ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Jay Potter is the co-founder and CEO of Ecor Global, a company focused on repurposing agricultural and urban wastes into bio-based building materials. He is a champion of the circular economy, manufacturing wastes into value. Ecor produces dense particle boards for construction, materials that are organic, without chemical binding agents, and which are fully recyclable.
What's he working on this week? Simple: seeking investors. He jokes that Ecor is a classic 15-year overnight success story! To bring a new innovation to market, he explains that you have to prove every point... the technology, the product, the material, process, the timing, and then there is extensive customer testing prior to widespread acceptance.
Ecor uses organic wastes, most of which are agricultural products that grow 200 times faster than trees. This gives the Ecor building product a huge advantage. Furthermore, the company uses whatever agricultural and urban wastes are local... for instance wheat and soy straw in Poland, and silicone-coated paper used in the bottling industry, where the label and glue adhere to the bottle, and the paper heretofore is waste. Using green chemistry, Ecor is taking wastes, and without a petrochemical or plant-based resin binder -- Ecor is creating sustainable building materials.
Jay notes that any alternative product has to be cheaper and better than the incumbent. Possible? Yes, trees are expensive, labor and energy costs are higher for traditional particular board manufacture... as is the cost of petrochemicals required. Jay stresses the need for a broader calculus, the need to value carbon and to avoid the societal cost of carbon in manufacturing. Jay notes that his product is so green that you can eat it! Ultimately, he envisions Ecor facilities in every major metropolitan area in the world.
Co-founder Robert Noble developed the first Ecor manufacturing plant in late 80s in Long Beach, California. Noble wanted to build three-dimensional materials. Jay Potter shifted the approach by making a drop-in replacement for sheathing that is routinely used in construction today. Together, they licensed the technology to the Dutch government in 2019, taking millions of tons of grass clippings from the Schipol Airport for a test facility that produced materials for ongoing airport construction. For some years they licensed the technology to manufacturers in the Netherlands, and domestically. Today there is a production plant in Serbia and Ecor is building a facility in Bakersfield.
Jay's career was influenced by two men he met in an Atlanta rainstorm in 1999... Bill McDonough, the architect and author of "Cradle to Cradle" who coined the term "circular economy," and Ray Anderson of Interface. These two icons were early inspirations that caused him to study waste streams, municipal solid waste and agricultural wastes. He then built a gasification plant with pyrolysis technology. He built a high-volume electrolysis operation to create hydrogen. Then he developed a high-volume disinfectant.
But again and again, he found that the barrier to adoption of beneficial technologies was money. Seeing that the timing was right, he created Envision Solar, a novel parking lot application of solar. But simple economics stymied adoption and he knew that he needed to change the measurement of their value... not just cost per watt of solar power generated, but additional values like parking lot security, shade, advertising, branding, EV charging, and the value of renewable energy on location need to be taken into consideration.
Ted notes that it must be frustrating trying to bring new products to market, despite their clear value. To this Jay responded quickly with a sparkle in his eye. "It's all about how to solve the rubik. That's what makes the game." Bringing any new product to market is about education, repetitive performance, demonstrations, and building an army of advocates. The Ecor logic drives him: Rather than exporting cash from our communities to bring in building materials from thousands of miles away, why not use materials in the neighborhood that will create healthier economics and ecosystem benefits?
