Episode 108: Cleaning up the textiles industry with Matter filters
October 23, 2025 at 3:11:56 PM
Molly Wood Voice-Over: Welcome to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast where we dive deep into the innovative solutions and the brilliant minds who are tackling the climate crisis head-on. I'm Molly Wood.
This week we are going to talk about water and it’s a fascinating story that takes us from microfibers that shed from textiles and clothing how those microfibers contain microPLASTICS so when they shed they pollute waterways that eventually lead the the ocean choking marine life bleaching coral and preventing the seas from acting like the giant life-giving, carbon sequestering lungs of the planet that they are.
Ok but ALSO? You want to hear a founder story?? This one is some epic hustle. Let’s get into it.
Adam
Hi, name is Adam Root and I'm the founder and CEO of Matter. Matter is a company focusing on innovating in water filtration. So we're looking at how to remove micro pollutants. We care quite a lot about micro plastics and microfibers from clothing. We do that in a home, in a domestic application. So looking at things like washing machines and removing micro plastic from washing machines. And we also do industrial applications. So looking at things like...
textiles manufacturing, big industrial processes like paper and pulp and food and beverage and wastewater treatment plants.
Molly Wood
Give me the origin story. What is the background and what led you to want to do this and be able to do it?
Adam
Sure, yeah. So I'm a technical founder. So I'm actually a mechanical engineer by training. I've had some amazing, incredible experiences in the real world. If you like, working in big businesses, things like GE and Dyson, I decided to use my superpowers for good, if you like. And really was kind of looking at.
all the big challenges in the world and really how I could apply my skill set to really move the needle on this. when I was thinking about a lot of the challenges, think pollution is one of the greatest challenges of our generation. And if you actually boil down, if you start looking at pollution in a real serious way, you can realize that there's a lot of mismanaged waste. There's also a lot of wrong
materials being used in the wrong place. So I read a book called Cradle to Cradle. It's kind of the foundational piece of where a lot of my knowledge came from about what the challenges were. And actually, think one of the real key solution pieces for me. So I am looking at that and was kind of like, how do I apply it? What does it look like? So I started
super humble beginnings. So I got, I did a five day business course with the Princess Trust, which is a charity in the UK. It's now called the Kings Trust for King Charles. And I got given 250 pounds, so like less than $300. And that was all I had.
Molly Wood
So you had left Dyson, you got $300 to like live and start a company? what? I feel like there are a lot of details missing in that story. And then what?
Adam
Yeah.
Adam
the
Molly Wood
You're like, went out to a really fancy dinner and a brilliant startup was born.
Adam
Yeah, know it was. So basically, I was working at Dyson. never would have a lot of products I've worked on and never produced less than a million units a year. So high volume production, mass runs, you know, generating the next technology, the next thing. And I come to the realization I was like, you know, this is all great and everything that I'm doing something really positive, I really well paid job. Me and my wife are saving for, we were saving to go
to get a house, put mortgage together, put some money in and then basically we were like, I don't know, probably about 25 at a time. And we were like, this is very sensible. Why don't we go and try to figure out what we're gonna do? So we both quit our jobs at the same time and we were gonna cycle from Norway to Italy was the plan. We got about two weeks in and we had some broken bones. My wife unfortunately broke her wrist. We was in Oslo. Norway is like one of the most expensive places I've ever been in my life.
Molly Wood
no.
Adam
And we both realized we quit our jobs for basically like a two week holiday. And we was like, okay, what do we do now? So we came, I remember getting really drunk in a bar in Oslo and my wife was kind of in hospital being like, okay, well sitting there with a broken hand being like, what do we do now? And I was like, I came back and, this is the truth. We were sitting there and I was in this bar and I,
Molly Wood
I love you two, by the way. I absolutely love you two. This is amazing.
Adam
I come back to my wife and I said, we could either do a chicken farm, a Japanese street food business or space pizza. And she said, what the hell is space pizza? And I was like, everybody gets a tin hat whenever we get pizza out at nightclubs. It'd be really fun. And so she said.
Molly Wood
And yet somehow none of those three great ideas exists. Here you are saving the world instead. you did?
Adam
Yeah, well, no, we did a Japanese street food business in central London. We spent all of our savings on... I went from Dyson with no money, no object. You can just order whatever you like, but it turns up. And I kind of did that with all of our savings. And then we were like basically just earning no money. We were kind of just starting. was a crash course in life.
Molly Wood
You
Adam
which was really fun. But we kind of picked ourselves out. did the business course and then I was like, I probably should figure out how this thing worked. And at the end of that, I'd like 250 pound. We moved in with my wife's parents' house and that was how it started. was literally, we kind of had this street food thing. We'd get the ingredients on Friday, we'd cook it Friday night, we'd sell it on Saturday and we'd have a little bit of money that would last us the week. And yeah, was,
Molly Wood
Wow.
Adam
That's kind how it all started.
Molly Wood
Note to self, always say the words. I think there are some details missing because the details are everything. Okay, so in amongst the Japanese food, you are developing this high level industrial focus technology for filtering microplastics and other pollutants out of water. And that's like happening in the bathroom. Like how is that?
Adam
Hehehehehe
Adam
Yeah, so I. OK, so this is the details of this is so I did the 250 pounds, got the money, built my first prototype and that was based on I looked there was a published report from University of Santa Barbara and Patagonia basically said microfibre shed off our clothes and they shed a lot and they're a really big problem. And that was around 2017. I read the report and I was like.
this is an issue, somebody really needs to solve this. So I start phoning up anybody who's working in a space. There's a lady called Rosilla who runs something called Corrable, which was a big kickstart. She raised about 350,000 pounds. I was like, I can help you. Like, I've got this degree in engineering. I know how to make things. can like, she was a sailor doing some amazing stuff. And I was like, I can do it. And I remember they had this conversation that was kind of like, we don't have the capital to hire somebody. Like, it's just, we can't do it.
I tried a couple of different ways of going in and I just come to the realization that there was lots of people that wanted to do good stuff, but nobody had any money. And I was like, well, if they haven't got any money and I haven't got any money, then I might as well just start something. So in the UK, you can go in a company's house, you can spend 15 pounds and then you have a company. That's how it works. So it's like a 15 minute process. I probably clicked all the wrong buttons, but I had a company after about 15 minutes. And then from that,
Molly Wood
Mm-hmm.
Adam
I won, I put my idea into Young Innovate, to Innovate UK. I put the idea into the process and I won Young Innovate a year award, got given 5,000 pounds and it was like eight pound an hour for 15 hours a week. And that was like living money. That was like living money. So we would still do in Japanese street food. I was working like 16 hours a day doing street food.
Which was supposed to be fun and it just got really out of hand. we kind of we were doing a peak We were doing three thousand eggs eight hundred kilos of cabbage. So that's like what I don't It's sixteen hundred pound of cabbage in weight So when your eggs start getting on pallets like you like we we had like eight stuff and we hired a unit in a turkey farm So he was downstairs with street food and up
Molly Wood
Yeah.
Molly Wood
Wow.
Molly Wood
So really like that business was kind of crushing it.
Adam
It was pre-COVID and street food was a thing in London. We were the only people, so we did this thing called Okonomiyaki, which is like a Japanese pancake, maybe a little bit more well known in the US. The UK definitely had never heard of it, a lot of places we'd ever been. So it was pretty wild. It was a wild point. I kind look back at it being like we were doing 16, 17 hours a day doing street food and then we were coming home and working.
Um, so it was, uh, was insane. It was a really insane period, over a period about 18 months was just really messy. Um, and then I got some funding. got, I got a proper grant and I was like, I'm going full time on this. Um, so, um, we, there was a moment where I was, um, I'd been asked to represent the UK at the G7 for innovation and I was downstairs shredding cabbage and I was like, I've got to get on the plane. We've got to go to Canada.
And my wife was like, I think we kind of need to stop doing this now. So we put it into a shed and it stayed there until we fixed it really. that was the early parts of that now is that we now use that as a kitchen for our current business. So yeah, all part of the same thing.
Molly Wood
That is like a great founder story, great founder story. All right, it now seems like a fair point to actually talk about the company that you're working on. So the core problem that you're tackling is specifically the microfiber sort of filtration and recovery. Tell me more about that problem.
Adam
Yeah, so one of the things when you kind of start looking at numbers, you really start to understand it. There's really big focus environmentally on that CO2. We think a lot about that. So I was like, OK, well, what's the largest sequestration of carbon? And it's the ocean. Our oceans sequester more carbon than all the plants and trees on Earth. And then where's the majority of the oxygen come from? It's our oceans.
So our oceans are like the lungs of the planet. They're literally breathing in that CO2, sequestering it down and sticking it in. And the organisms that do that is often referred to as the blue carbon pump. And it's things like phytoplankton and zooplankton and these little tiny organisms that are the beginning parts of the life in the ocean. And these guys, they eat things that, like what's referred to as marine snow, so little bits that fall down. And we are just pumping in.
chemicals and pollution into that piece. If you imagine these guys being kind of like the bees at a sea, you're kind of giving them all the chemical stuff that's really bad. So generally as a rule, microplastics is an ingestion problem. So taking up animals eating it, and that includes us, goes into your body. It takes up space in your stomach. And then often plastics are really good at like
attaching chemicals to them. So in clove, PFAS is quite common. People talk about PFAS and forever chemicals and it's becoming a lot more common in the last few years. But those kind of coatings are designed to stick on plastics. And plastics is designed to kind of absorb these pieces. It's kind of how it's made. So you can add in your little magic sauce to make your plastics like better slip or whatever it is. So those chemicals will often transfer into the fatty tissue of the animal.
And then when you have an organism like a bigger fish, it's a bigger fish equals and then you got like a whale eating 10,000 krill or whatever, the toxicity increases. So you have this ingestion, you have this chemical issue, and then that's starving the food chain and stopping this blue carbon pump. And generally, if that stops, that's really, really bad news for the obvious reasons. But oxygen is quite important to our planet and so is sequestering of carbon.
Molly Wood
Mm-hmm.
Adam
ocean acidification and coral bleaching is all interrelated, but the best kind of mechanism we've got to fight this is we're polluting and killing it. So we kind of wanted to increase nutrients into the ocean and like continue to like kind of exacerbate that carbon pump because there's more carbon to absorb. But actually what we're doing is adding all these real barriers into it to make it kind of more challenging to absorb carbon and CO2.
Molly Wood
Got it, okay. And so then what is the technology that you've developed to tackle that?
Adam
Yeah, so out of microplastics and microfibres, so microplastics, there's around about 171 trillion particles in our oceans today and that increasing. So 2017, that was predicted to about five trillion pieces. So from five to 171. And out of that number, the largest portion of microplastic comes from microfibres, which is clothing, and also car tires. So if you ever go to a city and you've got black up your nose,
That's often carbon black and that's from car ties. So a lot of PM2.5 and PM1, that's a real big issue. Microfibres is what we focus on because it's the large, it's like 35%. And about 60 % of all fabric is synthetic. So that means it's made of plastics. hear polyester and you think poly is probably a plastic and a high chance.
So we developed solutions for those different things. So the first thing we had to develop was a piece of technology to capture microplastic and do it without disposable parts. So filters have been around forever. You can buy a filter like a Brita filter or like a water filter or different pieces and you'll fill it full of material and it will capture it. We found a washing machine filter that captured.
microplastic from washing machines and it was you threw away 180 grams of plastic to capture six grams of microplastic and that just doesn't work when you scale it. So we developed technology that has no disposable parts, it has no consumables, it is a technology we call Regen, so we refer to it as regenerative filtration, so it's the ability to remove material without adding anything to it.
Molly Wood
Not efficient. Yep. Yep.
Adam
And that is scalable from liters of water into millions and billions of liters of water. So that allows us to work in different applications. The first application we work with is in washing machines. So you can plug your washing machine into the back of the unit, captures the microplastic and then can be removed. And then we've scaled that up to work for commercial washing machines. So that's like hotels and laundrettes. Now we're into textiles factories. So think about dye machines, like dyeing the colors of your clothes uses
Most of our customers are using between three and five million liters of water a day as a minimum, huge volumes of water, drawing it from rivers. So we're developing solutions on those different pieces.
Molly Wood Voice-Over: Time for a quick break while I go try to hunt down some Japanese street food. When we come back, we’ll talk about how this technology works, how there could eventually be a circular economy for captured microfibers, and also a bit about how the textiles industry is so so so messy.
Molly Wood Voice-Over: Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. We’re talking with Adam Root from Matter.
Molly Wood
So what happens, I don't totally understand the no disposable parts part of this. Like what happens once the microfibers are captured?
Adam
Yeah, great question.
I think if I talk about textiles, I think that's quite a good example of this. what we have like a single layer of mesh in our design. so imagine lots of holes. I always like to think of it like bread and butter. So if you imagine a slice of bread has got lots of holes in it, right? And if you've got a piece of butter, you only need like a small amount of butter. And if you spread it super finely,
It blocks all the holes. Now, in a normal filter, basically that's kind of how it works. You have a membrane filter, you have the holes, the material fills the holes, and then that then kind of get disposed of or kind of removed. And the filter and the material embedded in it both get disposed of. And that's because they weave the filter material together by having like layers of plastic over the top of each other, make smaller and smaller holes.
And that's how the system works. So that's how it works in reverse osmosis, desalination. California's got huge issues with water issues. They're installing membranes aggressively throughout California. And they're all going to be using these filters. They have some sort of regenerative processes. in a wastewater treatment plant, you're costing $4 million to dispose of these things. And they're doing it every couple of years.
Molly Wood
Right.
Molly Wood
Yeah. And even let's like a huge issue with desalination just to put a finer point on it is like, sure, cool. What do you do with all that salt? Exactly.
Adam
Exactly that. And then you're basically embedding this material into stuff and then you have challenges. So what we're doing is kind of scraping the butter back off and we give you back the butter. So out of the butter bread analogy, you have the bread and then we kind of scrape it off and give it back to you. Now what happens afterwards depends entirely on what region you are, where it is and the quality of what that kind of material looks like. So in a textiles application,
Often you can get factories and they do majority like do bulk stuff. So they do loads of polyester, they do loads of cotton and they might do loads of nylon. Some of them will mix some of it, but most of it is all kind of together.
Molly Wood
So it's filtration and recovery. You're then recovering some bulk material, like bulk polyester material that could potentially be part of the circular economy after that.
Adam
That is the intention. We've proven it's technically possible. So we've made materials where we can make material out of the stuff that we've captured. But at the minute, it's not commercially viable at the scales we're at today. we're looking, we need, there are factories coming online to do chemical recycling and that they're like 2027 when they're going to be at like 300 ton plus scales.
Molly Wood
Got it.
Adam
it starts becoming a little bit more exciting. The whole fashion industry has a massive issue in textiles recycling. So microfibers is definitely like low down on the food chain of like, they can't recycle like big bits of clothes properly, let alone the microfibers. So we are working on it and we've got some partners that super excited about what we're doing and they're doing things and helping us. And we are driving that, but like phase one, stop the bleeding.
stop the leaching of material. Phase two is circular materials. Phase three is a little bit more fun. What do you do after all of those things?
Molly Wood
And then talk about the process of scaling. I know the beachhead product is the washing machine filter that's only available in the UK currently, right? Across Europe, OK. And then talk about the scaling industrially. That is tricky. What are the barriers to getting that done? Or what are the headwinds, or the tailwinds, rather? What are the things that make it easier?
Adam
It's across Europe, across Europe.
Adam
Yeah.
Adam
Yeah, great question. I think like, so from a technology perspective, we've already proven that we can work in millions of liters of water, which is kind of the scale that we need and our technology is modular. So to do a five million liters of water per day solution is just five of what we've built already. So the engineering, that side of it is, we're working our way through that and we're on track to kind of deliver products
early next year, which we're super excited about in textiles factories. From a business value proposition perspective, the value proposition in industrial water is very, very straightforward. I go to textiles manufacturers, I don't even talk about the fact it saves microplastic, reduces pollution. We just talk about reducing cost.
Molly Wood
Yeah.
Adam
So our technology when we drop it in is faster, better, cheaper than what they're doing at the minute. It's a smaller footprint. These guys are using acres of space and our technology fits in a car park in space. So we're super small and we're really efficient. We're like, there's a piece of kit that we're replacing in someone we're working with in Southeast Asia and the CO2 savings can be huge for them.
because the amount of energy they're using, we're like a tent for the energy. And that ROI for them is less than three years. So they're getting a cost saving benefit. And then I can tell them and say, by the way, it's a pollution reduction thing as well. Like we're just a better way to filter water.
Molly Wood
Mm-hmm.
So they already have to, I mean, I feel like this is important to know. They already have to filter water or they already, the types of facilities you're working with are already filtering water for what purpose, know, like people just, yeah, let's assume that I and everybody else knows nothing about textile manufacturing. That's a good place to start.
Adam
Yeah, yeah, maybe I'll talk about t- yes.
Adam
Yeah, I'm really sorry. There's so loads of detail and I'm so niche. It's such a like little window into something super niche, but like. So there are 150,000 textiles factories globally out of those around 100,000 based in Asia. So when you're making cloves, use a lot of water to grow things like cotton, which is like one piece of the water puzzle and the other piece.
Molly Wood
That's what I love and that's exactly my kind of nerd business. Like let's geek out.
Adam
is in the manufacturing of textiles. So you normally make fabric and then you normally turn the fabric into garments. Often they will dye the fabric and then they will make the garments out of the dyed stuff. Sometimes they can make it differently, but dyeing is a big part of it. And just to give you some sort of concept here, the world is 70 % water. Most people know that. Out of that 70 % water, 1 % is fresh drinking water.
The rest of the that's all got lots of salt in it is not really useful in industry. And to remove the salt from things like desalination is incredibly energy intensive. So once that fresh water, that 1 % of that 70%, the textiles industry draws 5 % of global fresh drinking water and it pollutes 20%.
So it is one of the largest pollution sources on the planet. And most of the guys are operating sort of between four and 8 % margin. They are textiles manufacturers that care about making clothes. But to be legally compliant, need to have, they need to have dye management and they will have to have certain legal limits. Now there's a little bit of a whack-a-mole game that goes on where big brands don't own any factories.
big brand will have like a thousand factories in their supply chain, they won't own a single one. They will send orders to the factories and in those orders will, they will be completed by the manufacturer and they have kind of this kind of symbiotic relationship where there's sort of some standards, there's some local standards and then there's the brands, they set the standards. So they will say you're not allowed to discharge water without these kind of permits. You need to do these kinds of things and if you breach those, then we shut you down and that's
And that happens between country to country. And then basically the country gets full of pollution, they get sick and tired of it. And then they start increasing the limits because people will be, it will harm human health. It will cause, it will be a public outcry. So the politicians will start saying that, okay, we want harder and harder limits on the water. This is happening in China right now. So China's like losing 15 % year on year. The textiles manufacturing is.
Adam
is going out of China and it's moving into other regions where there's water quality standards and the environmental standards are lower. So the brands, move their stuff out of different regions and there's a big push from stuff coming out of China into India. You're moving things out of Southeast Asia, it's moving to North Africa. We're seeing an explosion in things like Ethiopia, Egypt, and that's where countries have relaxed their laws and they're doing tax breaks. So it's a kind of like a whack-a-mole of pollution. You're kind of like saying, hey,
Molly Wood
Right.
Adam
we've solved it in Bangladesh and then they're like, we're to move all our stuff over. there is a super challenging industry to work in, which for me is really fun because it means we get to make some proper impact. This is not like us trying to make up if we're making impact or not. There are people living downstream of the factory that are drinking the water.
Molly Wood
Right.
Adam
So if I have a removal of the pollution and I increase the quality of the water, then I'm directly improving people's lives, which gets me excited and helps me wake up in the morning.
Molly Wood
So, but if the factories are moving to company or countries where the regulation is looser.
Adam
Yeah.
Molly Wood
Are they still likely to adopt a filtration system to make the pollution less?
Adam
Yeah, I mean, like it's so toxic coming out that they always have to have some filter station system.
Molly Wood
So no matter what the rules are, they still have something because like you can't just straight up kill everybody with your effluent. Ideally.
Adam
I mean, mostly that is the case. So, I mean, I could give you horror stories about people who have wastewater treatment plants and then they turn them off when you're not looking. Like, I mean, there's lots of stuff that goes on all the time, but generally as a role in the tech-sensitive industry, the brands are God. Like the brands come in and they say, okay, we don't really care about your local laws. If you want to produce for, I don't know, name a high street brand, Adidas, Nike, H Zara, Intertex.
They say this is the minimum standard you need to work with intertext. So in Europe, as an example, if you want to produce textiles, the laws are so high that most of the textiles manufacturers have water circularity. So water doesn't leave their factories, which means they're spending loads of money on filtering their water. Whereas if you're working in Bangladesh at the minute today, it's legal to discharge water that's full of dye and microplastic and microfibres.
Molly Wood
Yep. Yep.
Adam
But that's changing. So Bangladesh is increasing the cost of water. And therefore, that directly reflects how competitive they are. So it's all about what the current government feels. Most of the Texas manufacturers do have wastewater treatment plants. Most of the people we talked to all have it. They're spending millions of dollars a year filtering water. And they wouldn't be doing that if they didn't have to.
Molly Wood
Yeah. Well, at some point, it's just got to be better to filter water than to keep moving your facilities all over the world, right? Like just just by the doohickey and clean the water.
Adam
Yeah, yeah
Adam
I think, you know, they're running out of places as well. Like, to be frank, you know, like there is an element of it. I don't want to just sort of be super doom and gloom because I think, you know, there is a lot of great people out there doing really good stuff and there are a lot of manufacturers that are doing good stuff. And there are, you know, there are the cowboys in every industry. But I think generally a lot of brands we're working with have stable supply chains that we've been working for 20 to 35 years with.
But it doesn't mean there aren't people that are capitalizing on opportunities in different parts of the world where it has lower quality.
Molly Wood
Sure, but it's not, and I also don't want to paint the entire industry with that brush. You're clearly saying, sure, there are some bad actors, there always are, but the bulk of the industry, people ultimately understand that water is good, drinking water is important. I mean, at some point, at some point.
Adam
But also with the climate crisis, this is being exacerbated. you've got countries like India that will doing, they have tighter water regulations in India, in regions in India that we do in the UK. it's, Texas factories will have zero liquid discharge. So you'll see this ZLD thing, which basically means they can't, they're not allowed to draw any water from the local grid because there is no water for them to draw without starving somebody food down.
Molly Wood
Right.
Adam
downstream. And that also means that like they have to completely filter their water because you they need completely clean water to be able to run it through their process again. So there is like there is a general trend to go towards circularity. So, you know, brands like H &M say they need a 30 % recycled water content by 2030. I think that is one of the targets in Patagonia.
There are lots of brands doing lots of positive stuff in this. And we can highlight a few, there are a few people doing really terrible fast fashion stuff. But there are some brands that you think of about the Gucci's and Kerrings and Pradas, the high end fashion have been Italian manufacturing. They've been working with those manufacturers for 50 plus years sometimes.
It is a multi-trillion dollar industry and there's a whole bunch of people on a whole wide spectrum.
Molly Wood
What, so then what is the, as you look at the future of matter, you're industrial first and have the kind of consumer or hotel-based modular filtration system. Like, do you plan to do all of that?
Adam
We are currently doing all of it, it keeps me up. We're doing a lot. But I mean, it's all about a minimum effort, maximum results. So like with the laundry business, we made a decision.
Molly Wood
Yep.
Molly Wood
I mean, I want that to be clear. Like, I'm like, cool. When can I have it?
Adam
Well, I'm glad you're one of our customers. we were, yeah, we'd, you know, that's kind of like, there are a lot of people that want this to happen. And also that's a big driver for the legislation. So a lot of the things with the washing machine filters is for us, it's all about turning the invisible visible. You know, it's that idea that we can like using our filters, you can physically see it working and you can capture it. And then I want you to send it to your local politician and be like,
this come out my washing machine, what the hell are you doing about it? I think there's a really big movement that we've been able to drive with this. About focus and delivery is always a challenge with that. How do you make sure that you execute well? We have a big team of people for the size of business we are. We've got a lot of people working a lot of different pieces.
So we've got people working in the laundry space dedicated to that, separate people working in the commercial space. And we've got a whole bunch of people working on the industrial stuff. So we've managed to build the skill set and we've been juggling this for a couple of years now. So we're building this out. yeah, hopefully that helps a little bit.
Molly Wood
Yeah, no, do it all. I'm down. All right, so then fast forward. Fast forward to the kind of the big goal, right? Where industrial filtration is absolutely standard practice and you've accomplished the technology and partners for circularity of the recovered materials. then what does that start to, let's tie it back to oceans. What does that start to do for the ocean ecosystem that you described earlier?
Adam
Mm.
Adam
Yeah, so while a brand I probably shouldn't name, we had a meeting with them Wednesday, we've been working for a little while, they've got 1200 factories in the supply chain. There was predicted to be 120,000 tonnes of microplastic emitted from textiles factories per year. Therefore, their personal footprint was 20,000. And we've done some measurements and numbers about it. So we were looking at
That one brand was a sixth of all of the pollution that was predicted to be going in the ocean from textiles. And so they were pretty big fish for us. They're a big customer and they're really important. so we have built a roadmap of how we could do that within less than 10 years. So it's a model where we drop filters into their supply chain and we can save the money.
Molly Wood
Yeah, yeah.
Adam
and the money that we save, the manufacturers, pay us, pays for the product, and then we can then do more products for more people. we're looking at water as a service, so it's a lease model, we're also looking at capital sales. So that helps perpetuate our business and helps us grow to that scale. So I'm looking at how do we take big chunks of the supply chain and start taking measurable sections out?
of the microfiber emissions. And the intention is to create healthy water, healthier rivers, healthier oceans, and healthier humans. Fundamentally, this all relates to us. And I think that it's possible to do that within a five to 10 year period.
Molly Wood
Amazing. Adam Root is the founder at Matter Industries. And by the way, a great founder story. Like just be inspired everybody. You can do it all turns out if you're young and strong. Adam, thank you so much for the time.
Adam
Thank you so much.
Molly Wood Voice-Over:
That's it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool. Thank you so much for listening.
Two quick follow-ups we didn’t have time to get there first Adam told me that the current process of cleaning water at these textile plants is aeration which we talked about in episode 98 with Moleaer the nanobubbles company. He told me aeration for cleaning water is responsible for something like 3 percent of global energy use and that aeration, even with Moleaer, requires pumps, which require power. That is NOT the case with a physical filter so there are energy savings with this solution also.
And in terms of the material that’s collected by the filter until it can be recycled Adam told me that textile plants will dispose of it using their existing processes for what’s called sludge management.
Which is what I’m now calling all my future workouts. Sludge management.
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Thank you to those of you who already have. Together, we can get this done. See you next week.