Climate Action Figures
A safe place for youth to share steps they are taking to mitigate climate change.
Climate Action Figures
Season 2, Episode 27: Derek
Derek Saltzman, an aerospace engineer and co-founder of a sustainable materials company, shares insights on his journey from rocketry to developing eco-friendly carbon fibre using seaweed-derived nanomaterials. He discusses overcoming challenges in green tech, highlighting the potential of seaweed in reducing CO2 and advancing technology.
00:00 Introduction to Climate Action Figures
00:29 QuickFix: AI and Energy Consumption
02:12 Derek's Perspective on AI and Energy
03:25 Derek's Journey into Aerospace Engineering
05:29 From College Competitions to Business Ventures
08:20 Innovations in Carbon Fibre and Drone Racing
10:51 Advancements in Nanocellulose Technology
16:03 Environmental Impact and Future Goals
21:32 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
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My name is Derek Saltzman, and you're tuned into the Climate Action Figures podcast.
John:Hello and welcome to Climate Action Figures: Tales from the Deep South, part two. My name is John Whidden, and this week on the program you get to meet Derek. First this week's QuickFix, which comes to us from an interview I heard with tech expert and analyst, Carmi Levy. We have talked about AI on the program before, and more and more people are aware of the energy that AI uses, and Carmi gives us a really great reality check on this. What he did was he compared a Google search to the equivalent of a 60 watt light bulb and he said it's about 17 seconds. Then he says, okay, if you use chat GPT as an example of AI for the, the same prompt, same question you asked Google search, it takes about 10 times that amount of energy, so about three minutes with the same light, light bulb, and that's for each prompt. the interviewer asked what we can do to mitigate that, and Carmi said there are, uh, he named at least three things that we can do. First of all, ask yourself: do I need to use AI for this question? You know, if I'm asking the temperature outside, can I look at the thermostat instead? Second is minimize the extent of your ask. So cut to the chase. Don't get lazy and have a big conversation because every prompt, every refinement takes another three minutes of the light bulb burning. So be succinct. And he added, interestingly, don't say thank you. He said, doesn't care whether we thank them, even though it seems polite to us. But again, there's another three minutes to have the thank you conversation or maybe more. he also said We need measures like a car will tell us the fuel efficiency. We need a tech efficiency tool. So very interesting commentary from Carmi on that. Welcome Derek, and uh, you're an engineer so we'd love to hear what you think about that QuickFix.
Derek:Yeah, no, I mean I definitely agree with, with those points, being an end user and a user of the, of the AI and the chat GPTs of the world, I think having a good understanding of what you're prompting it and what you're truly seeking and, and if you really need to use it because he is correct. It, it is an energy hog. It consumes a quite a lot of energy. If you were to tell me, Hey, this query cost, I don't know, a hundred units of carbon compared to the other one, cost a hundred thousand units of carbon, that may help you kind of determine if you want to go down that route and still query those questions. In the future, it'd be best to start pressuring these companies or organizations that are utilizing and building these large infrastructures for that, the AI development and AI race that they look at energy systems and energy sources that are more fuel efficient. So you have a lot of data center companies that looking at buying and building their own fusion reactors on site to, to generate their own clean energy rather than tapping into the grid or tapping into a more fossil fuel based source. So I think with time and innovation, you'll start to see new new developments in the the world for energy when it comes to AI.
John:Right. And as you say the consumer ultimately can put a lot of pressure, perhaps is
Derek:Yeah.
John:positioned to put a lot of pressure on the companies to, to do their part. Now, uh, you, Derek, are an aerospace engineer at the start. What took you in that direction to begin your career?
Derek:Uh, so I came from a background where, when I was really young most kids their, their first interaction with aerospace is using an Estes kit. They're small, maybe about five, 10 inch little rockets that you put a little motor into and you, 3, 2, 1, press, press the go button and it, of course will fire into the sky and a parachute comes out. That was my first, uh, interaction. I used to go and do that with my father when I was really, really young. And then
John:I spent so much time with my Estee Rockets. You can't imagine.
Derek:yeah, I mean it's the the first area where you started to do engineering and failure analysis, and it's great. So from there, when I got into high school, we started to actually compete in rocketry. So we, we actually competed in competitions called TARC, Teen American Rocketry Challenge. It was part of my, high school at the time. And that's where I got the competitive edge. I've always played sports, so I was always very competitive with football, baseball, and it was pretty cool to take the competitive edge to more of the engineering side now. So you got to use your brain and it was all about who could build to design the best rocket to hit a specific altitude target and, and do a specific job. So that got my feet really, really wet about engineering, building, designing. I got to work with a professor known as, Joe Valone from Plantation High. I was probably my, my best professor and, and mentor as I grew up, um, when it came to the field of engineering. So much so by our senior year of high school, I mean we were doing projects with Nasa, we were working on something called SLI, which stood for Student Launch Initiative, where we were building a full on eight foot rocket with a super powerful M motor. So, I mean, these things were going a mile high, carrying pretty intense payload, and you would go through every engineering discipline of the preliminary design, the critical design review, the final report. it was just a really good. Point in life where it taught you a lot about the early, early facets of engineering before you hit the collegiate scene. Uh, and then when I got to college, I felt very prepared for what, what was, what basically the, the engineering career had to, to offer.
John:Now let's just place you geographically because I, I introduced things by saying this is tales from the deep south part two. That's because you are connected with Sam, who was our guest a few
Derek:Mm-hmm.
John:Uh, do you wanna just tell us about that connection? I.
Derek:His business and we were working on our business at the time and, uh, we were both engineers and, and material engineers and chemists and, uh, they went down the path of agricultural tech and we went down the path of the material tech. But Sam and I have known each other for quite a while. He is a great friend and really great business operator from what I can see. No, Sam and I have known each other for quite a while. We come from the, the same university. Our alma mater is UCF, uh, I think he's a bioengineer or a biochemist by trade. I'm a material engineer by, by trade. But we, we work together closely. We crossed paths in the UCF's, Blackstone Launch Pad, which is basically the UCF startup incubator. Where he was working on
John:And you are still in Florida,
Derek:Yeah. Still located in Orlando, Florida.
John:So back to your story, Derek there was a competition that you won for business. Is that correct?
Derek:Yes. So our freshman year of college we were doing a bunch of engineering competitions.'cause we were, we were freshman engineers with a lot of experience. My co-founder and I, Mason, I. Funny enough, he was my first roommate that we ever met. So our first roommate, he came from background in planes. I came from background in rockets, so we hit it off really well. Did a bunch of engineering projects together and we walked by that, that same incubator lab that I was mentioning, the Blackstone Launchpad, and it basically set a competition, win$75,000. Uh, if you start a business, and we thought, I mean, we're engineers, how hard is it to build a business? You quickly realize it's very difficult to build a business. But that was our bug. So we walked in there, got meeting with some coaches, and they said, Hey, there's a business competition. Try to figure out how to start a business. So we said, all right. And that was what kicked off our very first business of basically we were aero engineers. We built a drone, we attached some sensors to it. We would fly it around farmers fields to try to give them some vegetative basically data on their farm and tell'em, Hey, this is what's going on with your farm. You need more nitrogen, or you need more water in this area. And you quickly realize through customer discovery, what works and doesn't work. And it took us a little bit of time, but early on we were able to find that may not be the best route for us starting off as a business. These are guys that are managing 200 plus acre farms for soybean, corn, sod, whatever it may be. And, uh, we just realized that we're trying to sell this advanced. Not only are they not gonna fly the drone, they're not gonna be able to understand the data digestion part of it. So. We as young engineers realized that's more of a data science problem. We weren't data, we weren't data scientists. We are more aero engineers or more mechanical hardware guys. So we decided to pivot the business action into a different direction where, where we focused mainly on that, where we started focusing on the materials development of the drones which led us down into basically making carbon fiber or carbon fiber fabrics for the the racing drone world.
John:Okay, so racing, many of us don't know about the racing drone world. Tell us a little bit about that and why the carbon fiber is such an important aspect.
Derek:Yeah. So I'd say about six or seven years ago now, it was, uh, it was first shown on ESPN, Drone Racing League, or DRL was the really big league at the time, but they were essentially the group that were putting on these really high end events where you would have pilots that were put on the full on ready player one virtual reality goggles. So you're sitting in the cockpit of the drone, uh, and you have these drones that are flying around 80 miles an hour doing acrobatic flips, turns, loops. And you can imagine, it's almost like you're sitting in the cockpit'cause you have the goggles on and you're seeing from the perspective of the drone. Now all of these drones are made of carbon fiber, which is an extremely lightweight, strong material. And the major reason for that is to keep them fast, keep them in the air. And we saw a, a, a space in the market where we said, Hey, a lot of these drones are manufactured with carbon fiber and we are really good at composite or carbon fiber manufacturing from our first startup when we were trying to manufacture the drone for the farmers, what if we decided to actually manufacture the drones for drone racers instead? And that was a much more lucrative initial business for us where we were able to basically work with a variety of distributors. As well as pilots. It was an up and coming space, um, where we were able to manufacture custom drones for these guys. So we were manufacturing custom carbon fiber plates at different thicknesses, different sizes. And even if you look at the photo that's popping up here, uh, the photo that you're seeing now is of a drone that's about one meter. So these are considered X class racing drones. So they're about a meter in, in diameter, from tip to tip. It's quite a large drone, so you can imagine about six or seven of those flying around 80 miles an hour. They crash into each other, it's like NASCAR in the sky. So we saw that as potentially gonna be one of the future sports.
John:So has drone racing continued to ramp up? Is this still a huge thing? Not as big as it was on ESPN, but they've gotten even larger now. So you have a company actually based in Australia called Airspeed, where they're actually putting humans inside of the drones now. So no more, is it the one meter long drone, now you're having drones that are the size of cars and they're putting people inside'em and they're flying'em like the Red Bull races. We've talked about carbon fiber here, and clearly the weight and the strength are important aspects, but there are, I'm assuming, hundreds if not thousands of companies that are working in that direction. But you've kind of taken it at a different angle, have you not?
Derek:Yeah. So as we were moving into the world of material science and engineering, uh, my partner and I, Mason, we decided to go into the world of academia. So we were starting to work in the actual carbon fiber composites research laboratory at UCF where essentially we were working on nano material processing. So these are nano materials, are materials that are about 10,000 times thinner than a human hair. So super, super tiny materials and incorporating those into carbon fiber to make them stronger, lighter, and more robust. we've come out with a, a nano coating. So we essentially have developed a process that allows us to take biomass such as hemp and seaweed which are raw, biodegradable biomass that exist in abundance on the planet. Have a proprietary processing method that allows us to extract out a specific material from those biomasses called cellulose. Cellulose is the most abundant biopolymer on the planet. It's found in every tree, every plant. It's pretty much the rebar that's inside a plant cell wall. So if you've heard of the mitochondria as the powerhouse of the cell. Well, cellulose is the rebar inside of the cell wall. It's quite analogous to that, and our process allows us to extract that and turn it into something called nanocellulose. Think of tiny, tiny little fibers that are about 10,000 times thinner than a human hair, and eight times the strength of steel per weight, so insanely strong. Super tiny little fibers, um, that nature has developed. So we took that biomimicry approach and we decided to take that and put those tiny fibers on the surface of the carbon fiber fabrics, essentially adding a nanoscale Velcro to the surface of the carbon fiber. And why did we do that? Or the entire reason of doing that is composites or carbon fiber. Is essentially layers of fabric. So it's fabric layers stacked together with glue. So it's what people in the industry call rags and glue. The biggest issue is the reason that they break is they break because the fabrics or the, the carbon fiber fabric and the glue that surface or interface breaks. So once you rid to a specific amount of force or energy, it starts to delaminate and rip apart. Essentially with our nanocellulose nano coating onto the surface of the carbon fiber, we increase that strength or that bonding, or that adhesive, that adhesion between the carbon fiber and the resin, which allows you to make parts that are stronger, lighter, more cost effective and overall just a better, stronger, cheaper part. And we're really excited about that because since we're able to put this nano coating on the surface of carbon fiber so high in the manufacturing process that it can have end benefits to a variety of different end customers or end markets. And these are people that are making, let's say carbon fiber golf clubs, carbon fiber surfboards. All the way to aerospace grade planes where you're trying to make a plane more energy efficient, or even for the future of aviation where everyone is looking at new VTAL drones for point-to-point travel, we're able to make those vehicles lighter and even stronger. Even today we're working with electric vehicle companies where the, the main goal that they have is reducing the overall weight of the vehicle so that the battery can work less and essentially push the vehicle further. So if we're able to reduce the weight of a vehicle by almost 20, 30%, you can think those energy savings and then gain for the, the user. So you can now potentially have people that were originally afraid of buying an EV because of range anxiety, now that anxiety may be reduced with the use of seaweed or hemp-based nano materials, which we think is a pretty cool future.
John:we won't ask the chef to share his recipe, but what, is the critical component that is different than everything else you've seen before?
Derek:the main thing that we say, which is the big critical difference is what we call in material science is chemical, functionalization, functionalization, all that really boils down to is, let's just say you're adding specific molecules to the surface of something. So, so it talks to something else much better. Usually if you don't have that molecule on the surface to talk to something else, then it's, it's not gonna wanna, It's not gonna want to do the dance, it's not gonna wanna bond, it's not gonna want to glue. So the thing that we really focused in on is being able to have a one of clean, non-toxic process. Um, majority of the times the industry uses pretty mean chemicals like sulfuric acid and harsh, harsh chemicals to do these processes. We developed a unique green chemical or green chemistry method that allows us to do this without having to use any of those toxic chemistries. and two, it also allows us to increase the efficiency of that chemical functionalization or adding that specific molecule to the surface. IE That's really where a lot of our IP is generated, where we're able to take this green chemistry functionalization process and turn it into what used to be seaweed now into this nanocellulose goop. And once it goes into the carbon fiber, we basically surface modified, or again, we've added these specific molecules to the surface of that nanocellulose so that it talks to the carbon fiber a lot better. IE just making a stronger bond, making a better connection, and making an overall better part when it's manufactured.
John:now we talked with Sam about greenwashing, and I'll have to ask you the same question because it sounds to me like your product is much more green than the average product in this class us about what you see out there in your field in terms of greenwashing and how your product is different than that.
Derek:Oh yeah. I mean, when, when you're in the industry for long enough, there's usually an always an outward narrative that you hear from a large, big companies, um, where they wanna be more sustainable, they wanna be more green. And then when you get behind, when you get behind the curtain, or you start actually having conversations, everything boils down to the bottom line, or how is it gonna affect the financials? How is it gonna affect the bottom line? So yes, greenwashing is a pretty strong thing that's been happening in the industry. We've seen it ourselves in, in the textile space where people describe something as, let's say vegan leather. Everyone's like, oh my god, it's great, it's vegan leather. But when you actually peel back the onion, you realize, well, vegan leather just means plastic leather. It doesn't mean that it, it was made with cactus or anything like that. It's probably 2% cactus and 98% plastic. And that's just the overall aspect of, of greenwashing.
John:But the big difference with your product is that at the root, it is a natural product that you're using
Derek:a hundred percent. So at the root we make sure we use actual biomass, so we're taking biomass that is coming from the beaches. So sargassum, it's washing up on the beaches of the Caribbean, of Texas, of Mexico as well as stuff that's even harvested and grown in the North Atlantic. So these are actually giving what used to be lobster farmers and crabbers, now on their off season, they're growing seaweed and it's a, it's a whole new revenue stream for them to farm seaweed. And we're taking that raw biomass. Again, and we're not using any of the harsh or toxic chemistries that are used today. We do everything with pretty much materials that were extracted out of fruits and grains. So like, like for instance, citric acid and things like you come from like orange peels and orange juice. We use those types of chemistries to impart all our chemical functional groups.
John:Now a lot of business people, Derek, you'll know don't really give much thought to environmental impact. More and more these days hopefully they are. But what, what makes you so interested in developing great products, but also taking care of the environment at the same time?
Derek:I think it's quite interesting. I think at the end of the day, nature does it best. we, we are always trying to mimic nature to make a project or make a product. For instance, I mean, we looked at birds. Birds flew amazingly, and then we decided to build the plane. Nature didn't decide to strap engines to something, blow it up with some compressed gases and chemicals and shoot it out the back. They, they developed a whole different system for a bird to fly naturally. So I think as engineers we're always striving to try to reach that. And when, when I say na, when we say nature does it best. It truly does. So not only do we see that taking care of the planet is not only a great thing utilizing these greener chemistries, but they're actually more efficient and they can beat out the synthetic materials that are used today. It's just that we kind of forgot our way. more natural materials were used in the early 19 hundreds, you can look at Henry Ford. They made hemp door panels. They were looking at these types of materials. But then you had the age of the petroleum industry and plastics kickoff, and finances became the main driving force as we industrialized. And we're just now getting back full cycle, realizing like, oh, the actual natural materials could work better than what we pretty much have engineered for the past 70 plus years.
John:And as you develop seaweed, for example I think to salmon farming, we thought, oh, that's great. We'll get all. Our salmon from farms, and then we won't have to take the salmon out of the natural environment as much, and then all of a sudden we find out there's all these problems with lice and other issues with salmon farming. Are there similar problems with using seaweed, farming seaweed for, for this product?
Derek:Entirely. No. So some of the seaweeds that we work with are actually invasive seaweeds. So sargassum is a really big issue. So we're actually helping out coastal communities because essentially sea levels, uh, have gotten hotter, and as they've gotten hotter, it causes more algae blooms. So now you can actually look at something. It's, it's from a satellite. You can see it from satellites. You can look at the large sargassum bloom that happens every year. And it's basically a giant mass of seaweed that starts in the Atlantic Ocean and migrates its way over into the Caribbean and slams into the US coastal regions and becomes really big issues for tourism, for local economies. It starts to degrade and cause pu putrid air, which is really, really bad. So not only are we working with invasive species, we are working with farm species. The great thing about the farm species is they actually promote biodiversity. So when you're actually growing these seaweed farms, you're actually. Incentivizing coral, you're incentivizing other organisms to actually grow onto the seaweed and, and bring biodiversity to the region. And since these are cyclical processes, which happen every, like, say six to 12 months, once you remove it. You have, you have another batch in the water. So you're continually growing more biodiversity as you scale. And, uh, and seaweed is a fast growing plant. Uh, it's not like, it's not like trees where it's gonna take a hundred years. It's, it's similar to a grass where it'll grow in a few months. And that's why a lot of the nutrition, a lot of the diet of Southeast Asian countries are based on seaweed because it's a fast growing, high nutrient dense material or plant to eat. But we don't see any adverse effects as of yet, uh, of growing seaweed at scale. Uh, actually we see some benefits realistically.
John:When you look ahead five, 10 years, where do you see yourself and this, uh, company
Derek:Oh, I, I, a hundred percent. We see ourselves. Hopefully, uh, we'll, we'll be making electric vehicles snf some of the, the new electric planes in the aviation space a little bit lighter and a little bit more fuel efficient. That's our, our end goal. But not only that, seaweed has been shown we have a couple researchers that are actually buying our materials for tissue engineering, and it's not an expertise of ours, but I mean, within the next 10 years, you may see organs being built, a new heart, a new liver, a new pancreas, uh, being developed with, funny enough seaweed extracted from cellulose where they're using it as a, a scaffolding material to to dope it with specific stem cells or retina cells to grow an organ. So who knows? Maybe in the future you could, for all the people that are, let's say, on dialysis or, or on those types of machines or, or have those health issues, they could come in one day, get a scrub of their own stem cells, and then within a matter of a couple months they could have a, new pancreas or new, new kidney grown for them on potentially seaweed.
John:Wow, big dreams. Congratulations on all your success with your business so far, and before we let you go, we definitely have to ask you what your climate action is.
Derek:so for us, the biggest thing that we're looking at is reducing or increasing the amount of biomass that we utilize. Uh, seaweed sucks up about one to two kilograms for every kilogram of biomass. So the more and more seaweed that we use and grow, the more and more CO2 that we're sucking out the atmosphere and putting into products, whether it be into cosmetics, composites, or even tissue engineering. So our whole goal is to reduce around 700,000 tons of CO2 over the lifespan of our business.
John:Wow, big climate action today. And uh, last question for you, Derek. What gives you hope?
Derek:I would say the younger generation, I would say seeing some of the younger engineers, uh, and some of the, the younger people really care about trying to develop a, a, a more sustainable future. Not only are they worried about world, world issues, but they're also thinking about how we're gonna solve those issues in an effective, more green manner. I think with the advent of, AI and new technologies, I think we'll be able to actually crack the nut of being able to generate energy more efficiently and have more efficient processes that allow us to just thrive better as a society.
John:Well thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to join us, Derek.
Derek:Thank you. It was an absolute pleasure. And
John:thank you dear listener. Oh, also, Thanks to Sam for connecting us with Derek. Listener, we love to hear from you, so please let us know what you think of what you hear and see on Climate Action Figures. You can connect via, comment on YouTube. Send us an email or, uh, send us a message on Instagram. We will be back again next week, same time, same place to hear from another climate action figure. Until then...
Derek:go figures!