Steel is the world’s most used metal, and enables the construction of everything from buildings to wind turbines. Unfortunately, steel manufacturing is incredibly carbon intensive, contributing to approximately 8% of global green house gas emissions. As CEO of InventWood, Josh Cable envisions a future where the demand for steel can be satisfied with a renewable resouce: fast growing woods like Poplar. By densifying wood, Josh Cable’s team produces a fire-resistant product that is stronger, lighter and cheaper than steel. The final product, MettleWood is actually carbon negative. In this episode, Hilary Langer and Josh Cable discuss InventWood’s foundational technology, its early partnership with the University of Maryland, and its new 89,000 square foot manufacturing facility in Frederick, Maryland.
Steel is the world’s most used metal, and enables the construction of everything from buildings to wind turbines. Unfortunately, steel manufacturing is incredibly carbon intensive, contributing to approximately 8% of global green house gas emissions. As CEO of InventWood, Josh Cable envisions a future where the demand for steel can be satisfied with a renewable resouce: fast growing woods like Poplar. By densifying wood, Josh Cable’s team produces a fire-resistant product that is stronger, lighter and cheaper than steel. The final product, MettleWood is actually carbon negative.
In this episode, Hilary Langer and Josh Cable discuss InventWood’s foundational technology, its early partnership with the University of Maryland, and its new 89,000 square foot manufacturing facility in Frederick, Maryland.
Links:
Liangbing Hu makes wood stronger than steel (acs.org)
Fast Company profile of InventWood innovations
Episode recorded April 10, 2024
Chad Reed: I'm Chad Reed.
Hillary Langer: I'm Hillary Langer.
Gil Jenkins: I'm Gil Jenkins.
Chad: This is Climate Positive.
Josh Cable: Green steel is almost like not digging the hole any deeper. Whereas if we really want to pay the debts of the past or atone for the past, we need to find materials that are carbon sequestering.
Hilary: We use steel in everything from ships to buildings, cars and planes. But the manufacturing process is the most carbon intense of all heavy industries. what if there were a material that’s stronger, lighter and cheaper than steel? By densifying wood, CEO Josh Cable’s team at InventWood has created a product that can be used in place of steel and is actually carbon negative to produce. He joined to me to discuss the mechanics of this and his vision for a more climate positive future.
Hilary: Josh, thank you so much for joining us today on the podcast.
Josh Cable: Thank you so much, Hilary.
Hilary: Before we get into the InventWood story, I'd love to hear more about your background. Why are you interested in climate change in this climate tech space?
Josh: Sure. My first job was actually in financial services. I was working for an investment manager and worked there for about 10 years, both in the US and in Asia, and had a wonderful job at a wonderful company, but started to feel a bit unfulfilled being in that industry. Then as life tends to happen, things happen, my mother was actually diagnosed with terminal cancer and it really got me thinking about what matters in life and what impact I wanted to have. After she passed away, I decided to make a change.
I gave six months' notice at my firm, which by the way, I would never recommend anyone do, but essentially began to pursue a career in sustainability. Through a series of events, I was introduced to the founder of InventWood, a gentleman named Professor Liangbing Hu, Bing for short. Bing and I really hit it off and he showed me what he was up to. I just found that super exciting. For me, it was an opportunity that really checked all the boxes. I was able to have an impact as well as create a really dynamic and exciting organization.
Hilary: I understand that professor who invented InventWood and the technology behind it, you now have this product called MettleWood that has incredible statistics. It's 50% stronger than steel, 50% less expensive, and 80% lighter. How do you do it?
Josh: Yes, it's a pretty remarkable process. I'm not a technical guy. I have all the respect in the world and admiration for those that do it. Essentially, what happened was they figured out a way to, at the molecular level, modify the chemistry of regular wood to imbue it with incredible properties. MettleWood was really discovered with the scientists figuring out how to modify this chemistry of wood. What they did was they ended up densifying wood using a chemical process and then heat and pressure.
What this ultimately resulted in was the cellulose fibers of the wood, which are incredibly strong, by the way, lining up far more closely. You get a material that captures that inherent, incredible strength of the cellulose fibers, which is magnitudes greater than that of regular wood. What's really remarkable about MettleWood is that it's 100% wood at the end of the day. All we're doing really is channeling or unlocking the natural strength of regular wood to create this remarkable material.
Hilary: Tell me more about that. How do they do that? What does the process look like?
Josh: Yes. We're building a facility now that is massively scaling this up, but it basically involves just two key steps. Essentially, we first are modifying the lignin in the wood. Lignin is what gives-- first of all, it gives wood its wood color, but it's like a sap-like or tar-like substance. You can think of it almost like maybe maple syrup, not as tasty though. It gives wood its form. It holds the cellulose fibers together. We first treat the lignin and then we densify the wood. What you'll see is that the thickness of the wood is reduced by a factor of five. Basically, 80% of the thickness is reduced. It's a really incredible process, but it's a fairly straightforward process to understand that has, again, this incredible output.
Hilary: The wood is then condensed. What are the byproducts like?
Josh: That's another great part of this. The generation of MettleWood that we're now creating has no byproducts essentially other than water vapor, some steam that comes off the process. We're very thoughtful about what the environmental impact is of the MettleWood creation process. We recycle the chemicals as part of this process. Basically, we're able to treat the wood using the lignin of the wood. It doesn't require any byproduct or disposal that would create some sort of environmental impact. It's really a very green process. We're also looking for feedstock, on the feedstock side, to use wood that's either recycled or in certain cases, invasive wood species that allow us to, again, minimize our impact even more.
Hilary: With the different materials, is the cellulose the same? Can you go to any type of wood? Can you use bamboo or hemp or materials like that?
Josh: Yes, great question. Yes, virtually any wood species can be used. What we saw is that the densification process is really an equalizer. Regardless of whether you start with a wood species that's considered very weak or lower quality, or one that's very slower growing or high quality, you basically get the same output at the end of the process. What that has impelled us to do is to look at what are the fastest growing, most abundant wood species that we can use that are the most sustainable? As a result, the MettleWood process is incredibly sustainable from that standpoint.
Hilary: You're introducing this as a substitute for steel in buildings and other wood applications. One of the challenges with steel is its carbon impact. In addition to sourcing the materials, you then have to involve very high heats. What kinds of heats are needed for MettleWood?
Josh: It is much lower temperature. It's about a 10th of the temperature that's needed. From a sourcing standpoint, steel has a dirty underbelly, if you may allow me to say so. The mining process is very destructive. The communities, particularly around the mines, which are often indigenous communities, are greatly impacted in many negative ways. Then from a manufacturing standpoint, it requires, as you said, a tremendous amount of heat, over 1,600 degrees to form steel into what we use it for today.
What we've calculated is that basically for every kilogram of steel produced, it's about 1.8 kilograms of emissions. When you contrast that to MettleWood, all of the feedstock that we will be using to create MettleWood will be sustainably certified using either SFC or FSI certifications. As a result, the disruption to communities is basically non-existent. Part of those certifications is really to measure the impact to the communities that surround the harvesting operation.
When it comes to processing, the temperature that we use is about 150 to 160 degrees Celsius, which is, again, about a 10th of the temperature that's required to use steel. The end result is basically for every kilogram of steel we replace, we're net negative in terms of emissions because of wood's ability to absorb carbon. It's about 0.6 kilograms of emissions are absorbed for every kilogram of steel we replace.
Hilary: That's amazing. We work really hard to quantify the carbon impact of the different investments that we engage in. The fact that this building material is actually reducing the amount of carbon is incredible. That's the combination of the carbon sequestration through the wood, and then also by offsetting the very carbon-intensive steel manufacturing.
Josh: Exactly, yes. Really, it's a win-win all around for not only the customers or consumers of the end product that we're making but also the environment and the world at large.
Hilary: There was an article just this morning in Canary Media about green steel and just the incorporation of hydrogen for addressing the energy intensity. Although it was a buoyant article, my read of it is that we're still a long way away from steel actually being sustainable or earning that green adjective in front of it. Is this something that is ready to go to market? Can we see it out in the wild today?
Josh: Yes, and it's a great-- Just if I can spend a moment on green steel. First of all, I think it's very exciting. By all means, anything that can happen or can be discovered or invented that will reduce emissions, I'm all for. By all means, if green steel is successful, I think that's a win for the environment broadly. The challenge with green steel, or I say maybe the shortcoming, is that green steel can only get to basically zero emissions whereas a material like MettleWood is actually net negative.
The way I think of it is with green steel in the situation that we're in from a climate perspective, green steel is almost
like not digging the hole any deeper. Whereas if we really want to pay the debts of the past or atone for the past, we need to find materials that are carbon sequestering. A material like MettleWood really can go a long way in addressing that. In terms of our market adoption, we're really excited to see how much interest and traction there has been from companies all around the world.
We're seeing companies that basically span every industry that you can imagine, coming and reaching out to us, basically saying, "When can we get these materials into our products?" We will be producing at a meaningful scale by early next year. First half of next year, we will have our first manufacturing facility live, and we will be able to sell product at that time.
Hilary: Where are you sourcing most of the feedstock? Is it domestic or international?
Josh: Domestic, yes. We're looking at, for our first manufacturing facility, using poplar that will be sourced from either West Virginia or Western Maryland. Poplar is really interesting in that it can regrow basically on its own stump. It's a very sustainable feedstock. Poplar has generally been regarded as less desirable. It's a great story to tell in that we can use a wood species that typically hasn't gotten as much traction and turn it into something that's really value-added.
Hilary: In the early years of InventWood, founded over seven years ago, you were in the University of Maryland's incubation lab. How did that support your growth?
Josh: Yes. The university has been a fantastic partner to us. We certainly would not have gotten as far as we have without their support. The University of Maryland has provided, in addition to the incubation space, a lot of guidance in the form of EIRs, basically entrepreneurs in residence. They've provided a lot of opportunities to showcase our materials and publicize materials. It's been a fantastic partnership to have the university so supportive of us.
Hilary: Were you based in the university's lab with your manufacturing facilities at that point?
Josh: Yes. For the first few years, we were actually in an incubation space on the University of Maryland campus. We recently relocated to Frederick as part of our growth into a 90,000-square-foot facility. This will enable us to pursue manufacturing. We're dramatically increasing our innovation space, as well as we can innovate new materials and optimize the ones we are creating, as well as have more comfortable space, office space, and a kitchen for our team members.
Hilary: Congratulations.
Josh: Thank you. Thank you. We're super excited. We're extremely excited.
Hilary: How did you decide on that location? It's in Hassey's backyard of Annapolis.
Josh: Yes, and the folks in Frederick County have been tremendous in terms of really making us feel at home in terms of supporting development, making sure that as the build-out of the facility happens, that we're getting everything we need. Frederick is a wonderful community. I've talked about how great Frederick is. A member of my team said that I forgot to mention how good the beer is in Frederick. Apparently, there's some great local brewers. I haven't had a chance to try them, but that's one of the other things I'm excited about.
Hilary: Seems right for some collaborations with your product launches.
Josh: Exactly.
Hilary: Josh, you've been traveling a lot with your team. You're actually joining us from New York today. As you go to these different green building events and expos and conferences, what has the feedback been like? What are people most excited about?
Josh: Yes, we've seen a tremendous amount of traction. Different folks are interested in this material for different reasons, but overall, really broad excitement. Perhaps one group I can mention is architects. Architects are really excited, particularly about using MettleWood as a cladding material. If you think of a big city, most of the buildings in any large city in the world are clad in concrete or metals, and they're not clad in wood. The reason being is that wood materials today cannot meet the fire rating required to be used as a siding or cladding material on buildings.
What we're really excited about and what architects are really excited about is using MettleWood as a cladding solution that will not only be something that's highly beautiful, highly fire resistant, but also something that can really sequester carbon and also demonstrate a building's commitment to the environment. It's a really, again, win-win-win around the biophilic feeling that a building can convey over the current cladding materials like concrete and metals.
Hilary: I grew up in Massachusetts and we spent a lot of elementary school learning about Boston's Great Fire of 1872. There are a number of contributing factors for that fire, but my main takeaway at that point was, thank goodness we don't build things with wood anymore. Tell me more about the fire resistance of MettleWood.
Josh: I think there's a big rethinking of the ability of wood to withstand fire. In certain cases, believe it or not, wood performs better under fire conditions than metals do, because metals can melt and lose strength catastrophically. With MettleWood, though, we augment the natural fire resistance by basically densifying the wood. Because MettleWood is so densified, it's so dense, it doesn't allow for oxygen to go through, which is, fires need oxygen. If you were to take a piece of MettleWood and attempt to light it on fire, basically there would be a small char mark on the surface, but the fire would go out almost immediately. Again, because of that densification factor, MettleWood is extremely fire resistant.
Gil: Climate Positive is produced by HASI, a leading climate investment firm that actively partners with clients to deploy real assets that facilitate the energy transition. To learn more please visit HASI.com
Hilary: One of the challenges with some of the other wood products and particle boards is the off-gassing and the different adhesives that are involved. What is the off-gassing like for MettleWood? Is there any?
Josh: It's essentially non-existent. Yes. To make a MettleWood board, we don't use any adhesives, any polymers that require health and safety considerations. MettleWood is 100% wood. The process that we use is facilitated by a chemical reaction, but the end product has undetectable amounts of chemicals. We've explored using MettleWood in food-grade applications, things like cutting boards, and it's perfectly safe.
Hilary: You've attracted funding from the DOE. I'm curious how you stood out in a very competitive pool to get that funding and be a company that was identified as being promising to scale.
Josh: Yes, I want to thank the Department of Energy and its innovation agency, ARPA-E. We are extremely grateful for the support from them. Yes, we were awarded a SCALEUP award for $20 million. The project began last year in March, and the funding from the Department of Energy and ARPA-E has been absolutely catalytic in terms of enabling us to build our facility to meet milestones in commercial development. The funding has been transformative, and I'm very supportive being in this space and seeing other companies come up through this space. I hope that many other companies can benefit in the way that we have from the Department of Energy's funding.
In terms of what distinguished us from others, I can only speculate. I think we're very passionate about what we're up to. I think MettleWood, in many ways, speaks for itself, the clear technological advantages and really the ability for MettleWood to massively decarbonize the world. We estimate that if MettleWood was used in about 40% of steel applications, and we believe this is a very reasonable number, we can have a profound impact, probably about over 2 gigatons of CO2 and other GHGs, emissions averted per year. If you think about that, that's roughly 4% of the emissions just by using MettleWood as a material instead of steel.
Hilary: What are the concerns that people raise or the barriers to entry that you'll have to address in order to get there?
Josh: I think introducing any new material into the world carries its own inherent challenges, and so there is a slower process of adoption. We think that when people see the benefits of MettleWood, it will be clear that it is a superior material over the incumbent materials that are used today. I think that would be the main consideration is just the time to market. I think bringing a new material to the market as well is quite capital intensive. We also, for example, with the Department of Energy grant, we do need a certain amount of capital that wouldn't be required if we were doing something like in the software space or something maybe a smaller gadget or something like that. I think those would be probably it's the time to market and the amount of capital required to bring a new sustainable material to the world.
Hilary: Do you plan to focus on the larger corporations or will you do retail initially?
Josh: Yes. We're set up to be basically a business-to-business company, and so we are pursuing partnerships with larger companies. The idea would be that end consumers would see our material in the context of other products that they use, whether that be consumer electronics, vehicles, or of course, houses and buildings.
Hilary: You are looking at things like electronics and vehicles as well?
Josh: We are. We have a saying at InventWood that the 20th century was built with metals and concrete. The 21st century is going to be built with wood. There are going to be more and more cellulose materials that are going to be better performing, lower cost, and far more sustainable than anything that we've seen today.
Hilary: Do you think MettleWood will be a source for car manufacturing?
Josh: Yes, there's some really exciting opportunities as well that are maybe less intuitive than what you'd expect. Yes, there's some very compelling reasons to use MettleWood as components within a vehicle, in addition to all of its sustainability benefits and its strength. There's the aesthetics, there's the lightweight. It's really the strength-to-weight ratio that's really attractive. In addition to replacing, or the advantages of replacing steel from an embodied carbon standpoint, you can lower emissions of the vehicle by taking a lot of weight out of it from basically using wood instead of metal.
That makes cars more fuel efficient. You can go further on a given amount of fuel or batteries as well. That's what's really exciting. Then on the consumer electronics side, yes, having a small electronic device that is made out of MettleWood or wood material, I think it's not only a means of showing how committed you are as a consumer to sustainability, but being able to touch and hold a wood material that has been shown to really have some profound health benefits as well. Given how much we hold our smartphones these days, I think having them made out of wood would be a huge benefit.
Hilary: Do you envision iPhones and televisions made out of MettleWood?
Josh: Sure, why not? Absolutely.
Hilary: Any other applications that you're especially excited about?
Josh: Yes, I think there's a lot of opportunity, not only in the industrial space, but also with electricity generation. One day we'd like to use MettleWood to make things like wind turbines, both the towers and the blades. Currently, they're made out of carbon fiber in many cases. While carbon fiber is a great material from a strength-to-weight ratio standpoint, there's a lot of disposal challenges associated with carbon fiber. This would be a way to augment the sustainability of those mechanisms for generating electricity.
Hilary: When you are actually forming the product, can you make it into any shape? Could you make a coffee mug-shaped MettleWood?
Josh: It's a great question. Yes, our current focus is on more flat or planar shapes, but ultimately, yes, we are really excited about doing more complex shapes. If we want to be in the vehicle space or potentially aerospace as well, we're going to need to make MettleWood curved or into some complex geometry. Yes, that is something that we're looking at as well and the research is ongoing.
Hilary: Right now, you're taking the pieces of wood and compressing them and making them more dense, but it's not like you're just getting all of the little cellulose pieces and putting them into a block, correct? It's not making a brick, it's condensing the wood?
Josh: Correct. We're taking a piece of wood and then densifying it. That's a good piece of wood. It's a great question because we are looking at using wood residuals, so things like wood chips and sawdust, to assemble a form of really strong wood materials as well. That's in the pipeline. It won't be our first product, but it is something that is coming.
Hilary: That's exciting to have a product with no byproducts that can actually be sourced from what's now trash.
Josh: Exactly.
Hilary: Moving to the hot seat, a favorite piece of advice I've received is--?
Josh: One of the best pieces of advice that I got early in my career was to always take your work extremely seriously and never take yourself too seriously.
Hilary: Is there a book or an article that you've read that has pushed you to think differently?
Josh: Yes. One of the best books that I've read recently is Natural Capitalism by Paul Hawken and Amory and Hunter Lovins. That really started to get me to think in a different way in terms of how the world has undervalued the natural resources. That's something that as a leader of InvenWood thinking about how we can make our materials even greener and more sustainable. A lot of what the authors discovered in that book is super relevant.
Hilary: Great. I love that one. It's classic. A key ingredient to my productivity is--?
Josh: I schedule everything. My work time, my free time, everything. I have done a 180-degree change. I used to be very resistant to this, but I feel if I don't put it on the schedule, I miss it somehow. That's key for me.
Hilary: Then on the other side, when I need to recharge, I--? What do you schedule in?
Josh: Yes, exactly. I spend a lot of time with my kids. I have a daughter and a son that are fairly young, seven and almost four. I don't know if being around them is the most relaxing exercise, but I've gotten into hiking in a big way recently, especially exploring the hills around Los Angeles County.
Hilary: What do you want your kids to be proud of you for?
Josh: For me, it's that they see that I made an impact in a way that leaves the world a better place. Being in an early-stage company, growing a company is not always the easiest, but I think it's a very meaningful vocation. I hope that they realize the sacrifices that I've made to bring some change to the world.
Hilary: Then finally, to me, climate positive means--?
Josh: To me, climate positive means not having to make sacrifices. For us, the materials that we're bringing to the world really don't require any change in behavior. It's really a win-win for everyone. I'm really excited about the next generation of technologies, and I think that the world is going to be a better place for them.
Hilary: Fantastic.
Josh: Thanks so much.
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I'm Hilary Langer.
And this is Climate Positive.