🌟 New Episode: E58: The recipe for making leather out of grapes🎙️

This week, Alysia Garmulewicz, co-founder of Materiom talks about building an open database of recipes for making biomaterials--plastic, textiles, and more. Plus, a music recommendation!

We’re sticking with the topic of making stuff this week (including making music, so don’t skip the second half of the newsletter!). Plastic and textiles in particular need an overhaul. There’s a lot of promise in natural or biomaterials, as they’re known, but it’s been hard to get alternatives to petroleum plastic and other materials into the mainstream.

On this week’s episode of Everybody in the Pool (we’re back from summer vacation!), I talked with Alysia Garmulewicz of Materiom, which is an open database of recipes for biomaterials, about her attempt to help a generation of entrepreneurs develop more mushroom leathers and seaweed plastics and leather replacements made out of everything from grapes to bananas to food waste to mycelium. Some highlights:

🌱 Regenerative Biomaterials: Discover how these game-changing materials are set to replace harmful petroleum plastics in everyday products like packaging and textiles.

🔍 Materiom’s Cool Tech: Learn about Materium’s amazing open database of biomaterial recipes and how they use generative AI to help startups create and optimize new materials faster.

Source: technia.us

🤝 Google.org Partnership: Materiom is teaming up with Google.org to enhance its AI and expand its resources to support innovators around the world.

🌍 Sustainable Future: Using renewable feedstocks means going hyper-local; Materiom is pushing for regional value chains, as well as clear standards to avoid greenwashing.

New Music Alert

I was lucky enough to attend San Francisco’s amazing Stern Grove Festival last Sunday, and see Lucinda Williams. All by itself, that’s an amazing day—especially a concert in the trees with such a beautiful natural amphitheater, that’s free to attend as long as you stalk the ticket line or know somebody who does.

The opening act for Lucinda was a young woman named Jobi Riccio, who has a Patsy Cline-esque voice and and hails from Colorado, and I’d suggest you give her a listen no matter what. But when, from my perch on the grass surrounded by happy picnickers enjoying a nice day of music in the sun, I heard her say that she wrote her next song because she feels a lot of climate anxiety, almost all the time, I got tears in my eyes. I think she said she’s 23, with a whole long probably successful musical career and future ahead of her that will be and already is indelibly marked by a changing climate. She sang a song called Wildfire Season—some crappy video below—and it was a reminder to me, although I know it every day, that this isn’t an “issue” anymore, for most of us on planet Earth. It’s life.

Happy to be back, friends, and see you next week. Together, we must get this done.