Alysia Garmulewicz is co-founder and director of Materiom, a pioneering organisation that provides open source recipes and data on materials made from abundant sources of natural ingredients. Alysia is an Associate Professor of the circular economy at the Facultad de Administración y Economía, Universidad de Santiago de Chile. She is also an Associate Fellow at the CABDyN Complexity Centre, Saïd Business School, at the University of Oxford. Her research and entrepreneurial endeavours take place at the intersection of circular economy, open source biomaterials, and digital fabrication, paving the way for truly regenerative and distributive systems. She regularly collaborates with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, is a member of the International Society for the Circular Economy, and a regional co-chair of the Research Data Alliance.

Hi Alysia, it’s a great pleasure to have you here for a conversation. To kick it off, I’m curious to learn more about the journey leading you to establish Materiom. How did you come to embrace the grand mission of building ‘Nature’s recipe book’, as you phrase it?

The genesis of my work on circular economy was out of first reading Cradle to Cradle when I was in my undergraduate years - that really sparked my interest in more positive systemic solutions. I had been focused on climate change for a number of years as a young person, and at the time—as it is now—it was difficult to see how the global community was going to develop a viable path forward. When I read Cradle to Cradle, I started to see not only what we were against, but also what we were for. Articulating that vision was the focal point for my studies.

Through my masters and my doctorate, I started to look at industrial ecology. I had the insight that we were up against the huge challenge of trying to pipe back into circulation a large amount of distributed waste into a centralised manufacturing system. This is incredibly difficult from a logistical and economic perspective. It’s there that I understood the value of nature-inspired cycling, where local and regional production, consumption and cycling of resources make the whole system a lot more effective. 

“The value of nature-inspired cycling, where local and regional production, consumption and cycling of resources make the whole system a lot more effect”

Around that time, there was a growing hype around 3D printing, along with the idea of digitising manufacturing as a means of decentralising production. Putting the two structural difficulties together—cycling resources in our current system on one side, and making manufacturing more decentralised and distributed on the other—the main question I pursued in my doctorate was: in these distributed manufacturing systems that are burgeoning in many parts of the world, are the material supply chains distributed as well? Or, to phrase it differently, where are the materials in this whole distributed manufacturing world?

What did these questions lead you to?

I studied it through the lens of Fab Labs. I looked at Fab Labs around the world and interviewed Fab Labs leaders to understand where the materials were coming from and what knowledge about materials existed at a local level. And I found a large barrier in terms of access to knowledge about materials. People had large amounts of expertise and understanding in terms of software and hardware—they're building their own machines and they're writing their own software—but when it came to materials, they were ordering them on Amazon. That was just the traditional 20th century supply chains feeding this new world of distributed production. I saw a real gap and challenge that needed to be addressed - how do we make this distributed manufacturing future connected to supply chain networks that are in tune with the local environment?

“How do we make this distributed manufacturing future connected to supply chain networks that are in tune with the local environment?”

That’s the kind of insight that sparked Materiom. After my doctorate, I looked at actually doing something about that, not just identifying the issue. What Materiom seeks to do in that respect is to provide knowledge about materials: open access, open source material recipes. The other aspect is developing a common set of nutrients—of ingredients—that one can use as a palette for making various composites and plastics, using biomass that is abundant. That core set of nutrients is actually what the natural world builds with. We look at natural polymers as the fundamental building blocks for our own products. 

When it comes to bio-based materials, there are contrasting claims about the systemic potential they have for transforming the way we produce and consume - e.g. in relation to functionality and economic competitiveness. What is your perspective on this? 

It is definitely an evolving research area as to how much functionality we can get from bio-based. I think there are a couple of aspects that are super important. One is that we need to work with bio-based molecules, because when they break down they are food for other organisms, so it goes back into a more distributed nutrient network that can support natural ecosystems and provide ecosystem services. This goes beyond the notion of a tight technical loop where leakage is a problem. So, there is a systemic benefit for using biomass. 

The other aspect is the processing - the actual chemistry with which you fuse molecules together and create plastics, composites, etc. What you currently see in the industry is that they are using bio-molecules but through traditional manufacturing processes - fusing the molecules together through high heat and high pressure. So, at the end of the day, you have plastic that is bio-based, but is not biodegradable.

So, it’s not only a matter of inputs, but also of how those inputs are processed for production. What is necessary, then, to unleash the full potential of bio-based?

The twin pillars we work with are 1) molecules that are bio-based, and 2) looking at chemistry processes that are inspired by nature. If you look at nature-inspired materials’ design—the biomimicry world—you see a huge amount of really promising research looking at adding function through the structure, or architecture of the material. You can get really amazing functionality when you play with structure at nested levels of scale. This is how natural materials become so impressive. Wood, for instance, has nested  architectures made of cellulose, lignin and hemicellulose, which make it an incredibly high performing material at the macro level.

“You can get really amazing functionality when you play with structure at nested levels of scale”

What we are trying to do is set a roadmap to become able to architect materials and design them through digital tools—such as 3D printing and laser cutting, milling, etc—in order to make materials that are high-performing by virtue of their architecture, not their chemistry. That’s a longer game, but I think it opens up a different window into what you can make with bio-based.  

As it is an evolving research area, where do you see us standing right now?

There's a couple of approaches to that. One is that there are already a lot of impressive materials out there, they are just not commercialised yet. You have got a lot of small-scale entrepreneurs and designers showcasing that bio-based materials perform well in traditional product niches. For example, there’s a company called CuanTec in Scotland, as well as MarinaTex and The Shellworks in England, that are using chitin for packaging. They are all at the pilot scale. Chitin is the second most abundant polymer on Earth, and can be sourced from crustacean and fish waste. Other examples using algae are Evoware in Indonesia, Agar Plasticity by Amam in Japan, and Desintegra.me and Lugae in Chile. There are a lot of little startups and designers that are currently operating at the local scale. 

Then there is the question of R&D time. We have to recognise that we have spent huge amounts of money investigating and understanding the behaviour of polymers from petroleum. With the advent of cheap oil, there was a big boom in terms of research and development and commercialization. We have to catch up and surpass the effort that’s been put into that world. So I don’t think it’s accurate right now to compare the current suite of materials that can be made from biopolymers with those that can be made from petroleum polymers in terms of their functionality, because it’s like comparing apples with pears. We haven’t reached the same point of understanding.

That’s clear - to fully assess how bio-based compares to petroleum-based we first need to achieve a bigger scale of bio-based production. How do you suggest doing that?

How to scale is one issue that is really important to address from a systemic perspective, because I don’t think we should get to scale in the way we scale petroleum polymers, which is investing in huge manufacturing plants and exporting all over the world. That’s the model we think of when we think of scaling. What we need to do is to have distributed fabrication of materials everywhere close to the centres of demand. That shortens the loop from production to consumption, and has nutrients going back into the source ecosystems to close the loop and make sure that bio-based materials are regenerative, not extractive. This will support resilience in specific ecosystems and the biosphere as a whole. To do this we should adapt recipes for different sets of polymers or different sources of biomass, depending on where you are. We should scale horizontally. 

“What we need to do is to have distributed fabrication of materials everywhere close to the centres of demand”

What does your ideal process of distributed materials’ production look like?

What I envision as a possible world that we're building is a world where materials become more integrated with the process of making the product itself. Right now, the idea of architecting a product is quite separate from the materials—the feedstock—that goes into it. Digital fabrication starts to open up the possibility of designing those materials through the building of the product itself. Bio-based molecules can be composed and designed in a very specific way to create the architecture and the overall material that you need in terms of performance and functionality.

The merging of materials and product architecture is really important. I see the world of Fab Labs, makerspaces, and hackerspaces as incorporating materials into the processes of design and fabrication. They could become nodes, around which local and regional supply networks form in. Moving from this idea of a linear supply chain to more distributed supply networks that have nested local and regional levels of scale is one key. The second key would be that the way these bio-based building blocks are composed would really merge with objects’ manufacturing through digital tools.

It sounds extremely intriguing. To make all of this more concrete, could you provide us an example of Materiom’s work starting from your local ecosystem in Chile? 

We have started with the idea that a large variety of materials can be designed with a common, abundant set of building blocks and easy-to-access processes. Over the last couple years, we have developed a dataset with agar-based bioplastics, creating thin films that can be used for packaging. With a very simple process, one pot and a stove, you can create these films and let them air-dry afterwards - a process that can be varied quite easily just by varying the percentage of agar, water, and of glycerol that we use as a plasticizer. In this way, you can achieve materials with different performance.

We created a large dataset of different variations - 32 different variations in terms of composition alone. Then, of course, you can vary the processing parameters, you can dry it in different conditions, etc. You can tweak those parameters to get very different outcomes. That’s an example of what you can achieve starting with a base set of nutrients. In this case, we focused on a polysaccharide called agar, which is abundant in Chile because we have a large amount of algae that grows and can be harvested and farmed with sustainable aquaculture models.

Open source is a key pillar of the whole Materiom project. Why is it so important for you?

The point of open source in this area is to provide a layer of information that can spark entrepreneurship everywhere. Small, medium and large players may use these recipes and enter the market, or come up with a new product in their current suite. The community we’re trying to incentivize and enable is really large and distributed, so the knowledge has to be open so that anyone of any scale and capabilities can access and use it. We envision a small or large company taking the recipe, adopting it and developing to make it their own. They could file a patent that is different enough from the original set of information, that may allow them to more easily commercialize their material. Or, they could maintain intellectual property in the commons, helping to grow the body of knowledge that will accelerate more solutions in more places to get to market.  So, that’s the aim of providing open source. A core part of our mission is to democratise access to this kind of information.

“The knowledge has to be open so that anyone of any scale and capabilities can access and use it”

What are Materiom’s plans for the future?

We will be launching a data commons of biomaterial properties in the next couple of months, which will be open source and open for people to contribute. The main point here is that people will be able to search on the basis of performance. So, if you want a material that’s really good for plastic packaging, you might need certain barrier properties, strength or elasticity - and you can query the database for that. Along with the data that is physically tested, we will also be applying machine learning algorithms to start predicting what would be the performance of certain formulations with a given set of ingredients or process parameters. Further, the trajectory is to make material recipes more integrated with digital fabrication processes. For instance, we are looking at 3D printing as an element of processing to provide increased material performance.

The longer-term vision I see possible is being able to have a palette of ingredients you work with, but then adapting them for various design purposes to compose materials with different functionalities. That’s what the natural world does: there is a limited set of polymers and of elements in the periodic table that the natural world composes structural materials from. The diversity of material performance in the natural world is unending in terms of continual adaptation by organisms. That’s the template we need to work with. The tools we are building now will allow us to have unending possibilities to recombine and develop biomaterials that have an unending variety of performance. 

I saw you have also been working on setting up Materiom Hubs around the world - what’s their role in your overall mission?

A lot of what we do is digital, such as developing a database and online library. But, at the end of the day, we’re about making real materials. So we are developing local hubs, often located in Fab Labs or other digital fabrication spaces that have an understanding of the local environment in terms of entrepreneurs, businesses, and material designers. The hubs represent our core ethos by demonstrating local, decentralised production and global digital collaboration. We are looking at scaling this network: developing hubs with people who have local roots and can develop an understanding of the abundance of certain bio-based materials in their environment while contributing to our global research network. 

“The hubs represent our core ethos by demonstrating local, decentralised production and global digital collaboration”

As of today, you already have hubs in Chile, the US, Netherlands and the UK. Are like-minded individuals who share your vision and objectives invited to reach out to start a new hub in their own location?

Of course, they are definitely welcome! I think the best way to do it is just to get in touch, and we'll have a chat. We can discuss what are the opportunities you see in developing local material networks and interfacing with various communities that are interested in the bio-based development of materials. It's more of a conversation rather than a procedure. So I would invite anybody who's interested to get in touch.

The other aspect I want to mention on the hubs part is that we are really looking at distributed testing, data acquisition and gathering through the hubs in our research network. A core barrier in this open, distributed world of circular materials is access to knowledge about materials. And that’s not only for recipes, but also for the data on how the materials perform. For instance, if you make beautiful plastics that seem really good, how do you compare it to other plastics on the market, through a clear, scientifically-benchmarked method of measuring material properties? 

“A core barrier in this open, distributed world of circular materials is access to knowledge about materials”

I assume you are working on a solution for that too…what’s the strategy?

What we are doing is working on opening up access to testing tools that can measure those material properties, such as tensile strength, elastic modulus, barrier properties (water, gas, etc.) and thermal properties - all of the suite of material properties that you currently need to go to an industrial lab or university facility to measure. We are looking at open sourcing these tools and distributing the knowledge about them, so that one day when you make a material in some part of the world, you can share data on it, understand how it could perform and how you could adapt it to make it perform better.  That’s a core part of what we’ll be focusing on in the next few years - distributed access to testing and data gathering in order to feed a global data commons that will be living and breathing with the people who are making and testing materials.

That’s brilliant - we can’t wait seeing this future unfold!

A conversation between Alysia Garmulewicz & Emanuele Di Francesco

February 2021

About the painting

The painting accompanying this conversation—named ‘Renewal’—is an artwork by Natalja Heybroek, a Dutch artist whose works are underpinned by an exploration into the fluid nature of life. This painting (which you see in cropped version) is part of the six paintings’ series Sentience, which studies the depth of awareness living beings possess of themselves and their environment. You are warmly invited to discover more of Natalja’s works on her website and her Instagram page.

Useful links

• Materiom

• Materiom’s Materials Library: make your own recipes!

• Materiom Hubs: ready to join a global community?

• Natalja Heybroek