BioCellection co-founders Miranda Wang and Jeanny Yao met in their eighth-grade recycling club. Today they are innovating chemical recycling of plastics, transforming packaging waste material into valuable chemicals and performance materials that stay in the economy longer.

“We’re contributing to a new type of circular economy that is more beneficial because it just gives more opportunities for these molecules that are stuck in the traditional petrochemicals to be used in different parts of our economy. Different parts of our supply chain.”

In this episode:

• Jeanny and Miranda’s journey from recycling club to innovation start-up 
• How BioCellection is creating a new type of circular economy by recycling plastic packaging waste into valuable chemicals and performance materials 
• The different types of recycling and the communication challenges of the recycling industry
• Creating and managing a relationship-based, flat structured team
• BioCellection’s plans for a commercial waste facility
• The importance of plastic and recycling education go change consumers, and in turn, change business

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Show Notes

• SheEO Venture: BioCellection
• Social Profiles: Facebook, Twitter

Transcript

Jeanny Yao: If they want to help the environment start learning about their local recycling system and understand that the hype isn’t just bio-plastics. The hype isn’t just banning plastic. It’s not about peer pressure and whoever’s the loudest, whoever is the most radical with, but really think about the ideas on the table. Learn more about different solutions because there are so many different types of technologies and these different technologies work for different region. It’s really a solution that is case by case. You have to look at the use case of the plastic that’s created and the technology that is used to recycle it.

Vicki Saunders: Welcome to sheEO.World, a podcast about redesigning the world. I’m your host, Vicki Saunders. In each episode you’ll hear from SheEO ventured founders, women who are working on the world’s to do list. These innovative business leaders are solving some of the major challenges of our times. Sit back and prepare to be inspired.

Miranda Wang: My name is Miranda Wang, and I’m the co-founder and CEO of BioCellection.

Jeanny Yao: I’m Jeanny Yao. I’m the cofounder and COO of BioCellection.
Vicki Saunders: Thank you very much for joining us today you two. Really excited to hear all about the crazy journey that you’ve been on since you met way back when. And so maybe I’ll start with you Miranda. How did you two meet and where did the idea for BioCellection come from?

Miranda Wang: Jeanny and I met in eighth grade at high school at recycling club meeting. The two of us were actually new to high school and looking for great afterschool activities to get involved in and both of us chose of the recycling club where students were responsible for ensuring that plastic bottles and cans are actually getting recycled. So we met each other and that was where we started what is now about a 10 year relationship and building multiple organizations together. When you’re through so much is sort of like a civilian relationship at this point, not just working together but helping each other in our daily lives.

Miranda Wang: We’ve moved in terms of Jeanny, to a totally different country. For me, to a totally different state after college because I did college in the US. We had periods where we really were the only people around that we knew very well. And going through those periods together has just been an incredible journey, and incredibly strengthening our relationship.

Vicki Saunders: So from grade eight to co-founding a company. Jeanny, tell us a little bit about what is BioCellection?

Jeanny Yao: Yeah, BioCellection is an innovation startup in chemical recycling of plastics. So our mission is to use technology to valorize plastics that are currently waste and contributing to pollution. And how we do it is that we develop advanced chemical recycling methods to turn this material, this packaging waste material into valuable chemicals and performance materials that not only have higher value than plastic packaging to begin with, but also stay in the economy longer because they’re used as performance materials like in people’s cars, and electronics, and textiles and apparels rather than packaging that is used for a few minutes and discarded by the consumer.

Vicki Saunders: Why are you passionate about this? I mean, clearly you’ve been passionate about this for a long time. Starting with recycling club and grade eight which is where all great companies should be founded I think. I love it. Why are you passionate about this issue, and does it matter so much to the world right now?

Miranda Wang: Both Jeanny and me, it’s a pretty deeply embedded belief that if humans want to continue living on this planet, we have to solve the plastic pollution problem and we have to do with the regeneration. It’s really obvious that right now plastics are being found as pollution in every single part of the food chain. What we think we’re putting it in a garbage can is going away forever, could end up in the middle of the ocean just because of the way of the scrap waste industry. The waste is being transported, exported to poor countries that don’t even have recycling programs and infrastructure. This is a horrible problem and if anything else strays, the social inequality globally, it’s kind of like, I would say the ugliest side of the global trade, and globalization because waste is something that is.. You could have places, say California, we have pretty clean beaches and then you go to places like Indonesia and the pollution is everywhere and they have the densest biodiversity in the oceans.

Miranda Wang: It’s clear that this plastic, no matter how amazing of a material it is, has no place our environment. And what BioCellection is doing is we’re turning this challenge into a bigger opportunity. From the perspective of what do we do, a lot of people are advocating for banning plastics or reduce it. We’re in favor of that as well. However, we believe that, given that right now over 340 million tons of plastics are produced globally, and the plastic industry actually projects this number to double in the next 15 years due to global population increase. And if you look at what the single use plastics are used for, a lot of is they use it to protects food and water. In places, for example, like Haiti where they don’t have clean drinking water coming out of pipes. Like these packaging, no matter how polluting they are, they actually do have a very major important use in that 10 or so minutes they are being consumed and the shelf life that they provide.

Miranda Wang: So the question is if we have to make these plastics, everyone will be making more, what can we do to prevent this plastic from becoming this terrible pollution after is being used? And the answer is that we came up with is to continue innovating and developing a technology that can take this plastic once becomes waste and then up-cycle it in a way that right now no one knows how to do. We specifically target plastics or unrecyclable right now. So specifically, low-density polyethylene. So these are plastics life things that would make up your plastic bags or wraps, clean wrap, pallet wrap. So both consumer packaging and plastics used in different parts, kind of the background or the supply chain. We take these plastics, we break them down completely to their essence, to their chemical building blocks, and then we build back up not to the same plastics but to higher value performance materials that can be used in advanced manufacturing. And turning them into materials that can be used for many, many years.

Miranda Wang: So this in our opinion is the solution. Doesn’t only cut pollution in the end, but also by secularizing these molecules in this circular economy, we’re able to reduce the amount of fossil fuels and the carbon emissions that are created in producing these chemicals traditionally, and also making these these performance materials. So there’s multiple benefits. We believe that the solution is inevitable.

Vicki Saunders: I just have a question. I mean, you just mentioned it and I was going to ask a little bit about the circular economy. This is for either of you. Do you view yourself as part of the circular economy, is this a future that we think we’re going towards?

Jeanny Yao: I think that the current circular economy is mostly about turning the same type of plastic back into this same material. To be able to circularize this you don’t have to extract virgin oil to create this packaging. But we see ourselves as contributing to a new type of circular economy because inherently plastics are coming from petrochemicals and they’re stuck in this cycle of technical materials. So plastics can only make things that are plastics, or fuels, or of the sort. Things that are used in the industry, in supply chains.

Jeanny Yao: And then there’s this whole other cycle of biological materials that people are creating, like bio-plastics and then those things would break down, but there’s no overlap of the two right now. Traditionally produced plastics are not able to enter the bile cycle to be turned into compounds that can essentially break down at the end of life. So what we’re doing is really interesting because it’s taking a traditional technical material and turning it into molecules that can actually feed into both the technical cycle and the biological cycle. So, for example, the output of our novel chemical process is a group of chemical blocks as Miranda said. These are called dicarboxylic acids. And these are actually biological compounds that humans create in our bodies.

Jeanny Yao: So these are breakdown components of certain types of sugars. If you release these compounds into nature, or if animals ingest certain amounts of it, they’re actually biodegradable. They’re perfectly harmless in nature, so they can break down. They can also be used to make biological compounds like they’re used in the food industry as additives. They’re used in pharmaceuticals as additives. They are used in personal care and cosmetics. So that’s a totally biological path because eventually at the end of life for these types of products, you don’t really generate any waste or it’s waste that you can put down to drain. And that’s fine. These chemicals can also be made into things I was talking about earlier, such as performance materials.

Jeanny Yao: So these are back into the technical realm again, but in a higher value chain. So these are performance materials like nylons and polyurethanes. These are essential for building homes and cars and even airplanes. They’re a really high quality, high functioning things, and they’re the building blocks of of these higher group materials. And the way that we’re doing this circular economy with the way we’re recycling the molecules is we’re not breaking down the plastic packaging into the same monomers that create that low value technical plastic packaging, but we’re transforming these small molecules into versatile chemicals that can feed into so many different applications in both technical and biological cycles. And they have so high final value that the margin created from that recycling really makes sense for this recycling effort.

Jeanny Yao: Mechanical recycling is not working today because there’s no market for the end materials. They’re so low value and they’re not good enough quality that they can’t compete with version grade plastics. So our approach is really, you really have to check all of these boxes. You have to make a versatile material that can go into various different applications. This end product has to be high enough value to justify the recycling cost. It has to be able to allow more opportunities in both technical and biological cycles. So that’s how we see that. We’re contributing to a new type of circular economy that is more beneficial because it just gives more opportunities for these molecules that are stuck in the traditional petrochemicals to be used in different parts of our economy. Different parts of our supply chain.

Vicki Saunders: The word transformation, and I mean taking a product and breaking it down actually create an even better product efforts transformed to me is really fascinating. A lot of the work that we talk about with sheEO ventures, mindset shifts and doing things a new way is one of the biggest blocks. And so Miranda, maybe over to you on what are the biggest challenges you face in going to market with what you’re doing? Is it on the total edge of innovation and hard to explain to people or what are the things that are your biggest challenges?

Miranda Wang: Yeah, I think on a communications standpoint, there are definitely challenging. Plastics, there are many types, especially when it comes to packaging materials. If you might have noticed that the triangle logo for recycling has numbers on it. There are actually numbers one to seven when it comes to everyday packaging. The one to seven actually represents six major types of plastic materials for packaging. But each of these different materials are built of completely different chemical structures. So for example, what would make a clear water bottle, like PP is a completely different chemical structure than what makes up a plastic bag, which is PE, and that’s usually number four. There’s low density or number two that’s high density.

Miranda Wang: With these two types of plastics, what is really challenging to communicate is that although they both look similar and feel similar to a consumer who’s holding it, PG the clear water bottle type of plastic is actually really easy to recycle. We have always had mechanical and also now chemical ways of breaking down that plastic and recycling it. And that’s due to the chemical structure enabling pretty easy fixes for it, for it to be recycled in a circular fashion. However, with polyethylene, so things like plastic bags, because of its chemical structure, it’s really difficult to recycle both mechanically and chemically. So it’s really difficult to recycle mechanically because you can imagine a plastic bag that has grease on it, you just can’t shred it, clean it and melt it and mold it into something that has enough strict.

Miranda Wang: Whereas plastic water bottle, if you shred that, you can turn it into a polyester shirts because it’s essentially the same material as what is in a polyester fiber. It’s a little hard for people to understand that these two materials have both totally different technical challenges when recycling. And because of this all of the companies are claiming to be using post consumer recycled plastics are only using the PT, where the water bottles type of plastic. And people think that that is a closing the loop but is not because there are five other plastics, numbers two seven to seven. The seventh type is sort of miscellaneous group.

Miranda Wang: Are there five other main types of plastics that are not in the picture right now. And those are the plastics that are causing the ocean pollution. Those are the plastics that right now we have very poor economics justifying the recycling for. Whereas the PT plastics, have always had really great ways to scrap markets. So what BioCellection is creating as a solution for the unrecyclable plastics, they’re unrecyclable because the current mechanical means to recycle them do not yield a quality product that people can sell at a profit. So nobody is recycling those. And we believe that this problem is largely due to a lack of technology allowing higher value product to be created. So we have been targeted this.

Miranda Wang: So the challenge has always been how do we communicate with it to a consumer at the end of the day, where we make a performance material that’s made from trash bags, from polyethylene, and somebody else makes a T-shirt that’s made of polyester from recycle water bottles. But the total experience, the challenge of doing both of these things are completely different. They’re completely different. And what we’re doing is actually something that contributes to closing the gap and solving the pollution problem by either preventing materials that would otherwise go into the oceans or landfills getting there, or we’re actually going to be in the next stage working with groups that actually recover the materials from the oceans.

Miranda Wang: It’s a question of how do we communicate this to people out there so that people understand that it’s the stuff made from recycled PE, or polypropylene, or polystyrene that are really, really solving the problem. Whereas recycling PT, I wouldn’t say is a green-washed in there because it’s still valuable. It’s still neat to recycle, but it’s by far right now the only thing that we talked about when we talk about recycling plastic and that needs to change.
Vicki Saunders: Just to dig in on that for a second though, the consumer isn’t actually your customer, is it? You’re going directly to businesses?

Jeanny Yao: We’re B2B’s. We are sort of in the middle of two different industries. We have two groups of customers and currently they’re both business type. So on the front end we are recycling service. So we’ll take these unrecyclable plastics and recycle them for a fee. Currently, waste plans and recycling plants, when they cannot recycle these plastics, they take them to the landfill and pay the landfill a tipping fee to just dispose of it. So they would rather pay us the same amount to get it recycled sustainably. So that’s one group of customers. So there’re waste plans, recovery plans, and usually they have a contract or relationship with the city government. So that group is the upstream set of customers.

Jeanny Yao: And then we have this process that turns this waste into products. so these are chemical material products. So we’re selling to downstream material buyers. So these are people who would buy 3D printing filaments, or really high grade nylon pellets to do molding for a car part. Or it can be something that is more consumer facing. Maybe individual designers can buy the starting material and create small parts for their design projects. But we foresee ourselves in the longer term mostly B2B because that’s where the volume comes from. We want to be turning a lot of plastics into a lot of products and be able to get these products out into the economy without having to try to sell to individuals.

Jeanny Yao: But the initial plan is that as we are still scaling, we will be producing small quantities in the beginning, and testing these products out, putting them into the marketplace for individual designers to come in and try them out and use them. That is a really great way to get started and then we can get some validation to move into industry.
Vicki Saunders: Yeah, this is part of, I imagine the challenge of this. It’s new, it’s got a really interesting story behind it. It’s hard to kind of show that whole transformation. So for example, right now with 3D filament, is any of that coming from recycled product or is that all new or how does that happen right now?

Miranda Wang: Yes, there are also many different types of three 3D printing. So where the actual three 3D printing filaments that you would use when you want to build a part you want to rely on. So a part that would go into a car, or maybe a part that would go into a rocket, or make the material that you want to perform and look really good. So those things are like, as long as there’s some type of nylon, they’re not made from recycled plastics, they may be made from… In some cases, you can grind down nylon as you melt it and use it, but in most cases they’re made from a virgin source. So they’re made from some sort of oil or natural gas.

Miranda Wang: What we’re doing is we’re targeting this filming material. So at the moment we have already achieved in the company turning un-recycled plastic polyethylene into these chemical building blocks. And what we’re doing right now is building up from the [inaudible 00:19:39] building blocks to these performance materials. Our first targets are making nylon, and also polyethylene, and we’re going to choose the best of either material as our first product to launch.

Vicki Saunders: Let’s go back to how this became a business. So take me from you finished university, you’ve stayed in touch throughout this. What did each of you study and then how did this become a business and how did you get off the ground?

Jeanny Yao: We did a high school science project together and that was where we started sort of incorporating science and innovation into a technical way of thinking and solving the problem in addition to the community awareness and all of these things that we were doing in our high school. When we graduated high school, we actually went to separate colleges. Miranda went to Upenn, where she studied molecular biology and philosophy and engineering entrepreneurship. I went to university of Toronto in Canada, and I studied biochem and environmental science. And the reason why we were both focused on sort of the bile realm of science was that that was our initial approach to how do we break down plastics? We were just thinking of breaking it down. It’d be so great if we just break it down and it will be harmless.

Jeanny Yao: And we were looking at these papers on biodegradation. So that’s where we did the science research project in the science fair. And we continued studying these fields in college. I had junior year after junior year of college, we found this opportunity to join a biotech accelerator, this was where we formed the company, we incorporated, and we named it BioCellection. We were still trying to use a biological way to not only break it down now but to create some type of value. That was when we realized nobody’s going to fund the technology where you’re just reducing waste but not generating anything valuable because you need money to kind of fund that process to run it.

Jeanny Yao: So we were brainstorming things like what can we make out of bio? That was the idea that we sort of started working on while we’re still in school. So the last year of college was kind of crazy for both of us because we were still full time in school. We’re trying to finish our degrees last year, and then we’re basically full time working on this project, the prototype and we’re trying to like develop a business plan, and we’re trying to get some funding. We applied to like 20 something, 30 something competitions around Penn and Wharton. And I was basically living in Miranda’s dorm half the time trying to attend these competitions with her and help with the research. And we ended up winning like 26 competitions at Penn, where we swept up a bunch of startup grant money. That was what got us started.

Jeanny Yao: So we decided to move over to the Valley. We heard some friends were in this area, they were doing biotech and it seems to be a really innovative hub where we could recruit talent and investors are more sustainably minded. The cities are more interested in recycling. So we decided to move over here with the grant money and some angel funding that we got. So that was about just over three years ago. So we graduated college and moved to Silicon Valley to get started. And then as soon as we got started we had a bio lab set up. We hired a biologist that will be scientist, and then we started touring waste plants. We got invited by the city government and they were actually… San Jose city has been really gracious to us. They arrange these trips for us to go tour all of the waste plants in San Jose.

Jeanny Yao: And then we started learning about the waste materials. And it just really dawned upon us that there’s so much contamination on the plastic surfaces, and there’s so much volume of plastics that we realized that the biological methods that we were working on wasn’t going to work just because it’s so slow and it doesn’t do well in the presence of contamination. So we had to go back to the drawing board and say, okay, what do we do now? What is the much more practical and feasible method to recycle these molecules, turn them into something else that’s more valuable. Inspired by this biological pathways, we were originally thinking, how do we make biodegradable compounds that can be made into other things? So we were still on that line of thinking, but we switched to a chemical method.

Jeanny Yao: It’s a type of chemical recycling that enables us to turn a technical material into a biological set of compounds. So that’s how our kind of twisted journey was what actually allowed us to arrive at this innovation that other people have not been thinking about. And it’s a very different, it’s a very challenging type of science to do. We were able to recruit a lot of help. We had advisors from industry and academia that were helping us on the project and eventually when we got enough money, we were able to recruit a full time PhD scientists and they have just been phenomenal. Now, Miranda and I don’t do any of the lab work and have a whole R&D team that is just here. They’re here like 10 hours a day, and they’re just really committed and really passionate about the work they do.

Vicki Saunders: Let me just guess on what this might look like, but you’re both 25 or younger? Yeah. And you’ve got this team of PhD researchers and scientists working there, so how’s that work, that whole age gap thing going?

Miranda Wang: I would say it took us about one and a half years to two years to understand what it takes it to manage them and help them be at their best. The way that I see it is not so much that they’re our employees and we’re their employers, but it’s really a team dynamic. We have seen as that what Jeanny and I are trying to say, we are completely complimentary to what the typical kind of PhD inventor or scientists that we bring on. Scientists are really good at thinking about challenging questions, problems, and coming up with innovative solutions. Jeanny and I are very innovative too. It’s really easy to bond on that dimension.

Miranda Wang: However, scientists typically don’t want to take on that risk of having an unstable income or having to go out there and fundraise and present to a lot of people and make things sort of provocative. We’re just explaining to people all the things in a way that is not difficult to understand for a five-year-olds. That whole training process, it’s quite specialized actually, [inaudible 00:26:31] go through to communicate to different types of audiences and scientists don’t really want to be good at that. Most of the time they want to be good at science. The creation, the knowledge, and the invention of application.

Miranda Wang: As on the other hand, Jeanny and I, my passion are in solving the problem. So what we care about is whatever does it take to actually be able to put this team together, to support the team to end up reaching the people in the world who will be able to emphasize on this matter, or some other form of resource for us to keep going. We learned over time that the relationship is a lot more successful if we have more of a flat structure, if the way that the company works is much more democratic, we provide to the scientists what they need to be able to thrive in the environment. They want a place with flexibility where they can have flexible hours, where they’re trusted and not micromanaged so that they have their own schedules. And one thing that we have got very lucky with and finally was able to successfully implement where Dr. Jennifer Le Roy, who is our director of D&D, who at the beginning of this year, at the time when she joined, she was a product development scientist who’s working on formulation of our chemical products.

Miranda Wang: But it became really evident that she’s really good at working with different people. And she’s really good about working with scientists who sometimes may not want to communicate to others in the team, who might be more of a individual or siloed worker. And she’s really good at putting together the bigger picture for R&D, and helping people figure out how their everyday work, which [inaudible 00:28:07] helping them set goals and managing that. What we’ve basically learned is if you have a really competent scientists who can also really have a passion for management, and having this person manage other scientists, and for us to really just be able to trust that our team is on route to to achieving those goals. Setting those higher goals on our end, and then making sure that that is being trickle down and being implemented on a daily experiments and reactions.

Miranda Wang: So it’s about building on this type of infrastructure and the right people. That actually took us quite a while to figure out and I think in the past quarter we’ve finally gotten this [inaudible 00:28:56] to a state where she was extremely effective, a genious gold in measuring this progress.

Vicki Saunders: Jeanny, just a question for you around the vision of where you’re going five years from now, 10 years from now, whatever your time horizon is, what is success for you? What does it look like?

Jeanny Yao: Yeah, that’s a good question. We’ve been thinking a lot about vision. We’re actually going through a rebranding process to fully have a update, a representation of our identity as this chemical recycling company. And we’ve been thinking about this vision alight. Our ultimate goal is to transform the way that our society currently sees plastic waste from a source of pollution to a valuable resource, a material that can really fuel the rest of the economy by transforming these molecules into other valuable products. Our mission is to develop technologies and scale them up to enable this type of societal impact. Five years from now, according to our current timeline, we’re going to have a commercial facility that processes upwards of 10 times of material per day.

Jeanny Yao: That’ll be the first commercial facility where we have somewhat like a chemical plant, and we will source plastic waves and produce these valuable materials. But in the longer term, we really want to have this technology in different parts of the world not just in the US, but also in developing countries, and provide an incentive for people to start picking up this trash, to see it as a valuable resource and to be able to help communities recycle. If people can start getting paid to pick up this material, they will. That’s what we’ve seen with water bottles. As Miranda said in these communities, water bottles are recyclable. They have market, so people go and pick them up, but they leave the plastic bags and all the flexible packaging behind. But now we want to be that solution that will incentivize them to also pick up those trash.
Jeanny Yao: Ocean pollution comes from land, so if you start picking things up from your community, if you start picking things up from the beaches, that is the best way to stop pollution from entering the oceans. So our really longterm vision is to create a sustainable supply chain based on [inaudible 00:31:25] ways, and have different parts of the people within the current existing infrastructure for trash picking, for waste transportation to all recognize that this is something valuable that we want to start collecting.

Vicki Saunders: That’s amazing. I have a question for both of you and maybe we’ll sort of end on this note, but first of all, I want to thank you very much for using your leadership in the world and you’re genius to be solving one of the most important problems that we have. These are women in our network that are working on the world’s to do list. I’m very thankful that you’re doing this. If you had an ask of people that are listening, whether it’s behavior change on their part or something that you need for your venture, what would that be? And maybe we’ll start with you Miranda.

Miranda Wang: Yeah. I think it’s a time where everybody as from a consumer angle, really begins voting with their wallet. We don’t have very much more time to send a signal to the businesses out there that they must adopt more sustainable materials and sustainable practices. And when it comes to how fast these new recycling innovations can scale up and make it into the market, it’s all a matter of economics. And in businesses like ours and other recycling’s for plastics, we’re competing against the petrochemical industry directly. The petrochemical industry is operating on natural resources. They’re pumping out of pipes that are already built decades ago. They’re using infrastructure and plants that have already fully depreciated.
Miranda Wang: So essentially all they’re paying are basic raw material cost, labor and these prices are incredibly low. Not because it’s actually cheap for us to get those resources, but because it’s at cost to the environment, and at a cost to social quality in most places. When new technologies like ours make these chemicals or the downstream performance materials, the goal that we have is to match their ballpark. But in the beginning there has to be some sort of a pull from the market where people really recognize that, “Hey, what this company is allowing us to now finally [inaudible 00:33:29] to buy was actually really hard for them to get here. And what they’re doing now is actually benefiting the world by cutting our emissions and reducing our pollution. And so we must support that.”

Miranda Wang: This type of poll from the market that allows any kind of adoption that we see in our supply chain to move faster, and any kind of financing that we can get from potential, whether it’s equity investors or debt financing to give us an opportunity when we still have different kinds of technical risks and scale up risks involved. It’s really important for everybody to recognize that it takes time. Once as a population we decide we want these things, businesses sort of needs to realize it and then choose a solution, the technology providers that can help them get there. So the earlier that everybody really spreads that awareness, the easier it will be for us to make that transition as a whole.

Vicki Saunders: Jeanny.

Jeanny Yao: Education on the different types of plastics. The recycling systems regionally is very complex, but it’s something that consumers would really benefit from. If they want to help the environment start learning about their local recycling system and understand that the hype isn’t just bio-plastics. The hype isn’t just spanning plastic, it’s not about peer pressure and whoever’s the loudest, whoever is the most radical will. But really think about the ideas on the table, learn more about different solutions because there are so many different types of technologies and these different technologies work for different regions. It’s not that bio-plastics are not good or pyrolysis is not good entirely, it’s really a solution that is case by case. You have to look at the use case of the plastic that’s created and the technology that is used to recycle it.

Jeanny Yao: So depending on where you are, supporting the different types of technologies will look different. For people who really care, especially the activators community, I know lots of folks are based in California, follow us and follow the policies that are going on. We have really great relationship with San Jose city over here and we are presenting to lots of waste conferences with them. And this is something that is going to influence the other States. All of the regions are at different stages of technology with their [inaudible 00:35:51]. Our technology is going to spread in the country in a different way based on regions. So based on where you are, you can really get involved by learning about your local policies, and recycling systems, and what technologies are available. And if you are in California, definitely follow us and keep updated.

Vicki Saunders: Awesome. Well, thank you very much for your time and good luck building this out. I know that you’re going to create a market for this. We’re so excited to learn so much more about what you’re up to. So thank you for your time today and take care of you two.

Miranda Wang: Yes, thanks Vicki.

Jeanny Yao: Thank you Vicki.