Gabe Tavas: From Kombucha to Sustainable Wood Alternatives

Hello and welcome to this episode of Conscious Design. I'm your host, Ian Peterman, and author of the Conscious Design book. And today we have Gabe Tavis. He's the CEO and founder of Symmetry Wood. They are a brand, a new brand, using bacteria to produce cellulose and make wood-like products. And I also saw you guys are A winner for the James Dyson Award as well?

Yes, yes, we have received that recognition.

Awesome. Well, it was great to have you on the show. Welcome.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Ian.

So everybody loves a good origin story, so let's start with yours. What, what got you into even exploring the idea of using bacteria to produce cellulose?

It's a long story with, you know, a couple different origin points, but I think the one I try to hone in on the most, uh, kind of traces back to right before I started my time in college. I was set to go to the University of Illinois to study industrial design, but before doing those studies, I actually took about 7 weeks to do a community engagement program in rural Ecuador. So I was actually living with an indigenous host family near Guamote, Ecuador, actually. So it's, it's in the Andes, in the mountainous region of the country, and learned an enormous amount about their culture, about their value system. But I also saw a lot of the environmental problems they were facing, you know. Climate change, of course, was quite pressing for them. Their water supply was shrinking as the mountain snowcaps dwindled. But also, I was seeing even more viscerally the issue of unsustainable materials in their lifestyles. You know, a lot of the plastic bags from the markets, other kinds of plastic debris had been accumulating in the homes, and the only way they had to dispose of it was by burning the stuff in kitchen fire pits, backyard fire pits, and that would obviously emit really noxious fumes that are not healthy for people or for the planet. So—

Right.

I saw this and, you know, I thought hard about how in industrial design you're often making products that are using petroleum plastic. Very often it's, it's quite the norm. And, uh, as I was feeling myself exposed to these fumes and seeing my host siblings exposed to them, I said to myself that this wasn't going to sit well with me any longer. I want to choose a different path with my design passions. So when I came back to the United States, I really started to look beyond the curriculum and my studio classes. Mm-hmm. I started to research more sustainable materials. Wood obviously is a great example. It's one of the most common, the most abundant natural materials that we have available. But of course, there's concerns with overharvesting of woods, you know, excessive logging, especially of a lot of these precious woods or tropical hardwoods. And I kind of honed in on that problem because these precious woods like ebony, rosewood, they're really beautiful. They add quite a bit of, you know, aesthetic and even functional value to whatever products they're part of, but they're just way too scarce and way too, you know, damaging to the environment to actually use on a regular basis. So having honed in on that problem, I started to look at the way wood is, is created chemically in trees. And I saw that, you know, cellulose was a main part of it. And then I started to think, well, you know, is there a non-plant source for cellulose? And sure enough, there had been research into bacterial cellulose. This research had been going on for years already. There's been several companies and researchers that have looked into medical applications, paper production, even leather production. So it's been widely researched, but no one had ever considered using it for creating wood. So I figured to myself, well, shucks, I'll give it a shot myself. So I started growing this stuff. I like that. It is the same kind of bacteria you often find in kombucha. So all I had to do was get kombucha SCOBY cultures, grow it in my dorm room, harvest the cellulose and start making some very rough, very curly samples in the beginning. And then from there, I progressively got better at it. I started getting student teammates involved, and then our work managed to progress to the point where it was recognized by the Dyson Foundation as well as other groups. But that's kind of the, you know, summary for the journey with Symmetry so far.

Oh, that's awesome. I love that you, uh, started it in a dorm room. That's always just as good as a garage, if not better. That's— I love that. Uh, and I saw— I was looking through your website and looking at your stuff, and I saw that you are working with the same bacterias and stuff as kombucha. So I'm curious, and I'm sure other people would be curious too, Is it— do you use it the same? Obviously you're not using it the same way because you're not brewing kombucha. So are you— did you have to like modify? Is it a slightly different bacteria or is it same bacteria but you're feeding it? You know, I guess just a different process.

I think, um, I would describe it as different priorities, to be sure. Uh, okay. So far in our experience, we've not had to do anything super different to the brewing process. I mean, you know, what we're doing right now is we're essentially taking the waste cellulose or the waste SCOBY cultures. And by the way, SCOBY stands for symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast, for those who are unfamiliar with that acronym. Um, so you can get these waste SCOBY cultures Um, right from the breweries, and they're happy to give it, um, to a group like us, especially because, you know, the other options are you either compost it or worse, just throw it out in the trash. Um, obviously you don't want to do that because, as with any kind of organic waste, whether that's, uh, food scraps or, um, you know, anything else that has organic material in it, if that gets to the landfill, that's going to get buried, um, under a lot of debris. And in those low oxygen conditions, you generate methane, which is 20 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2. So it's a real problem. I mean, we're helping the breweries, uh, you know, really deal with that. Um, and we're dealing with it, I think, more readily than maybe a composting company, because the problem with SCOBYs is they're very wet. extremely wet, actually, and you don't necessarily want your compost pile to get that, like, oversaturated.

Right.

But it's not as much of an issue for us.

We're—

our process is honed to really extract that water as efficiently as we can, so it's a priority for us, whereas the composting companies are not necessarily making that priority, at least not in the same way.

Right. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I've never heard of any composting companies that take anything that's super wet. They're wanting— it just doesn't work, right? Their systems are set up for a more dry, more, more dry material than, than what you're describing.

Exactly.

What kind of applications? And I think I Talked with, with you or one of your team a little bit about it. Um, but what, what kind of applications are you wanting to use this for? And I think one of them was more decorative inlays, and you mentioned like some of the hardwoods, those really, really expensive, bad to harvest woods. Is that kind of your main target? Is that the— What you'd like to offer as an alternative to, or are you looking at You know, trying to replace pine or something like that?

Yeah, so for sure we're very focused on really replacing a lot of these, um, you know, tropical hardwoods, the precious woods as we prefer to call them. Um, we're not so interested necessarily in, in, you know, competing with pine. I think that's in its own category. It tends to be a less dense wood. It's quite inexpensive and Generally speaking, you can do forest management practices that are more sustainable with, you know, like a pine harvesting operation. But it's not the same case for ebony or rosewood, which in some cases those trees can take as long as 200 years to grow to a sufficient diameter where you would actually bother harvesting the tree. So that, you know, that time span, um, the growth time span for those tropical hardwoods is long. And, uh, you know, the trees aren't exactly abundant to begin with. So as you can imagine, Right. we have loggers, often illegal loggers, who are willing to go into these rainforests. They're willing to bulldoze like other trees that are in the way to reach one of these high-value trees. They may cut down that tree, and if they see that the pattern or the color on the inside of that tree is not quite what they want, they'll still toss it aside. So it becomes an extremely wasteful process.

Yeah.

On average, 2 of the other trees are destroyed for 1 high-value tree, and a degraded forest is estimated to be 8 times more likely to be later completely deforested. And the reason for that is because when those loggers open up the first roads into the forest, they're allowing other groups like ranchers, like hunters, like miners to get in there and wreak even more havoc. And that can be really devastating for rainforests all across the world, including the Amazon, including the Congo Basin. Yeah, these are forests that really have to deal with this kind of cascading problem. That gets kind of underreported. If you think about it, we all panic when we see the forest on fire, but sometimes the process is a lot more insidious and it happens in stages.

Hey, it's Ian here.

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Yeah, that's a good point. I hadn't really thought about— because I, I've known about illegal logging, right, and all of that, but I hadn't thought about the fact that once somebody puts a road through, right, it becomes very easy because they've spent all the money to bulldoze a nice, clear, usable road Now you have a road to somewhere that would not have been touched, wouldn't have been mined, wouldn't have been taken over if they hadn't already. They built the infrastructure basically for all that other stuff to happen.

Right.

Yeah, that's a really good point. Your material, going back to your material, Is a hard equivalent to a hardwood then? Because we think of like, you know, ebony and things like that. They're very hard. They're not, they're not pine. They're not this loose, soft, squishy material. And so yours is on the hard, hard end of things. Are you able to change that at all and, and adjust the density, or is it just this bacteria produces Dense only?

Yeah, so addressing that second part of your question first, uh, I would say this bacterial cellulose lends better to, you know, those denser woods, just because if you think about it, the fibers of this cellulose are very fine and they can intertangle in a quite, um, should— shall I say, nanoscale way. So it does, like, you know, make it easier to make a Mm-hmm. A denser material. That being said, there's nothing that's like saying we can't try and do less dense materials in the future, but I think that's gonna require, uh, more commercial and technological advancement, uh, so that we can do it in a way that makes economic sense. So that's another reason why the tropical hardwoods make sense for us. It's not just an environmental argument. But it's also just a practical argument. I think that's just the low-hanging fruit for bacterial cellulose when it comes to recreating wood with that. And secondly, regarding our material and its properties, you know, we're still in the process of getting very specific with the material properties in, in terms of quantifying those properties. But even like some early results, Uh, have shown that like the Janka hardness on some of our earlier samples, which weren't the best samples, they were kind of rougher. So we're going to do more fine-tuning, but early numbers coming from that were reaching about 2,009 LBF on the Janka hardness scale. And just for context, that's like exceeding or competitive with like hickory, which is one of the hardest, uh, domestic woods to the United States.

Right.

Um, and, you know, that's significant because, you know, if we're thinking of ever using this material for flooring, I mean, a lot of people will buy flooring that's less hard than, than hickory, right? They may buy like, uh, I think it's like maple or maybe oak. And, you know, those tend to be a little, uh, less hard. So our material's already kind of hitting above that. Um, granted, it's not hitting exactly At the numbers of like some of these really, uh, high-end, uh, precious woods. Like African blackwood is pretty insane. It does tend to go over 3,000 LBF. But the downside with that hard of a material is, uh, it's so hard to cut. Like you could actually blunt an axe if you were to cut at the African blackwood. Um, just for context. So you can actually really hurt, uh, damage your equipment. if it's too hard. Where I think Pyrus is really hitting that sweet spot is, yes, we're, we're hard but not too hard, and we still have that kind of visual look, that darker color, um, that is reminiscent of the tropical hardwoods. So this is kind of how our argument is forming at the moment. I'll be able to get more specific with everyone as soon as Symmetry has more funding to do all the tests we want to do. flexural testing. We want to do impact bending tests, all that stuff. So there's more to come for sure.

Have you, have you done any testing yet on like, because what, right, insects and things like that love to eat certain woods? Is that, have you looked at that? Have you looked at like fire resistance, insects, um, all those things? Or is that more down the road as, as you get funding to do that testing?

I think those are more down the road, especially because we're really looking more at indoor applications for the foreseeable future. That's another— that's kind of like the low end, the low-hanging fruit of the low-hanging fruit, so to speak. So it's a subsegment that makes most sense for us. I'm sure with time we will get more data on things like that, like insect resistance, fire resistance. That being said, I have done just Uh, very quick tests with like a flame, like a match or a, um, what do you call those, a lighter? Yeah, lighter. Yeah, lighter. And put it straight up to this material, and it's not like some super combustible piece of wood. It actually will—

It's not pine.

It's not pine. It's not pine. Like, I can't just like have the, you know, the lighter going on it, um, and it will start to catch. No, actually, Pyrrhus doesn't seem to like to catch all that much. So it's already encouraging in that regard. But again, we're gonna have to measure that with, with once we get more funding, I'd say.

Right. Well, it's always good to, you know, if, if your first test, it shows that it's worth actually testing, it didn't just instantly light up, which is, which is great. Um, what you mentioned, hardwood, possibly looking at hardwood floors. Is there any other applications that you guys Are really seeing an interest in? Because hardwoods are used, and it's used in like furniture, all kinds of stuff, and you're getting in a hardness level where it could even be replacing other materials and products potentially. Have you— is it kind of just wide open right now, or have you had some interest in certain areas for a material like this?

Yeah, I mean, we have our material actually listed in a couple materials libraries, so that tends to invite folks to reach out to us. So we've had even, um, even car companies actually reach out about interiors made with Pyrus. So that has come up, um, on more than one occasion.

That's awesome.

We've had furniture builders inquire We've had musical instrument builders inquire as well. Um, and I think there's a couple others that just kind of labeled themselves in general as like product designers. So it's kind of a little bit of a mystery, like what exactly they had in mind.

Right.

I've had folks even ask about like, uh, could I make like a chessboard with this? Could I make some little, uh, you know, some little like a gift or something like that? Um, there's definitely been a lot of people that have gotten ideas, um, but obviously we've had to prioritize what we're willing to, you know, focus on. Um, so we can't like address everybody's requests for samples. We have to be a little, uh, selective about that.

Are you guys looking at launching any of your own products, like creating products with the material, or are you guys just looking to be that supplier of the raw material and let other people kind of do whatever they want with it.

So we, we have historically gone back and forth on this topic. Um, I think around the time of the Dyson competition, uh, there was a lot of these product demos we were doing. We were making guitar picks, we were making, um, jewelry items with our material. Uh, and to be sure, there's an appeal to that. It's also very helpful for us to just showcase what Right. But I think long term we are looking more at being like a, you know, material distributor as opposed to making the end product ourselves. That being said, I mean, we're very happy to explore partnerships with, um, you know, folks who may want to do some demo product on our behalf, and perhaps we have some sort of arrangement around that, but we're not looking to do it Ourselves in the long term, I would say.

Right, that makes sense. For, for producing the material, is this something that you— because when you think of lumber, right, most of us think like 2x4s or maybe some plywood or something like that.

How—

what do you guys actually produce? Like, if I, if I wanted to use your material, do you send it out, you know, into this giant chunk Or are you able to grow— like, are you able to change what shape it grows into in some way to make it easier to handle? If, you know, let's say I need a panel versus a 6-inch cube, what, what can you— what can you do with that material? And what kind of options would someone have for being able to get the raw material in?

Yeah, so I think honestly this goes back again to what our priorities are as a company. You know, physically speaking, there's no limit to what kind of dimensions we're hoping to provide to people in the long run. But I'd say—

Nice.

In the immediate future, we're trying to provide this more as like a plank, right? Like, uh, we're estimating about like 24-inch long plank, maybe about I think it was 4 inches wide and about 3/8 inches thick. So short planks that lend well to smaller applications, that's how we're trying to go about this at the moment. I think blocks and, you know, whole sheets of some composite wood material will come later on. I certainly am interested in exploring that route. when we get to flooring, especially if we're doing something where maybe we combine Pyrus with a base material that's also sustainably made. Who knows, maybe Pyrus, maybe Pyrus makes sense to go on one of these hemp composite woods, or maybe it could go on some other ag waste composite boards. So there's ideas to explore there, but for now the planks are where we're Trying to focus.

Got it. All right. And is it pretty easy to change the formula?

Because it's—

because one of the things I'm thinking about, that's another material that's, that's kind of grown is, I don't know if you're familiar with mycelium packaging.

Yes.

Where they actually, they grow it so you can mold it. You could, you could, if you wanted to make it in this shape, you could make the mold and have it grow into the cavity. Is that kind of similar to what you guys are able to do, or not at all?

You know, uh, I would say it's certainly— it's not like growing within the mold per se, because bacterial cellulose, at least the way it grows in a kombucha SCOBY culture, it tends to grow at at the top of this like container of water, uh, or kombucha, uh, in most cases. Um, and you have to kind of sweep off the cellulose growing at the top, and then you have to actually blend that cellulose and do other processes to it so that you can get it in a state where you, you put it into a mold, you pack it into a mold, um, and it will dry out.

Okay.

in essentially the shape of that mold. Granted, there is shrinkage involved in there, and that's where you have to be very mindful.

Right.

Yeah, but it's, it's, it's different from mycelium. Mycelium, as you mentioned already, it's gonna just grow right there in the mold. I think with cellulose, it requires a— or at least bacterial cellulose, it requires a bit more processing. But you never know, things could very well change as technology improves.

Yeah, we'll see where you guys are at in 10 years. Who knows what you'll be doing with it, right? That's awesome. That's awesome. Well, yeah, I really appreciate you taking the time to chat and share. This is— I'm very intrigued by what you're doing. I think it's a great product and a lot of— I'm very curious to see how How it progresses and what people decide to do with it. Hopefully you are able to replace a lot of those hardwoods. It looks it looks great. It looks cool. I like I like what you it has a unique look, I think to it as well, which is from the design standpoint. I'm I am I'm industrial designer as well. So from the design standpoint, it's always interesting to see a new a truly new material. And what you can, what you can do with it. Before we wrap up though, I wanted to give you the opportunity, anything you wanted to share, how can people contact you, find you guys? I know you're, you guys are raising money as well. So anybody that's interested in buying samples, how do they, how do they get ahold of you? And, and yeah.

Yeah. So, uh, I think first I just want to say thanks again for having me on here, Ian. But as far as info that people might want to get a hold of regarding Symmetry, right now, as you mentioned, Ian, we are raising some funds in order to actually get the company based in the West Coast. We're also making some efforts into our first market. that we're trying to sell to, and that's the, uh, actually the guitar market. We're currently working on making, um, guitar, uh, fretboards. Uh, and so what I'm interested in is potentially, uh, talking with folks that, um, may want to act in an advisory capacity for Symmetry when it comes to, um, you know, guitars and all that. Um, I'm very open to having conversations that go down that Um, that train of thought. Um, yeah.

Right.

And I mean, that's just something that's, uh, definitely on our mind right now as we're starting to get funding, whether it's through government programs or individual investors. We're also open to any referrals that folks may have in that regard. If you want to get more information on Symmetry, you can look us up at symmetrywood.com. We're also present on Instagram and LinkedIn for social media. Uh, and I believe my contact information is also found on those platforms. So if anyone wants to reach me directly, uh, that should be there, uh, for you. Uh, but that's pretty much it for me. I'm pretty good, Ian.

Awesome. Well then, yeah, for everyone listening, there will be links in the description, so feel free to click that. And definitely check them out. Yeah, it's been great, Gabe. Really appreciate you taking some time to be on this episode and chat.

Yeah, it was great talking with you too.