Leading the bio-industrial revolution by converting abundant methane gas into biodegradable materials.

Website: https://www.mangomaterials.com/

Founded Date: 2010

Country HQ: United States

Business model: B2B

Industry: Plastics

Applications: packaging, apparel, 3D printing

Team: 20

CEO: Molly Morse

YOUR JOURNEY TO FOUNDING

My name is Molly Morse, and I am CEO and co-founder of Mango Materials. The technology at Mango Materials is based on my PhD research at Stanford University. At Stanford we were looking to make new building materials to substitute plywood for temporary construction applications, and we became very interested in bio-composites, where you have natural fibres and a natural glue to hold the fibers together. That glue is a plastic, like a mitroxin material, and we became very interested in a class of materials called PHAs (PolyHydroxyAlkanoates). PHAs have amazing properties but they have traditionally been pretty expensive. Normally, you make PHA by taking sugar, feeding that sugar to bacteria and bacteria produce PHA.

“PHAs have amazing properties, but they have traditionally been pretty expensive”

At Stanford, there was this new idea: what if—instead of using sugar—we use methane gas? It could be any form of methane, even waste methane, and if you use methane, it’s a much lower price of the carbon feedstock, so this could drastically change the game for PHAs. My PhD was focused on bio-degradation, one of my co-founders was also a PhD student at Stanford looking at the bacteria that could produce PhA. We were academics, but after I graduated I worked for a while and then decided to start Mango Materials, based on the early foundational research at Stanford. I met another couple of people while I was a PhD student, so in 2010 we started Mango Materials with a group of 4. The first funding round was in 2012 - before that there was a long time of writing the business plan, with 3 of us technical founders and a fourth business co-founder.

Why the name Mango Materials - any particular analogy or association?

We are using biotechnology to reinvent the plastics industry. Other companies that make PHA or that work in biotechnology, have very technical sounding names—they sound like microorganisms—while we wanted something very approachable. From the foundational days, our aim was to be approachable to everyday consumers, so we wanted a name inspired by nature, which is clean and safe. We were thinking of tree names and flower names, mango is my favourite fruit, so here we are.

It definitely leaves an impression, and I barely know anybody who has a negative association to mangos.

Exactly! And it works very well internationally, because mangos are very popular all over planet Earth. One of the challenges is that we don’t use mangos and now that we are working with end-consumer brands sometimes it is confusing, because when they hear Mango Materials they think ‘oh for sure it’s going to be made out of mango fibers’. We are now actually branding the polymer with a different name just for that, but the inspiration for the biotechnology is from the fruit.

THE INNOVATION

Which problem are you solving and how does the solution work?

The number 1 problem we are trying to address is the pollution of plastics in the environment. As a side note, we are also looking at wastestream greenhouse gases. Our process works as follows: we take methane emissions—currently from the anaerobic digester of a wastewater treatment plant—we feed it to our bacteria, the bacteria naturally produces a bio-polymer inside their cell walls, we harvest the biopolymer (PHA) and we work on specific formulations. You need to tailor the material slightly for different applications, whether is for injection molding, fibers or for sheets.

“The number 1 problem we are trying to address is the pollution of plastics in the environment”

Our process ends once we produce the pellets. Others then take these pallets and melt them down to make plastic packaging or fibres for apparel. The great thing with PHAs—any form of PHA, not only PHA from methane—is that they can biodegrade naturally in many environments. If there is enough enzymatic attack from microorganisms like bacteria or fungi, they can consume the carbon in the material and use it to grow. Therefore, if this material ends up in modern waste facilities, which are promoting biodegradation, they can go for natural degradation. If they end up in industrial compost system or in natural marine environment, like oceans, they can completely biodegrade. Here you clearly see our focus on preventing the pollution of plastics.

You talk in terms of biodegradability - do you already have an estimate of the time required for that?

Whenever we talk about biodegradation, we want to know in what environments, how quickly and to what extent. Because pretty much everything is biodegradable to some extent. Maybe it takes 1000 years and only degrades 1%, but it is still biodegradable. We have tested our materials, in environment simulating the San Francisco Bay and it biodegraded in 7 weeks. In anaerobic digestion—an environment with no oxygen present—a very thin piece, like soya wrap, would degrade in less than 7 days. If they material is thicker and the environment is less active, then it’s going to take a lot longer.

“Whenever we talk about biodegradation, we want to know in what environments, how quickly and to what extent”

APPLICATIONS

The largest volume of our material right now is going into injection molding, for goods that substitute traditional plastic packaging. However, the vast majority of my team’s brainpower is going to fibers extrusion. It’s a lot of our time and energy, but smaller volumes at this point in time. When you take the pellets, if you melt them through a little spinneret you get fibres, which can represent an alternative to polyester in apparel. Every time we launder our polyester clothing we have micro-fibers polluting the ocean, so there is huge demand for technical innovations there, and that’s why we are doing it. We also work on sheets and 3D printing - 3D printing tends to be smaller volumes, while sheets have very slim margins but large volumes, which is part of our plan to scale.

We mostly work with the end brand, and that end brand pulls us through the supply chain. We provide our pallets to a mold processor—whether is an injection molder, a melt spinner or something else—but generally we didn’t find them ourselves. It’s the end brand, someone saying ‘I want to sell my product in biodegradable packaging, and get us an intro to the mold processors thy work with. Our business model is B2B, but it’s the B at the end that is pulling us through.

Have you done some pilot projects with corporates to test and validate the technology?

Yes, we have been doing this for a number of years, and hopefully COVID-19 won’t slow us down, because this year we can finally announce the partnerships we have been working on. Initially we started with research agreements, and then we went to joint development agreements, and we have now exclusivity agreements, so we have couple of fields where we can only work with one partner. We are pretty excited for that to become public, but it has been a multi-year process to get there.

VALUE IN CIRCULAR TRANSITION

We love methane - waste methane that is not being used for something else. We don’t want our technology to be the reason for new holes to be digged in the ground to get more natural gas. There is already a lot of natural gas being flared from the oil and gas sector - we really don’t mind any type of waste methane. Our vision for the circular economy in an ideal world is that we can take this waste methane from something like wastewater treatment plants, we make PHA out of it, the PHA goes into the different applications, and then it goes back to modern waste facilities in an anaerobic digester or in a modern compost waste facility, where the carbon is digested back to methane. In this way, we would close the loop completely.

“There is already a lot of natural gas being flared from the oil and gas sector - we really don’t mind any type of waste methane”

You can recycle PHAs, melt them down and rebuild them - that would be the most efficient. But if you go into something like food packaging that has also food waste in it, you can take all of that, single-stream it, produce methane, and use it again to make PHAs or use the methane for heating and electricity. We could have closed-loops regions of increased resilience. The Port of Rotterdam, for instance, has an anaerobic digester. It’s kind of small, but you can imagine that if all of Rotterdam took their food waste and packaging that can be anaerobically digested, we could take it to the port and produce methane for making new polymers that can be used locally, but also for heating and fuels. That would be our ideal world.

Yes, and also methane from dairy farms in the Netherlands fits into that vision.

Exactly! We have actually talked to a large dairy farm company in the Netherlands, we are not actively working with them right now, but I love that story because you could imagine taking manure, yoghurt packaging and other waste, single-stream it, and produce the material there. The only tricky thing is that milk chugs, at least in the US, are one of the few recycling success stories. Milk packaging is highly recyclable and recycled, the yoghurt cups no, they are a disaster.

FUTURE PLANS

Our next key milestone is working on a promotional product for the apparel industry. It’s not that every single jacket of this company would be made from this material. Hopefully, we’ll achieve it by end of this year, otherwise early 2021. That’s our key milestone. We will also be looking for additional funding to build our larger plants in 2021, ene though this might be a bit postponed.

VISION FOR THE DECADE OF ACTION

We are seeing a lot of things happening in the US and around the world, like plastic bans. I hope in 2030 this will be an extinct past, and we won’t need them anymore, because technologies like Mango Materials will have all scaled. Right now, we are all in this crazy period where we are proving our technology, testing market viability and getting that perfect product-market fit. Hopefully in the next ten years that has all happened, together with other changes like in legislation.

“Right now, we are all in this crazy period where we are proving our technology, testing market viability and getting that perfect product-market fit”

What makes me very motivated is that we are seeing the youth now take the lead in different places around the world, students striking for the climate, very young activists urging corporations to change. This gives companies like us a platform to tell our story and create brand awareness among these brand consumers that really care. I hope that by 2030, all these people will have grown up and will be making purchasing decisions with the environment in mind, helping technologies like us to scale. It’s going to take a while to build the infrastructure and build the plant that we need to see, but by 2030 I hope we are producing across the world millions and millions of pounds of PHA, whether it’s from Mango Materials or something else.

July 2020

A conversation between Molly Morse & Emanuele Di Francesco