Jul 25, 2018
In episode 124, Kestrel
welcomes Luke Haverhals, the founder and CEO of Natural Fiber
Welding, to the show. An analytical chemist, materials
scientist and entrepreneur, Luke is working to produce sustainable,
high performance materials for a variety of applications with his
team at Natural Fiber Welding.
"We're doing something
really important for the world which is to basically unleash the
abundance of nature and what nature produces at scale (that's very
high performance), and being able to convert those materials very
simply and very cost-effectively into the things that we need to
have high quality and standards of living that are sustainable and
renewable."
-Luke Haverhals, CEO + Founder of Natural Fiber Welding
In this episode, Luke
shares more of his backstory, and how growing up on a farm in the
Midwest helped him understand some of the processes behind the
creation of things - whether it was food or other materials. He
also explains how his research / the early developments of Natural
Fiber Welding evolved out of his work at the Department
of Defense.
Additionally, Luke helps
break down a bit more of the chemistry and science behind the
Natural Fiber Welding closed loop system process.
Kestrel addresses an issue
she has seen quite a bit recently in the innovative materials space
- in that younger, smaller brands often aren't able to access these
new fabrics, either due to minimums or requirements for large
financial investments. Luke explains how he and Natural Fiber
Welding are doing things differently - due to the way they have
built an efficient, scalable system, they feel confident
working with both smaller and larger brands.
The below thoughts, ideas + organizations were brought up in
this chat:
- Paul Truelove, Researcher who
Luke worked for and with at the U.S. Naval Academy
- Bradley University, where Luke
has worked as a Chemistry Professor
- "If you consider what nature is really good at making in
abundance, it's fiber. So, photosynthesis and plants - you can
think about it as an amazing nanorobot technology that produces all
sorts of wonderful materials of various physical and chemical
processes. But, it's fiber that the world is good at."
- "Cellulose is the most abundant material that's produced by
photosynthesis - something approaching 100 gigatons of cellulose
are produced each year by life processes on the planet - it dwarfs
the amount of abundance that mankind really needs in order to live
well."
- Intermolecular forces: nature's sort of glue that holds polymer
to polymer; the important one to know about is called
hydrogen bonding.
- Hydrogen bonding: this electrostatic
attraction that takes one polymer and holds it to all of its
neighbors even though the individual molecules are not connected to
each other through covalent bonding - they're connected by
this intermolecular force.
- "The fiber welding process is a chemistry process that's a
closed loop process that imparts a physical change to fiber,
connects fibers in ways that they normally wouldn't be connected,
and it's 100% natural when it's all done, and you reclaim the
chemistry that you enabled the physical change with, and use it
again and again. You get something that starts off as fibers as a
loose pile, and now those fibers become a 3-dimensional part for
your furniture. Or what we do in the textile world is we can
take yarns that are made from cotton and especially upcycled cotton
(where the fiber is short and the yarns that are made from
second-use cotton are not strong enough or very fine), to make
really high end performance fabrics. We can take those fibers and
we can make yarns that are very strong and fine, and therefore, you
can make performance fabrics from cottons that have already been
used once."
- Steelcase x Natural Fiber Welding
Collaboration, in which they strengthened recycled denim to
produce tabletops entirely out of used jeans
- "You can integrate other things that you do along the way to
make the textile - all into one process that ends up actually
creating a better performing thing - like color that doesn't fade
and wash out."
- "Because automation is
changing the world, and we're sort of making sure our process as we
think about it - we're on the forefront on the technology side,
making sure we can liberate it for everybody - not just a
few."
Recommended Article
From Intro
"Sustainable Fashion Only Works When
It's Inclusive: When talking about sustainability, we must address
the elephant in the room."
by Celine Semaan