Market Possibilities with Allen Witters of Carbotura

Hello and welcome to this episode of Conscious Design Podcast. This is Ian Peterman, your host, and with me today I have Alan Witters. He's a founding partner of Gravitas Infinitum, and they're investing and launching new technologies to help the world, including Carboterra ZeroFill, which will be focused on today. Thanks for joining me.

Thank you, Ian.

Yeah, so for— always love a good origin story. If you could give us a little background on how you got into starting Gravitas and, and working on such huge, huge problems today.

Well, several years ago, probably about a decade ago, I said, you know, there's a big change coming This whole, uh, uh, all supply chains are going to have to start getting into recycling and the circular economy. And we've seen the carbon credit things building up. We've heard all this ESG stuff, uh, 90% of it's greenwashing out there, and not very many people are actually doing something about it. And I said, you know, well, there's technologies out there that can actually allow us to recycle 100% of the waste that the world creates and put it back into the supply chain and, and move ourselves, wean ourselves off of the linear drill a hole in the ground extraction economy and turn it into an economy where we pull the same exact materials literally out of the trash and out of the carbon dioxide we've already put into the atmosphere and reuse those in the same products we're used to.

Amazing. Well, yeah, circular economy has, has been a big topic more and more. People are, people are talking about it. And I actually would love your, your thought. Well, I was talking to someone about circular economy and there's, there's a lot of focus on this super local, right? Very, very localized circular economy. But there also needs to be this global level of circularity. How does Carbon Terra fit into that circularity on either scale?

Well, the first thing you have to understand is that there's a broken link right now in the global, local, whatever value chain level you want to look at. And it's the waste management industry itself has been suppressing technologies, and they've got good reason for it. They have public bottom lines they have to show earnings for. And they get paid for picking up, handling, moving trash basically by the ton and by the mile. And the more they can do that, the more money they can make. And so if they can actually avoid, avoid processing it or keep handling it— and that's why today's current recycling is, is absurd at best, because just allowing them to pick up more trash, haul it around to another location. Say they're sorting it, and then 91% of it still has to go get picked up again and taken to the landfill on a global basis. And so we're literally— we're only handling 91%, uh, is, uh, is all going to landfills. 7 or 8% is getting recycled at the best. And so this is, this is a real problem. We need to fix that broken link. And that's what we basically decided to do is come out with something, our Carbiter ZeroFill, which is a virtual landfill that eliminates waste.

Got it. And, and what is, for those, those wondering, what is it you're saying, a virtual, right? So how are you, you're able to process it? How does this, how does this process work and replace the current landfill process we have?

Yeah, well, I'm going to start— actually, I'm going to start with the behavioral model. For 5,000 years, we've been picking up trash and putting it in a hole, okay? And we literally have to change that behavior, okay? And to do that— and by the way, the market is huge, trillion-dollar market a year, okay? To do this, we have to understand circularity. And what's happening is the circular economy, 91% is going into landfills. And all those materials that we spent, put a lot of energy into extracting and refining and making into products, we're basically saying they're waste now. And I'm like, well, those look like pre-manufactured, pre-refined molecules to us. And we decided to take on the problem at the molecular level. And not at the physical item assembly level. And that allows us a lot of things. Now, it's also forcing us to create a whole new category called circularity. And we look at this as a 90% open market because nobody's really doing it because of that broken link in the waste management chain. The waste management guys are putting everything into the landfill and they're not actually processing it to be reused again. Now, 7-8% is, and they're doing hand sorting. Is that as far as we've evolved as humans? That's really pretty bad. Okay.

Yeah, it always seemed really inefficient to me that you're gonna— yeah, you're gonna pay someone to hand separate.

The other thing is that you have to change the model, the business model, and that's one thing that we did. Is we basically said, okay, you need a waste elimination contract, that's fine, but let us process the materials. Let us turn those materials into high-value items. And it's not waste of energy and it's not waste of fuels. It's actual real molecular products that can be used in really good stuff. And then let us also get all the climate credits available that are out there for renewable fuels, carbon credits, renewable energy, all those kinds of things. We'll monetize all those. And this trash, we think we need to contribute back to the community something. So we actually will rebate 100% of the recycling fees back to the original community that had the trash. So we're changing the business model is the first thing we're doing. Hmm.

That's awesome.

Yeah. And if people don't understand what, what we're doing is, uh, waste has a huge impact. 20 to 50% of a municipal budget is spent on waste management. That's tax dollars. All right. It affects corporate bottom lines at 4 to 5%. And so that's earnings. Um, the other thing is, is we're facing these PFAs and PFOs. Our systems, we said, you know, we have to take care of all waste, not just go to 92% and let the PFAS go, right?

Right.

We've got to solve the whole problem. And there's a, there's a really interesting issue as we, as we just started launching this last year, we started seeing this, this problem where we know that our solution actually causes problems on monetizing the current failures that are in place. And it's a good problem to have. Well, it's a disintermediation problem is what it is. There's a lot of sunk costs in the bad systems. There's a lot of process that's been put in place, legislation, regulatory. It's really interesting, uh, and, uh, when you're creating a new category like this, because we're not in the waste management industry, we're, we're literally in the manufacturing business. And waste is our feedstock.

Hmm.

The, the big thing that sets us apart from all others out there is that we work in all 4 states of matter. We work in solids, liquids, gases, and plasma, and we can shift the molecules or the atoms between all 4 of those states with our equipment. So it gives us a lot of flexibility to separate, to isolate, and to extract various molecules It's something we would call selective depolymerization, if you want the science, some of the scientific terms. We also said we need to make an impact for our future generations and stuff. We're soon becoming ancestors, and I don't want my ancestral legacy and heritage to be one of trashing the planet. I want it to be one of cleaning up the planet and untrashing the planet. So we basically focused on these items as far as being able to Cause impact. Well, how do we do it? We build equipment that looks like this, and this is called a Recyclotron. Uh, pretty cool name. Basically, it's what it does— it recycles everything. Uh, what I'm showing here is a unit that can handle 100 tons per day of municipal solid waste, and it can do it without sorting. It could be Just dump everything in the dumpster and we'll take the whole thing. Now we use multiphase microwave reactors to literally vaporize the trash. We do that by pushing about a megawatt of energy into a microwave oven, and it literally boils it away, vaporizes it, and we collect it and condense the vapors that come off of these things. Now, because we're using microwaves, We can tune the frequency of the microwave and the phase of the microwave. If you have a, a plastic water bottle, that's gonna be a long-chain cross-linked poly type of plastic.

Right.

We, we know how to break the weak molecular bonds of the cross-linking, snap it into 3 or 4 molecules, hydrocarbon molecules, vaporize 'em, basically boil 'em and turn 'em into a vapor, and then collect that vapor. That vapor is completely reusable at that point.

Hmm.

Once we condense it and get it turned back right back into plastic bottles if you want to, or we can carbonize it and turn it into graphite if you want to make graphite. So these systems basically can pull out about 16 different discrete material streams simultaneously. We collect the fuel components, gaseous and liquid fuels, and we also run our own gas turbine generators. Which uses our equipment to make them zero emissions and atmospheric carbon capture devices because we clean up the flue gases. And this is where we get into what's elegant about our design. And this is the mass flow diagram of our design. So if we start over here, number 1, 100 tons per day of municipal solid waste comes into a multiphase microwave reactor. And we start at ambient temperatures. We run these reactors under a vacuum with a nitrogen atmosphere. And so there's no combustion whatsoever.

Hmm.

And we basically start cooking it and we pull off vapors at various different temperatures all the way up to about 550 degrees. We're pulling out oils and hydrocarbons and everything has hydrocarbons in it, textiles, Food has hydrocarbons in it. Everything's got basically hydrocarbons in it. And we pick it off selectively and some of it turns into renewable fuels. Some of it turns— we're also getting silica from glass. We're getting metals out of the garbage. We're getting a lot of water.

Hmm.

And we get a lot of char.

Okay.

The fuels we use in the gas turbine generator It generates all the electricity, so we're 100% self-powered. And then we actually take the flue gases and we run that into a microwave plasma reactor, which actually disassociates the CO— oxygen atoms out of the CO2, the NO2, any of the bad exhaust things we break up, and we actually reuse those gases. The oxygen goes back into the gas turbine generator. And we use the nitrogen as atmosphere over in the reactors here. And then most of this, we have solid carbon black that comes out from the carbon that was in the fuel and the carbon that was actually in the atmosphere. And with a 100-ton-per-day system, we're capturing 40,000 cubic feet a minute of atmospheric air, which is about 1 pound of CO2 per minute. So now we just turned this whole system into an atmospheric carbon capture device that's got a carbon-negative footprint that outputs Hey, it's Ian here.

So glad you're enjoying this episode of Conscious Design. If you want the full scoop on Conscious Design, what it is, how we do it, how you can do it, then check out our book. We wrote it so creative entrepreneurs like you can code social and environmental responsibility right into your brand's DNA. You can download the first chapter for free. Link is in the description. Enjoy the rest of the episode. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and share. So you put dirty air and your trash in.

Yeah.

And then it powers itself to give you raw materials, some char. And I would, I would imagine if you have a filtration system on there, you have some pretty clean drinking water too.

Well, it's just, it's distilled water actually. And depending on what you want to, yeah. So what, what, depending on what you want to do it. Yeah.

But it's pure, it's pure water.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So what we did is we took the time just to think through the inputs and outputs and said, oh, we know how to turn this all into a system that's just completely closed loop and clean, takes materials in, converts them to other materials going out without any emissions. And so it's really interesting discussions with the EPAs of the world. And when we say we don't have an exhaust stack, well, then they say, well, we don't know how to do anything with you. You don't have any emissions. And it's just pretty fun to work with them. So yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, what we do is a selective debonding thing. You're—

so you're able to, because of how you're able to tune the microwaves, you selectively go through and kind of just go through all the wavelengths and slowly break down everything and collect off Oh, we're breaking up a certain type of plastic right now, pull it off, and you're able to keep just going through that cycle and pulling off what you need.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's basically what we do. But that is the advanced form of what we do if we were going after a select type of plastic product. Now, We typically simplify it, and we basically are going for graphite and fuels and some specialized polymers sometimes. There's, there's 3 levels of processing. The first level comes out with these big buckets, 1 through 6, and then we start using non-thermal and thermal plasma to do either cracking or conversion. And to give you an idea, The way we look at it economically is the reason we can give a rebate to our customers to make this zero cost is that we're going to be putting out high-value products on the backside. And so one of the products we focus on are graphite and graphene.

All right.

Fuel is worth about 50 cents a pound. Graphite's worth about $4 a pound. And so that's how we pay for ourselves. Okay. Now I can turn 87% of the fuel into graphite because it's got a high carbon content. And so, and so we only make enough fuel for to power ourselves.

Um, how about, how, how do metals fit into this?

They just come out as metals that we sort and then we run into normal metal recyclers.

Got it. Okay, so that's probably the one of the easier ones then.

Oh yeah, it's— metal's easy. Yeah, I mean, if we wanted to fully vertically integrate, we'd put our own, you know, refractories in and do metal refining, but we're not in— we're not going to do that. So this gives you sort of the idea that there's 23% char in, in MSW. There is 87% carbon in the oils and in the gases. And so we just pull out enough oil and gas to fuel ourselves, and then whatever excess we typically will go after carbon for, for a product, carbon product. This is a really interesting chart. A lot of people have never seen one of these, but this compares municipal solid waste against coal, petroleum products, and natural gas. And this shows the hydrogen-carbon ratios and the oxygen-carbon ratios. And that's basically— we're just working with hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon, and 80% of the molecules are, are those combinations.

Right.

These are the companies that have validated this equipment. Some of them are using it today. And then we've, we've validated against all kinds of waste. So we're here to, we're here to basically change the world in a pretty big way. There's some pictures of some equipment. These are what the reactors look like being manufactured. Here's a plasma tube that's doing 10,000 cubic feet a minute of exhaust gases. And this is what some graphite from the systems looks like. Um, here's a big, big system design. We did this for a group in India, and this is 2,000 tons per day of trash. When this gets installed over there, it'll be handling 2,000 tons a day of trash. Now, this fits on 3 acres, so it doesn't take a lot of space.

That's a lot of— 2,000 tons is a lot.

Oh yeah, it's a lot of garbage. So, um, give you an idea, uh, we are really, really, really green because we generate all these different types of climate credits, green credits. And we actually won an award about a year and a half ago when we first said what we're going to get, what we're going to be launching. And we support all these UN SDGs. And so we're attempting to be the greenest company on the planet as far as I'm concerned. That's our team. Pretty straightforward. We've put our financing together already. We have a billion-dollar commitment out of National Standard for funding our deployments. And these are the reasons we stand out.

So, and so you, you had a pretty impressive list of companies that are already, you know, validated and working with it. And you said this is You can make it basically a zero cost because it produces such valuable resources through this recycling. Are you, is this something that you're seeing more interest from companies or are you seeing municip— because this is municipality level trash, 2,000 tons is a ton. Are you seeing more countries like kind of Kind of who are you seeing really interested in, in this?

Well, there, there are, um, the real interest around this because we actually targeted and tailored this towards municipal solid waste. Okay. Okay. Um, we did not target it towards industrial waste, which the list of companies, that's primarily what they're focused on, right? Municipal solid waste is a, is a public problem. It's a really bad problem when it comes to landfills. We should not be having discussions about creating new landfills because the ones we have already created are a big enough problem. And so we're seeing a huge amount of interest in this to basically get rid of the landfills or get rid of having to expand the landfills. Because even though you're putting stuff in a recycling bin, 7 or 8% of it's getting recycled. The other 90% is going into a landfill still, right? Which is just crazy. Okay, so, uh, I can give you 100 reasons why current recycling is a failure.

Uh, and I think many people would agree with you.

Okay, and it's like, why do we actually spend all that extra money, time, and effort sorting things when You're going to see a whole bunch of these systems coming out that just make it a full circular economy approach. And there's— we've been sold on the waste-to-energy thing for a long time. Those are highly polluting plants that have waste of ash coming out. We can adapt our systems to actually clean up their exhaust and even clean up their ash. Uh, so we're trying to mesh in and blend in with the industry and make sure that we don't cause any real problems. But we're, we're getting to the end of life of a lot of the incinerator fleets. And they're having to make tough decisions. I mean, Miami-Dade County just had the Doral fire, lost 5,000 tons per day of capacity on a waste-to-energy plant that burned down.

Okay. And is this because you have power generation in this, obviously, to run itself? Is this something that you could turn into and replace some of those aging trash-to-power systems as well and just come— so clean solution to that?

Yeah. So those trash-to-power situations aren't that large. They don't actually contribute that much energy. The trash— so the 5,000 tons per day was only contributing about 7 megawatts of energy. All right.

Oh wow. All right, that's not very much at all.

Not very much at all. And they were— I mean, most of these guys on that size of a plant are happy to, to have $7 million roughly made of energy sales, but they spent a billion dollars on the plant. And so It's highly subsidized industry. Okay. And the rates that we're seeing now are for resource recovery through waste-to-energy are $90 to $150 a ton. And so we come in way below that also. And then we rebate 100% of the fee, which means it's zero cost. Now, in certain areas, we like to be the best corporate citizen. We will offer power support, energy support. We'll offer local utility black start support, voltage support. Um, we have an industrial microgrid in our systems, and so it's pretty easy to extend out.

Okay.

For island— for island countries that we're in discussions with, it makes a lot of sense to also offer them power, offer them water. And also offer them fuels. And that's a, that's a judgment call we make to be a good citizen. Now, we also have dedicated a portion of our profits to go back into a permanent fund for the local community, similar to the Alaskan Pipeline Fund, so that the actual community is benefiting from all the trash, not only getting it at zero cost of elimination. But we also want to bring back some of the profits because all that trash was paid for by somebody, right?

Yes, it is.

And it's, it's the public that's paid for it. So why don't we figure out how to U-turn some of that and really create a circular economy here, which means that there's financial benefit that follows the circle around also, right? When we start, when we start doing that, we'll get— we'll change the behavior of everyone when they see their you know, $100 check in the mail from waste resource recovery.

Right. And I think you get a lot of people behind it because you're not requiring them to clean and sort, right? It becomes more, you don't have to have 2 different bins or I was, when I was a kid, there's, we would have like a glass bin and a paper bin.

Oh yeah.

Plastic bin. Or a metal bin and then a plastic bin and they would reject, they wouldn't even pick it up if it wasn't, if it wasn't clean enough, they would just leave it and not, not pick it up. So that would be, that would be great to have to not have to worry about that. And you're able to handle medical waste, which is a whole—

Yeah, we handle, we can handle, we can handle hazardous waste. The only thing we don't like to handle Is radioactive and munitions.

That makes sense. You don't need explosions or radioactive inside. Well, somebody, somebody else will figure out how to do, do that kind of waste.

Yeah.

You can handle all this stuff.

Yeah. So, I mean, we've sized these systems to go from 25 tons to 10,000 tons per day. We also will supply in this background image here, Uh, we'll supply shredding, baling, wrapping, and loading equipment and the flat-pack containers for small remote communities to get the same benefit where they can load up a container and ship it to us once a week. That's 40 tons of garbage. All right. And we'll process it for them and they'll get the credit for it. They'll get the rebates for it. The small community will also. It just doesn't have to be for big communities.

Right. So you could set up a more, you know, in more rural areas, set up one where the system's actually at, but then be able to feed it from the towns that are nearby.

Yep. And, and, and we need, we, we gotta, we gotta plan it to untrash and that's what we're focused on.

Amazing. Well, it sounds like something too you'd be able to, you would be able to handle You know, like ocean trash and things that are, they're super salty. They've been contaminated for a while as well. And not just obviously stopping the trash from going to landfill is great, but we also have this large supply of trash that's out there in nature too. Yeah.

So we actually are working on responses to RFIs and RFPs for the giant sargassum Seaweed blob that's headed towards America right now.

Okay, that's a good problem to fix.

Yeah, yeah. And it's, it's 9 million tons is what they're estimating is going to hit Florida beaches.

9 million tons, that is, that is a lot. And when do they— in the next year?

Yeah, it's starting to hit now.

That is a lot. That is a lot to deal with.

Yeah.

Amazing. Well, what's your, I guess, long-term? You're really just looking to get in with municipalities and are other, you mentioned island nations. So there's, you're definitely, I'm assuming, already talking to other countries. India's, you're putting in a pretty big system, 2,000 tons a day. Kind of, are you on every continent yet?

We, we're not on every continent yet. We just introduced this, uh, late last year, and so we're right now, we're organizing, uh, basically MOUs and LOIs with various municipalities or people that want our services. We're starting to do deployment planning, and we're— one of the things we're working on is a global circularity center to be based here in Naples, Florida. that is actually ran by the nonprofit, the Hot Planet Repair Team, that we sponsor. And that whole center will be showing off a lot of this technology, teaching people how to use it and what to do with the materials and things like that. And, um, we're also going to be building our manufacturing facilities adjacent to that. And so for the next 2 years, we're, we're doing a lot of infrastructure building to support our rollouts. We have, uh, in our current pipeline, we have around 80,000 or 90,000 tons per day of capacity, which takes up our manufacturing that we have set up for about the next 3 years. It's pretty well booked.

That's a lot of capacity already.

Yeah, and that's just across about 20 customers.

Okay, so that's only That's pretty good then. All right, when do you— where you have all your kind of this planning phase, when do you think first full-scale units will be fully operational? Do you have a target in mind, or is it—

It's about, um, when we get an order, it's going to take us around 9 months to deliver the first units. Okay. Because these are, uh, They're not— we're not building a plant or a large facility. This is equipment that we've name-plated that comes in on a container, okay, that basically can be installed within a day or 2 once it lands and it's up and running. So it looks like a big machine tool.

Right.

And so we've bypassed all that 3 to 5 years of project development, like a big power plant. or some of the incinerator plants that take 5 to 7 years to build. We can actually start deploying first capacity in 9 months and then keep adding capacity. And our capacity increments 25 tons a day. And so we can add 25 tons every day if we have the equipment lined up to come in.

Got it. And, and I would imagine there's, there's less legal loopholes or jumps you have, hoops you have to go through because you're not, you're not a permanent fixed structure. So you don't have to do all the zoning and all, all of that kind of work as well. You really just need a flat space.

We're, we're considered, yeah, we're considered a manufacturing type of company. Right.

Because you're producing, you're producing raw feed.

Yeah.

You just happen to be producing the feed rather than A final product.

Yeah, there are some permits we have to have on the, on the front-end feed side for waste handling, like hazardous waste handling and things like that. But as soon as it enters our facility and goes over into the machines, it— all that disappears. We're a manufacturing facility at that point.

Got it. So you have like this little tiny area where you're receiving, basically that's, that's the hazardous waste area, and then That's all you gotta worry about. It immediately turns into not hazardous.

Yeah.

Amazing. Amazing. Well, I appreciate your, your time and talking through this. This technology is impressive. I'm glad you decided to—

Thank you.

To go and solve and put this all together in a unit that all works together. Yeah.

So keep your eye on us. We're We'll invite you to our Global Circularity Center when that gets up and running later in the year. And yeah, that's gonna— that's being supported by multiple corporations, individuals, philanthropists, local governments, and some universities. And our mission with that is to teach people how to do circularity.

Right. It's important. It's an important thing. And You have the technology to make it actually possible, which is, which is good. So for everyone that wants to get a hold of you guys, where would be, where would be the best place to, to find you?

You just go onto our website, www.carbotura.com, and go ahead and click through or email us.

Perfect. And I'll make sure there's links in there for everyone listening. You can check it out. Those links will be available in the description. And Alan, thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate you sharing this and talking through it.

Thank you.