Hey, What's the Matter?
Photo by Sharon Pittaway
Last summer, while on a reading retreat, I was struck by an entirely simple idea that is no doubt already obvious to many (particularly molecular biologists and ardent environmentalists):
“Virtually all of the matter on Earth has been here since the planet was formed more than 4.5 billion years ago. Living things grow, or increase their matter, by eating food and using the matter in the food to build their bodies. When living things die, the matter in their bodies is recycled back to the soil and the atmosphere by the bacteria and fungi that eat the dead. It is like all living things are made up of tiny Lego building blocks. When living things die, bacteria and fungi help take all the blocks apart and return some to the planetary supply, where living things pick up the blocks and use them again to build their bodies. Just think about it — the matter that makes up your body has been around in various forms for 4.5 billion years! Some of the matter that makes up your cells could even have once been part of a T. rex!” - Molecular and Cell Biology For Dummies (p. 54)
What about this was particularly thought-provoking for me? Well, a few ideas...Matter is finite...Nature is smart and built to recycle itself...Molecules are repurposed endlessly when we let them and don’t obstruct their path...When we use matter to create synthetic and non-biodegradable products, we are removing these molecules -- for hundreds of years, in the case of a plastic bottle -- from nature’s construction sites, impeding their demo and re-construction...What we 21st century humans refer to as “recycling” -- plastic, cans and bottles, separated in bins -- is an expensive, energy-intensive and resource-inefficient way to turn synthetic products into more synthetic products, not to return those molecules to the “planetary supply”...And finally, yes, I may have been a dinosaur.
It was then that I began to view the world molecularly. Suddenly, trees were magic machines that took carbon dioxide from the air and turned the carbon into hard wood and leaves, releasing oxygen for us to breath. I saw my much-loved fleece jacket, worn thin through washing and wear, half in my closet and half in our water supply, with a good part of its mass having disintegrated into microscopic plastic fibers. Swimming in the ocean, I wondered what of its magnesium may be absorbed transdermally, via sweat glands and hair follicles, only to manifest in the online results of my next blood test. I examined my wild salmon at dinner, conscious that atoms of the iron- and zinc-rich krill and shrimp it had fed on were also here on my plate, and knowing that the salmon's carcass -- an important natural fertilizer of trees and plants -- would never fulfill its higher purpose, relegated to a Tel Aviv dumpster and later landfill, rather than in the soil of a forest.
My favorite early-stage investing maxim of “Follow the Money” -- a reminder to deeply understand where, when and how I will actually see cash return of my investment -- found a parallel mantra in “Follow the Matter”.
Better said, what companies can we support and grow that empower -- not inhibit -- our planet’s natural recycling processes? What can we learn from nature and advances in synthetic biology to more effectively break down what we create and to amplify the resource-efficient growth of the new? How can we be involving bacteria, fungi and other naturally-existing organisms in our manufacturing inputs and processes to make products that will biodegrade quickly and immediately after their use-life instead of products that leach chemicals and pollute our environments for several hundreds of years?
Companies are increasingly finding that our best inventions may come from copying nature.
Groundwork BioAg identified a means to reproduce mycorrhiza, a naturally-occurring fungus that empowers plants absorb nutrients, at scale.
Amai uses computational biology to mimic a “sweet protein” found in certain Amazon fruit trees, allowing food manufacturers to minimize their use of white sugar.
AlgaLife weaves algae, a far more sustainable alternative to water- and land-intensive cotton, into fibers for clothing, touting the benefits of skin exposure to algae’s vitamin and anti-inflammatory properties.
Wastewater treatment companies increasingly use bacteria, grown at scale in bioreactors, to eat away harmful chemicals and pollutants like phytoestrogens.
In our own portfolio,
WeedOUT recreates naturally-occurring sterility in plant pollen to prevent the growth of weeds not responsive to existing toxic chemical herbicides; and
Solutum designed a plastic packaging alternative that dissolves in room temperature water and biodegrades, leaving nothing but naturally-occurring molecules behind.
This focus on the molecular has, paradoxically, gifted us increased perspective on the macro, as “following the matter” requires a continual zooming out to understand companies' full effects on the planet and the finality of its abundance. The incredible Donella Meadows speaks beautifully to this expanding boundary of concern in her book Thinking in Systems:
“Whether it’s important to think about the full flow from mine to dump, or as industry calls it, “from cradle to grave,” depends on who wants to know, for what purpose, over how long. In the long term, the full flow is important and, as the physical economy grows and society’s “ecological footprint” expands, the long term is increasingly coming to be the short term. Landfills fill up with a suddenness that has been surprising for people whose mental models picture garbage as going “away,” into some sort of a cloud. Sources of raw materials—mines, wells, and oil fields—can be exhausted with surprising suddenness too. With a long enough time horizon, even mines and dumps are not the end of the story. The great geological cycles of the earth keep moving materials around, opening and closing seas, raising up and wearing down mountains. Eons from now, everything put in a dump will end up on the top of a mountain or deep under the sea. New deposits of metals and fuels will form. On planet Earth there are no system “clouds,” no ultimate boundaries. Even real clouds in the sky are part of a hydrological cycle. Everything physical comes from somewhere, everything goes somewhere, everything keeps moving.”
