Nutrient materials are unique because they are derived from natural molecules, and break back down into natural molecules to feed, rather than deplete, the soil. But why is soil health so important?

Soil health is the basis for a healthy ecosystem. Healthy soil can provide ‘services’ like growing biomass for food, cycling nutrients from unused plant material, and cleaning water by filtering and storing it. Healthy soils have a diversity of microbes and molecules which, when challenged by environmental changes like drought, allow soil ecosystems to adjust and continue to provide those same ‘services’. In other words, healthy soils are resilient to change. Resilience enables the soil to consistently provide clean water, and healthy food in the form of plants, microbes, and insects that support entire ecosystems. From the bottom of the food chain to the top, soil is life.

When soil health is depleted, its inherent ability to cycle nutrients, produce plant material, and store and filter water is also depleted. At NFW, we are especially interested in soil’s ability to produce plant material regeneratively. Plant fibres are incredibly, almost unbelievably, abundant. When humans maintain healthy soils, soil biomes can regenerate and heal. Regenerative management is a proven way to allow the earth to continually produce plant materials at incredible scales, sustainably and circularly for billions of people. Without healthy soils, life on Earth would be compromised.

How can we use the nutrients found in nature to create materials for everyday use?

When we say, 'nutrients as the basis for materials', what we’re saying is that the molecules that make up plants (and really all life) can also be the basis for our material economy. The advantage to our approach is that when these molecules, or nutrients, are turned into materials without being adulterated - i.e. mixed with petrochemicals and synthetic plastics - they are returned to the environment and become food for a diverse biome, not poison.

By comparison, the plastic industry takes fossil resources and/or biomass and refines them into synthetic monomers and polymers. While these systems are optimised to be moulded and shaped into a variety of plastic materials, the problem is the chemistries to build those materials up are toxic, have a high carbon footprint and are not circular with economics that scale. NFW’s approach is fundamentally different because we take natural molecules and build them up from nature, rather than breaking them down into a ‘synthetic soup’. Moreover, the NFW approach is not only better for people and the planet, it actually has clear economic advantages as well. Advantages that create the possibility of meaningful (global) scale and impact.

Does the NFW approach have a positive carbon impact too?

Carbon gets a lot of attention. It’s the backbone for all these molecules because of its intrinsic chemistry and natural abundance. Two forms of carbon, carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4), are emitted from human industry into the atmosphere and are contributing to the anthropogenic climate crisis. At the same time, in its different forms - for example soil organic matter or large forests - carbon is an essential nutrient in global biodiversity and ecosystem health. NFW believes humans must design within biogenic carbon cycles to mute our collective impact. We think building materials for their eventual return back to soil as nutrient forms of carbon is the only approach that scales with economics that are affordable.

What is the future of nutrient design? Could we ever make everything from nutrients without chemical modification?

Nature modifies nutrients all the time, but always within balanced ecosystem constraints. Given that plants and fungi, for example, are already shockingly diverse, NFW defaults to tapping into the already existing, low cost, and widely available natural diversity. For example, cellulose (from plants) is a form of a carbohydrate. The ‘simple’ substitution of hydroxyl groups (OH), in the glucose subunits of cellulose, for amyl groups (NHCOCH3) makes cellulose into chitin, (chitin is produced by fungi) and gives chitin extra chemical durability in certain environments that cellulose does not have. Nature accomplishes this without making a synthetic toxic soup of derivatives and NFW believes this is something to pay attention to, and emulate.

What is profound about NFW’s approach is that we do not use overly complicated and expensive systems to grow, for example, mushrooms that have been optimised to be mushrooms but not optimised to make leather-like materials. When people go down this ‘biofabrication’ route they typically end up asking individual natural systems to do and be things they cannot do and be, all while incurring extra expense and sacrificing performance. This is why many companies end up having to mix Mycelium (the network of ‘threads’ from which mushrooms grow) with petrochemicals and plastics to get their desired performance.

NFW’s approach, in comparison, scales in ways that biotech and conventional synthetics cannot. We do not lock ourselves into a box by forcing nature to manufacture the entire complex composite material. Instead, NFW mixes the right amounts of natural materials with other complimentary natural materials (e.g., cellulose + proteins) – just like you might do in your kitchen. The only difference is that instead of optimising for taste, we optimise for material performance. NFW has developed and patented broad classes and families of ‘recipes’ that are natural, plastic-free and that perform in the ways people need them to, without synthetic additives and derivatisation (chemical modification). This technological approach sets NFW apart from virtually every other materials company on the planet.

Why do you feel PlasticFree, our materials and system change intelligence platform is needed?

People need accurate and precise information to invest in and build solutions to correctly identified problems. PlasticFree is all about putting information into the world so that the appropriate problems can be defined and so that more relevant and impactful solutions like NFW can emerge.