligence to understand and maintain the complexity of this system. Augmented intelligence is going to include sensors on all the different components of the system that will allow us to do data mining, machine learning, and decision intelligence. We’re going to be able to put together a business intelligence along with these artificial intelligences to build a system that we think we can master, even though it’s so complex.
Shawn Flynn 31:49
So, can you talk about the revenue model of your company?
Jonathan Trent 31:53
Absolutely. Let me try to clarify this again. So, we’re going to look at the waste products from animals and Rather than going into a fertilizer-only pathway, we’re going to go into an energy pathway. What UpCycle is going to be doing is helping to design the system. And then we oversee the system using the sensors, and the augmented intelligence that includes artificial intelligence and data mining. So in our business model, what we’re doing is we have an eight-step process with four phases. And in those eight steps, we separate out, identifying sites, identifying people, we look at the environment, we look at the engineering, we look at the social aspects, and we help to create…
It’s a bit like the model of industrial symbiosis. And we’re calling it UpCycle Systems or UCS symbiosis. And within this, we’re building these teams of people that are going to work together, or for one part of the system are going to be resources for another part of the system. And we, as a company, we’re going to oversee this process using augmented intelligence and provide information to each of the members of our symbiosis.
Shawn Flynn 33:08
And this technology that you’re talking about, how much of it is in development right now, how much of it has existed before? And also, I have to ask, decision intelligence, can you talk more about that?
Jonathan Trent 33:20
Okay. So, first of all, the good news is that all the different parts of this technology are already known. So we know how we can take manure and turn it into bio gas and fertilizer. People have been doing this for a long time, we know that we can take the residual material and the anaerobic digester from making the bio gas and use it as a fertilizer. We know that we can take CO2 and grow algae with fertilizer. So, long story short, we know how to do all the parts of this. We include within the system, the food component coming out of livestock and the aquaculture. And that will be within our business model. And we include the algae component, which is a feed component of our system. And you know that number one cost in aquaculture and in agriculture for animals is often the feed. And we’ll be able to supplement the feed in a way that will save money. And we have a water component in our system also, where we are purifying the water in the system.
Jonathan Trent 34:30
So you asked about decision intelligence. Decision intelligence is where we take the expertise of local people who’ve been experienced in these different fields that we’re bringing together and use their archived information to help people just starting out in the field. So we don’t just use sensors, and data collection and data mining. We also use data from people who are experienced in these areas. We call it decision intelligence.
Shawn Flynn 35:03
So, I’m trying to visualize the future right now when your company’s successful. What will happen then to livestock farms? What will happen to big corporations that right now are investing in meat packaging or environmental waste? How is your system, your project going to affect what’s already established?
Jonathan Trent 35:30
Yes, this is an important question. A huge amount of the agricultural industry is focused on livestock right now. Aquaculture is a huge industry, not so huge in the United States, but in Asia. And what we’re looking at is how do we mobilize the waste from that part of the food industry so that we can make energy and we can use that energy both to clean water, and we can use that energy and the consequences of making that energy into carbon dioxide and the fertilizer that are byproducts. How can we use that to grow micro algae that become part of the feed pathway for our animals in our aquaculture? So, the future will mean that individual farmers and individual aqua culturist, and individual algae cultivators, or anaerobic digester companies, or water purification activities, or fertilizer makers, they will, in fact, form these collectives and work together so that their waste products from one part of their system will become a resource for another part. And it won’t be a liability, it will be another one of their assets. So we see this as being an inevitable part of how we’re going to move towards a circular economy, how we’re going to move the economics of the world towards a sustainable circular system.
Shawn Flynn 36:59
Can you talk more about the economy based on waste? And what is creative reuse?
Jonathan Trent 37:06
So, it’s been said that if we can’t, if a particular substance or product can’t be reduced, reused, repaired, rebuilt, refurbished, refinished, resold, recycled or composted, then it should be restricted, redesigned, or removed from production. Pete Seeger said that. And I think that’s kind of cool to think about. That if something is really a linear process, or something as a product that is meant to be thrown away in a world where we now recognize that there is no away, if something can’t be repurposed, reused, repaired, rebuilt, refurbish, refinished or resold, then we really should think hard about whether we should allow that product to enter our ecosystem that we’re trying to create.
Our circular ecosystem where we’re going to no longer be focused on an economy based on obsolescence or an economy based on fashion. Moving away from this idea of a new thing, or something that’s new is necessarily better, and that something is old is going to have to be discarded. You know, the Europeans are really getting into this much more than I see in the United States. I was at a conference in Helsinki in June. It was called the World Circular Economic Forum. And people were talking about reusing and repurposing everything. We’re even talking about how clothes in your closet can be reused, if you haven’t used them for a couple of months. You could lease them to somebody else. And they could be used by somebody else when you weren’t using them anyway. And you would get them some you know, compensation for letting them use your old clothes. Or we could recycle the clothes and not only the clothes and the cloth, but also the ink on the clothes. It was a really interesting discussion about how products would no longer be purchased but they would sort of be leased, when you were done with their use, or they became a little bit old fashioned. You turn them back to their manufacturer, who would then upgrade them and reuse all of the usable components rather than trashing them.
Shawn Flynn 39:21
How would this catch on in your mind?
Jonathan Trent 39:25
Well, you know, we talked a lot about this at this conference. And of course, you know, buttons can last for a really long time, and there’s no reason to discard those. And even the fabrics while they may get threadbare after a period of time, can be reused or reprocessed for all kinds of other purposes. The science of that will be the focus of future economics, and that helps to build a more sustainable system. Remember, we talked about when we were discussing Mars… I mean, Mars, there are no resources to come from the environment, almost nothing is provided by the Martian environment. So, the waste products from humans become really, really valuable, even though they’ve been used many times. It’s always a question of how can our ingenuity imagine a second purpose? Imagine repurposing or reusing some aspect of what we have in that environment? You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about reengineering our social concepts about some of these things, rather than thinking of clothes being old and looking tattered. I mean, it’s not uncommon to see people with holes in their jeans now as a fashion statement. But what if we put a little electronic counter on somebody’s clothes and it said how many times they’ve worn that same item, maybe we will be able to give kudos to people that they’ve worn something 150 times or 1000 times rather than giving, you know, criticizing them for wearing the same clothes day in and day out.
Shawn Flynn 40:57
I could imagine that. My social credibility score goes up a certain notch for wearing something 100-200 times.
Jonathan Trent 41:04
Why not? If we could do such a thing, then the use of art fashion changes our notion of fashion, moves towards the idea that you’re reusing things. I mean, it hasn’t been that long ago where people were sewed into their clothes and they wore the same clothes day in and day out, and year in and year out. And it was never an issue about wearing new things all the time. And in terms of resource partitioning, that will be an important devolution.
Shawn Flynn 41:35
And Jonathan, if anyone wants to contact you and find out more, what is the best way to do it?
Jonathan Trent 41:40
So right now, the best way to get in touch with me is to look up my LinkedIn profile, where I’ve described in a number of articles and posts how UpCycle Systems works. And you can go to the website and there’ll be a place you can put information in.
Shawn Flynn 41:56
We will have both those in the show notes. So once again, Jonathan, thank you for taking the time to be on our show today. I also want to thank Victor Wang, who’s the founder, chairman of Silicon Valley. He’s the one that made the introduction to Jonathan that allowed today’s interview to happen. So once again, thank him and Jonathan, thank you for your time and we look forward to having you on the show in the future.
Jonathan Trent 42:17
Thanks a lot, Shawn.
Outro 42:19
Thank you for listening to The Silicon Valley Podcast. To access our resources, visit us at TheSiliconValleyPodcast.com and follow our host on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn @ShawnFlynnSV. This show is for entertainment purposes only and is licensed by The Investors Podcast Network. Before making any decisions, consult a professional.
