4.13.22-Build.nano-Startups-RRTC

RICK RIMAN: Hi, there. I'm Rick Riman. Actually, just a little bit of trivia. I was actually in building 12 before they leveled it and built that beautiful building nano building. So big improvement, let me tell you. So just a little bit about me. I founded a company previously called Solidia Technologies. It's the world's only cement and concrete company that makes a green low-carbon-footprint cement that hardens with CO2 instead of water.

And just go on to the next thing, which is you've heard lots and lots today about materials and how they can really define an era. I believe we're in the era of advanced composite materials. And what I'd like to talk about is this process that I've invented in my lab at Rutgers called Low Temperature Solidification. It allows you to co-process polymers and ceramics together.

And yes, we can form ceramic bonds at lower temperatures than it takes to make a polymer, which allows you to co process the materials together. Better yet, I use CO2 to cross the ceramic bonds, and it's a non-shrinking process, which is a really big innovation in powder materials processing. The materials are stress-free, crack-resistant, stiff, tough, flame-retardant, and strong, and they're ultra-cheap.

So what I wanted to talk about today is replacing wood. A lot of people will talk about wood being a carbon-negative material. I have a big disagreement with that. I think we should leave trees in the forest, and we should leave the forest floor both for collecting CO2 and taking carbon out of the air.

And we have much better ways of making materials that can replace wood, so I won't talk about all the other composites that this technology allows, but in replacing wood, at least, we're talking about materials with better compressive and tensile strength. They're stiffer. You can't burn them, not even with a flame, a welding torch. They're infestation-proof, and better yet, they're not biodegradable, which means they're not going to emit methane after you landfill them.

So here's just a few examples of things we did where we just made a ceramic composite with high-density polyethylene. I don't have time to go through the numbers, but it's going to tell you that we made it better than the polymer and better than the ceramic. Here's probably the most interesting one is that even when we have a small amount of ceramic in this system, the material can actually be heated above the melt temperature in the plastic and still function. And we've done it with a lot of different polymers. So any new polymers people have, we're really interested in seeing what you got.

And here's a reason why you want to replace wood. So just looking at the pallet market, for example, there's $10 billion pallets in the world. They replace 25% of them a year. A lot of them go into landfill, emitting methane and CO2. And most of them only make one trip.

So this is one of the areas we can get rapid adoption because there aren't any standards in this industry. Anything that's better, they're going to grab onto right away. And you can see a summary of the performance advantages in this case. We've worked with a lot of companies as well as government organizations.

What are we looking for? Investors, upstream manufacturers of polymers, downstream technology licensees where we can drop our process in because we actually can manufacture very rapidly, very inexpensively. You saw earlier, we could make materials at a cost easily at $0.50 a kilogram. I'm targeting $0.10 a kilogram could be possible. And if we do that, we'll be knocking all of the materials out that you quite imagine that you might want to build with and be carbon-negative at the same time, meaning we consume more CO2 and manufacturing them as materials than we actually emit.

Lots of different producers can benefit from these materials. I think we can make packaging materials from it, cardboard, paper, automotive parts for sure. I've got a lot of materials in my magic box over there. Here's an example of one. If this was a concrete floor, I'd show you how I could bounce this off the surface. And this material here costs less than $0.15 a kilogram. I'm done. Thank you.

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