Episode 130: How Mill Is Scaling Food Recycling from Homes to Whole Foods

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, over the now three years I've been doing this show, I have been lucky enough to develop a close relationship with Mill, maker of the home composting appliance that's cutting down on food waste and feeding chickens at the same time.

They have even sponsored the show in the past, which I bring up because I want to note that this is not that. This is an interview that is purely in the spirit of news because as is the way of successful startups, Mill is expanding. Let's get into it.

Harry Tannenbaum: Well, thanks for having me. Longtime listener. First time caller. Uh, my name's Harry Tannenbaum. I grew up in San Francisco. I'm a surfer. Um, I studied economics and I founded, um, a company Mill with my awesome co-founder Matt Rogers. Uh, and the mission is to prevent food waste. And the, the reason we're working on this problem is it's just like a, the problems of a scale that is way more massive than we even thought.

Like we continue to learn more and more about this problem every day, and it just gets bigger and bigger. But to put it into scale terms, there's about $400 billion dollars worth of food thrown away every year in the US, which is like one and a half percent of GDP. That's big.

Molly Wood: Yeah.

Harry Tannenbaum: And you know, from an emission standpoint.

Molly Wood: My silence is just sort of an oh my god moment, 'cause every time I hear it, it's shocking. All over.

Harry Tannenbaum: Well, it's interesting 'cause um, you know, you hear stats like, oh, 40% of food that's grown for human consumption goes to waste. And you can kind of put that into context in visualizing, okay, it's buying five bags of groceries and you leave two in the parking lot. But there's something about putting it into dollar terms, 'cause you can also talk about it in emissions terms.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Harry Tannenbaum: You know, food waste, 10 to 12% of emissions just giant. But when you, when you actually really think about it in dollar terms, you know, one and a half percent of GDP, $3,000 a year per household, it's like, whoa, this is, this is just a huge sector of the economy, food waste. And if we could make food waste go away, we're just injecting efficiency into the whole thing.

So it's this, um, it's this problem that exists. Nobody's for it. No one's pro food waste. Nobody's interested in wasting food, whether you're a household or a business, but there's a gap in terms of the technology and the tools we have to really attack it.

Molly Wood: Right? So, so that, okay, so for those who have been listening to the show for a long time, like Harry, um, you know, that Mill has been on before to talk about the consumer product. Give us an overview for those very few, I would imagine at this point, who don't know, like, what was the fir, you know, what's step one in addressing this at Mill?

Harry Tannenbaum: Okay, so the initial insight food is the single largest thing in the landfill. 25% of the landfill is food, and when food goes to the landfill, degrades anaerobically, you get methane, not great.

The initial insight was that food is actually that, that 25% of the landfill food is 80% water. So if you just sort of think about any garbage truck in the world heading to a landfill, 20% of that garbage truck is water inside food.

Molly Wood: Hmm.

Harry Tannenbaum: And okay, so there's a lot of water in food. And then when you look at the way that materials are managed, it's all centralized. And when I say centralized, I mean, you know, you take material to a recycling facility or a landfill, and then it, it kind of gets dealt with.

Molly Wood: Right.

Harry Tannenbaum: You know, ideally you get value out of it, but it's tricky to get value out of it because when, um, food and coat hangers and socks and refrigerators get mixed together, you know, it's hard to like un-mix it once it's been mixed together.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Harry Tannenbaum: So sort of the combo of those two things, the infrastructure's pretty centralized. The largest thing is food. And most of that is water.

The first idea is, okay, what if we could make something decentralized closer to the point of generation of food waste, you know, that could pre-process it in a way that, you know, could unlock logistical benefits, value from the material, and like de-grossify the material.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Harry Tannenbaum: So the first product we made, uh, is Mill food recycler. You can kind of think of it like our Tesla Roadster. And it's, it's designed for in a residential kitchen. It is a beautiful thing. It's been described in the media as spelt. Um, we've, you know, and people write to us like, this product saved my marriage.

What, what it does is you put food into it and overnight, very quietly and completely odorless, we grind the food up and we take the water out of it. You get, get to it in the morning and it's like a magic trick. You put like a whole Turkey carcass in there and there's just this powder that um, looks like coffee grounds. It smells like spices.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm. It does by the way. Just like side note, I'm not putting cinnamon in my Mill, but it smells kind of cinnamon-y all the time.

Harry Tannenbaum: I mean, that, that is your terroir.

Molly Wood: I have terroir.

Harry Tannenbaum: You have terroir and it's also like what are the things that smell when they're dry and it spices, so yeah. Actually. You know, I, I've been standing with chefs, you know, that, you know, are, are, you know, are smelling each other's food grounds, that's the material that we say come out of it. And the food grounds, by the way, they are surprisingly pleasant. They are non-putrescible, which is a good crossword word for the people out there that are into that.

Molly Wood: It's an S and a C, everyone.

Harry Tannenbaum: Yeah, I, it's a tough Scrabble word and they, um, they have a lot of value. The average grounds that come out of homes, which are just food minus water, 19% protein, you know, shelf stable, can be used as animal feed, can be used as a fertilizer, can be used as a feedstock to a composting processor, an anaerobic digestion process. And they don't need to be moved around, you know, racing the clock because we've sort of paused digestion on the material.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Harry Tannenbaum: So we've got, um, tens of thousands of those devices around the US. People love them. They use them every day. Um, you know, we're diverting more and more material from the landfill, but we're also sort of preventing food waste to upstream by, by measuring how much is being created in homes.

Molly Wood: So we are, um, there may be some sharp-eared listeners saying you're talking about first product, but they haven't yet realized there are more products. So the reason that that Mill in the form of Harry is back on the show is because, now, as is always the case with the startup, there is a, a second act, right?

You're now moving into commercial. Tell us about the, the new news.

Harry Tannenbaum: Yeah, so I would say the most common question I've been asked since we started the company was when are you gonna make a big one?

Molly Wood: Right? Because everyone immediately is like, what about a restaurant? What about a, you know, a, what do you call those? Cafeteria?

Harry Tannenbaum: Totally. And, and we, we saw our residential design product, which is not a wimpy thing, you know, it has this much torque as a Harley Davidson. But we saw our residential products showing up in restaurants, showing up in offices, showing up in different spaces, and it had always been on the roadmap to make a big one.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Harry Tannenbaum: And sort of, um, the way we think about designing products is we look at everything that's out there in the world, you know, and we try to think about how we can integrate technology to create great experiences. So we, we had our eyes on kind of the, the space, uh, and we felt like there was a gap.

There wasn't anything that was, um, easy to use, effortless, had brains, had eyes that could work on this problem. Um, so we knew that there was something that could be done and the the thing we were waiting for actually was to find the right partner to build it with. You know, I think there's something interesting to talk about just in the realm of building new infrastructure. With consumer, you can kind of build something and believe they'll come.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Harry Tannenbaum: You know, and buy it. But you know, as we think about commercial and enterprise scale infrastructure, you really, it's really helpful to have a great partner you can build with. So the first partner we announced for Mill commercial is, is Whole Foods.

And, uh, we're gonna be deploying a larger scale version of Mill infrastructure across all Whole Foods locations in 2027. Um, and this is, this has been an awesome process, um, with the team there working hand in hand with them in what we would sort of think of as a design partnership.

Molly Wood: Hmm.

Harry Tannenbaum: And can talk more about that.

Molly Wood: Yeah.

Harry Tannenbaum: Uh, and, and Amazon's been involved as well, and Amazon invested in the company.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm. Through Climate Pledge?

Harry Tannenbaum: Mm-hmm.

Molly Wood: Right? Yep. Uhhuh.

Harry Tannenbaum: And that's been really cool, um, to work with them on this as well. So, yeah. So we're making a big, and I can talk more about the big one, but you know, the, the, the, the business journey to this, as you can think about, we did a lot of R and D in making the small one for the home.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Harry Tannenbaum: You know, and we learned a lot about the physics and mechanics of dehydrating food and everything you need to know about managing that process. So it's easier for us to scale it up now.

Molly Wood: Right.

Harry Tannenbaum: You know, and to continue the analogy like, you know, this is a move from a, a Roadster or a, a Rivian truck to a delivery van, you know, or a semi-truck. And, and with that, the decision to deploy the infrastructure is all based on ROI, IRRs, you know, what does this infrastructure do from an economic standpoint? And then of course it has just massive environmental benefits as well.

Molly Wood: Right. That, that's sort of the perfect, uh, entry way to talk about, you know, why, why Whole Foods would want this, right?

Why Amazon Climate Pledge would say this is not only like a, an investment that makes sense from a climate perspective, but it is something that our businesses need. Like as you said about designing this, what are the problems you're trying to solve within a grocery store that is also sort of a restaurant?

Harry Tannenbaum: Yeah, and, and I would say the surface area for this kind of technology and just for the listeners at home, um, you can imagine Mill Commercial is a sort of a modular, uh, platform where we can make different shapes and sizes, but…

Molly Wood: Hmm.

Harry Tannenbaum: Um, you know, the size of kind of a commercial dishwasher, uh, and a unit that can process hundreds of pounds a day, not single digit or 10 pounds a day.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Harry Tannenbaum: Um, so that, that can be applied to a restaurant setting, a grocery store setting, a cafeteria setting, a stadium setting, a hospital setting, a school setting, anywhere where, you know, food prep and production is happening.

And for us, something that we really cared about was, um. You know, we want this thing to really be a commercial product, not an industrial product.

Molly Wood: Okay.

Harry Tannenbaum: You know, we want this to be able to sit inside a kitchen and for any staff to be able to use it. The benefits associated with the pre-processing are numerous. One side of the equation is, yeah, like the residential unit, we're dehydrating food.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Harry Tannenbaum: So you put a hundred pounds in wet. 20 pounds of dry stuff comes out. That material doesn't need to be collected that day. That material could actually sit in a drum for a month. You know, that material doesn't need to be run to a loading dock. Um, so there…

Molly Wood: Every single day, right. Which I assume that they were doing before with every piece of waste.

Harry Tannenbaum: Yeah. Or you know, I think about all these sites I've visited with, with customers that are coming and it's okay, well we have, you know, we have all these kitchens and we have to move, you know, every time we accrue x number of pounds of material in the slim gym that gets run to the loading dock or whatever.

So there's time, there's energy. Um. You know, the material needs to be hauled frequently. Um, so there are all sorts of different kind of operational efficiencies associated with the pre-processing of the material.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Harry Tannenbaum: Now, the other side of the product is that it has eyes. So we're, we're putting a camera inside the device and look, we got 14 minutes into the recording by my count above before either of us said AI, which I think is…

Molly Wood: I was gonna, I was gonna say it.

Harry Tannenbaum: I know. So I, I burst the bubble. We can do a moratorium for 14 minutes, but this is genuinely a really awesome application of AI.

Molly Wood: Yeah.

Harry Tannenbaum: And if you think a little bit about our heritage, I didn't mention this before, but before Mill, Matt founded Nest. I was an early employee at Nest. Uh, we had a, a line of products called Nest Cam, and we were sort of doing computer vision there before it was cool.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Harry Tannenbaum: You know, we had features on Nest Cams like package detection, you know, is there, is the, and, and, and it would take like many engineers, quite a bit of time to train an algorithm. Is that a package or is that a cat's shadow?

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Harry Tannenbaum: And now, the large language models are just kind of imbued with knowledge of what stuff is.

Molly Wood: Yeah.

Harry Tannenbaum: So you can imagine what's possible today. If we're looking at what's being thrown into a commercial scale Mill, we can provide amazing feedback. Hey, that was a bushel of bananas that could have been donated.

Molly Wood: Interesting.

Harry Tannenbaum: You know, or that's a watermelon rind, and actually, there's like two inches of flesh on it versus a quarter inch of flesh.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Harry Tannenbaum: Or for a restaurant that was 16 forks and two ramekins, like it's, you know, it's like, it's, you know…

Molly Wood: Right.

Harry Tannenbaum: There, the, the thing that is, the reason why there's so much food waste out there is it is a, it is kind of a black box and it's, it's really tricky to measure. And so we can do real-time waste characterization with this product, which people are really, really excited about.

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Time for a quick break. When we come back, we'll talk more about the potential billions of dollars that can be saved by actually tracking commercial food waste and about how chickens remain a surprisingly central part of the Mill story.

Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. We're talking with Harry Tannenbaum of Mill.

Molly Wood: Because there already has been, you know, I think it's not super forward facing, uh, other, unless you're really checking your app if you're a consumer who has Mill, but there's already data. And so like, talk a little bit about the evolution of realizing that the data you were collecting was really valuable. It was changing the way consumers were shopping, you know, and then sort of realizing, oh, if we put this into a commercial application, we can save our customers a ton of money. We can give them a lot of like important insights. They can do better just in time ordering so they don't waste more. I'm answering your question for you, but like I bet you have more.

Harry Tannenbaum: Your lips to the p and l's ears. [Laughs]

Uh, look, I, I, I guess what I would say is, um, yeah, this is not, not something that's really metered.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Harry Tannenbaum: Right? And so, yeah, we can start, I can talk a little bit about the residential side of the equation. This is a fact. The average American household weighs 3000 pounds of food waste a year. Now, at the same time you ask Americans, do you waste more food about the same amount of food or less food than the median American?

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Harry Tannenbaum: And like 80% of people say, I waste less than the median American. And that is not how medians work,

Molly Wood: Right? [Laughs] First of all, we have a math crisis. Second…

Harry Tannenbaum: So, so, so you put a Mill into someone's home and, uh, just a residential one and, and they're, um, they have scales in them that are sensitive to like 15 grams of additions.

So that's like three blueberries. And the blueberry by blueberry measurement is actually not what makes a difference. What makes a difference is a little bar chart that says, Hey, do you know you threw away 60 pounds of food last month?

Molly Wood: Right.

Harry Tannenbaum: You know, and you just start noticing it, 'cause if the food's going in the trash, it's just like, yeah, it's going in the trash. Take the trash out. It's kinda this black hole.

There's the, the behavior change of food going into Mill and noticing that moment where you've like bought a full box of arugula from the grocery store and brought it home and like, it's like the whole thing is just going directly in the Mill and, and you tell yourself like, I don't wanna do that anymore.

Molly Wood: Right. Arugula is such a specific and painful example because I can tell you that I have almost completely stopped buying it for that reason, unless I can figure out how to buy only the amount that I need for my one sandwich.

Harry Tannenbaum: And then, yeah. And you know, we go ask people what is going on and they say, oh yeah, I'm cooking differently, I'm shopping differently. You know, I, I'm now, you know, I'm now kind of aware of this and that wasn't something we were expecting.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Harry Tannenbaum: We were like, oh this is cool. We're gonna like, you know, give people an output they can use in their garden or feed the chickens and create an odorless, effortless experience in the kitchen. We were not expecting to like reduce the amount of food procured.

Molly Wood: That creates behavior change. Yeah.

Harry Tannenbaum: Yeah.

Molly Wood: So then as you think about scaling up that behavior change, then at the commercial level, is that one of the things that inspired you to put a camera in and think like, okay, we're really gonna beef up the AI side of the house here?

Harry Tannenbaum: Yeah, I mean, there's value, right, in creating a resource, you know, and creating a circular solution and making food waste easier to manage.

The waste management industry on a annual basis in the US is like a $200 billion industry. Like if you think like a quarter of that is food, then you can, you know, the actual dollars spent on food waste management, it's like $20 billion, 10% of that.

But you know, a good amount of that is going to landfills, you call it maybe $40 billion dollars spent a year managing food.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Harry Tannenbaum: The value of the food thrown away is $400 billion dollars a year. You know, so there's efficiency in managing this material better, easier, you know, get it to the right place. But there's way more value in, in preventing it from going to waste and capturing, you know, keeping it as food.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Harry Tannenbaum: But isn't that crazy, you know, like that, that the value of the food thrown away on an annual basis is double the whole waste management industry.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Harry Tannenbaum: So if you sort of think about like what we're doing, it's like, okay. We exist, we're kind of a mining company, you know, to go mine the value of the food.

And, and how do you, how do you get the value out of it? You need to, you know, you need to measure it. You need to understand what it is, 'cause until, until it's measured, it can't really move.

Molly Wood: Right. So then how, how will the, um, how will the economics work at the commercial level? Will it still be given this sort of additional layer of service and data? Will it, I know with the consumer device you can either buy it outright or get a subscription. Will there be a subscription model for Mill Commercial?

Harry Tannenbaum: Yeah, there's, there's multiple models. We're finding different organizations like to approach it differently, but you can, you can buy the infrastructure.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Harry Tannenbaum: And then there are different ways to procure the sort of AI insights and action platform. You can also lease the equipment from us.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm. Okay, great.

Harry Tannenbaum: And we really stand, stand behind it and stand by the impact. We are very clear-eyed though that for this to work and really scale, it needs to pencil economically. You know, that's something we've believed from the beginning…

Molly Wood: Yeah.

Harry Tannenbaum: Of the company. Um, and look, we, we care a ton about the environmental impact. And as I said, like no one is for food waste, but we know that for this to become a pervasive thing, for it to be criminal not to procure this infrastructure, um, the economic rationale needs to be great.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Harry Tannenbaum: So, so one of the first things we work on with new partners is actually building out, you know, a pretty detailed financial model together. Hundreds of lines, a bunch of different assumptions, really, really looking at every input and output, every cost, every benefit to show that this is great investment.

And I'm very proud that, you know, that's why Whole Foods and Amazon, you know, are underwriting this and are underwriting not just like a one store pilot, but a deployment across all their stores because the, the economic case is there as well as the environmental case.

Molly Wood: And then what about the, um, what about the food grounds part of it? Like certainly with, for consumers who buy a meal, you can use it at home, compost it at home, feed chickens or send it back.

Harry Tannenbaum: Yeah.

Molly Wood: Um, so that it goes to become chicken feed. Is that aspect present at the commercial? That feels like a little bit of overhead, frankly, for commercial customers.

Harry Tannenbaum: Well, I will say that the, the chickens continue to be kind of the unlikely heroes of this whole story. Uh, and well then, and look, um, if you're to think about, okay, we have, we have food, not food waste.

Molly Wood: Yep.

Harry Tannenbaum: Sort of the most efficient thing to do with it is keep it as food.

Molly Wood: Yeah.

Harry Tannenbaum: Like, if we can imagine a loop, okay, we take food, we're gonna compost it, we're gonna make a soil amendment, we're gonna mend the soil, we're gonna go grow grain, we're gonna feed a chicken, we're gonna make an egg, we're gonna feed a person. Like quite a few steps there.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Harry Tannenbaum: Whereas if we were to take food, dry it, feed a chicken, make an egg feed a person, that's a tighter loop.

Molly Wood: Yep.

Harry Tannenbaum: And that tightness of loop, there's more economic value in, in feed as an output than a feed stock to another process. So, you know, the, the work with Whole Foods, the end destination of the dehydrated food from all the Whole Foods locations is gonna be chickens in, in their chicken and egg supply chain.

Molly Wood: Amazing.

Harry Tannenbaum: And, and there's economic value there.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Harry Tannenbaum: You know, there's, uh, deliciousness value there, 'cause you know, the chickens are gonna get to chow down on some pretty, pretty good stuff.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Harry Tannenbaum: Um, you know, and there's huge environmental benefit there. Um, so, you know, there, there's, there's more to share on that, um, in the future.

But, but we've talked about that being a, a, a real pathway that we're forging. Now, that does, that doesn't need to be the only pathway, you know, and for many of the other customers that we're talking to, compost, anaerobic, digestion, uses of fertilizer on site, there are lots of different, um, uses for the material.

Molly Wood: What, um, zoom out five to 10 years, like, are you gonna, do you imagine that you will still be selling consumer cars and fleets? Like is the goal to stay in both businesses? Where do you think most of the growth is gonna lie?

Harry Tannenbaum: It's a great question. I was talking to our team at an all hands a couple weeks ago, and I was actually saying, you know, if we had rewound five years and I, you know, could, could find myself and, and there are some more partners that were soon to announce.

Find myself in a position where we had the residential business we have today and the commercial business we have today. It would've far exceeded my expectations of what we would've been able to achieve. So thinking five years into the future is kind of five to 10 years into the future is kind of head trip?

Molly Wood: Yeah.

Harry Tannenbaum: I think, um, the majority of food in the landfill. It comes from residential sources. 

So when we're talking about the tam of value in wasted food, most of it comes from household kitchens.

Molly Wood: Hmm.

Harry Tannenbaum: Now, I think where that business goes and progresses over the next half decade, and maybe we just put a meeting on the calendar for whatever, 2031, we can check back in on these predictions. Nice to do this every five years.

Molly Wood: [Laughs] Hopefully like more, you know, more often than that five years is a eternity in, in new company time.

Harry Tannenbaum: Sure. Yeah, and, um, you know, we'll, we'll see what the world looks like, but I, I think at that point you can think about the residential product taking a sort of similar journey that Nests residential equipment took and distribution took over time.

So, you know, we started at Nest really selling online on our website, you know, but over time the most common way someone got Nest Thermostat was through their utility company.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Harry Tannenbaum: And, you know, there are lots of different, um, ways to think about that in terms of our partnerships with municipalities or our partnerships with, um, folks in the, in the materials management industry. But I think that is a, that is the direction that is gonna go. And if you can imagine, you know, signing up for waste services and it, it comes with a Mill, like signing up for your cellular plan comes with an iPhone.

Molly Wood: The dream. Yep.

Harry Tannenbaum: And that is all underwritten by cold hard cash flow. Yay.

Molly Wood: Yeah. Yep.

Harry Tannenbaum: Um, that's, I find that very exciting.

Molly Wood: Yeah.

Harry Tannenbaum: Because that means that it keeps going. So I think we're not done, we're not done with Resy. Um, and then I think on the commercial side, the data is gonna be really, really powerful.

Molly Wood: Yeah.

Harry Tannenbaum: I think what we're seeing as we've already amassed the world's largest dataset ever, most detailed dataset around waste behaviors in the home around food and what we will be able to feedback, um, to a grocer or a restaurant owner or a hotel will be, is gonna be really transformative.

I mean, it's kind of, I, you know, and I'm now like a kind of a, a broken person, you know, I'm like my wife is like, you know, we're, and we're just traveling with my wife and 10 month old daughter, and we were like in an airport lounge and I was like, sorry, like the flight was boarding. I was like, I have to look at the buffet. Sorry. Like, I need time.

Molly Wood: Like for recon… Just for recon?

Harry Tannenbaum: Yeah. Yeah. And, and 'cause buffets are crazy, right?

Molly Wood: Buffets are crazy.

Harry Tannenbaum: Well, buffets are crazy. And like, okay, how, here's a, like, how do you know how much people ate at a buffet? Okay. Like, really the only way to do it is like what you made, minus what you threw away.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Harry Tannenbaum: Because there's no ordering, there are no tickets or POS generated. For the most part, there's no measurement of the, what was thrown away part on buffet. So how do you know?

Molly Wood: Yeah. Wow.

Harry Tannenbaum: I'm like, I'm like grabbing the person in the lounge. I'm like, how do you know when to make more of those?

Molly Wood: Right. Or how much to order. Yeah. Yep.

Harry Tannenbaum: Sorry, this is a, so anyway, this is just to say like there is so much efficiency possible here. Portion sizing, merchandising, menu planning, the whole dealio, and it just falls right to the bottom line.

Molly Wood: Right.

Harry Tannenbaum: Of businesses that aren't like crazy margin businesses. So I find that to be really, really exciting.

And I think, um, it's not about also like, here's a PDF dashboard. It's like, no, here's the recommendation that you can action on right now.

Molly Wood: Right, right.

Harry Tannenbaum: So I think that's, that's where, that's where there's a lot of good stuff. And then, yeah. I mean, to go 10 years out into the world, into the future, it's like, can the same mindset be applied to other materials?

Molly Wood: Right. There's a lot of waste.

Harry Tannenbaum: There is, and there's a lot of value in it.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Harry Tannenbaum: And we're not necessarily heading to a future of resource abundance. You know, and I can kind of think 50 years in the future, oh my God, can you believe we, they were just throwing food away.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Harry Tannenbaum: They're just putting in the landfill. That's an ins, you know, that that's kinda the future we wanna build is like we're, you know, you think back, wow, people weren't wearing seat belts. Like, can you believe they were just throwing the food away?

Molly Wood: Totally.

Harry Tannenbaum: You know?

Molly Wood: Yeah. And then, yeah, you start to extrapolate that to like medicine or any, you know, or copper, anything like it goes on and on and on. Yep.

Harry Tannenbaum: Yeah, there's a book, Junkyard…

Molly Wood: Plan. No pressure, Harry, get to Work.

Harry Tannenbaum: Well, no, there's a book, Junkyard Planet that was, I forget the author of it. I, I, you know, when we were first starting, I just like tr there are like 28 books on waste. Yeah. So just, okay, we're just gonna read 'em all.

Molly Wood: You could have just watched Wall-E. There's just, there's one movie that puts it all together for us.

Harry Tannenbaum: So, so, so there are 28 books about waste, uh, Junkyard Planet’s a great book. It's about the scrap metal industry. And there's a chapter in Junkyard Planet that's about recycling Christmas tree lights.

Molly Wood: Ooh.

Harry Tannenbaum: And that, that seems kind of like, I don't think about Christmas tree lights as recyclable.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Harry Tannenbaum: But like, sure enough, there's a, a town in China. They're really good at recycling Christmas tree lights. If you, you know, you get the lights, you pop the bulbs off, test the bulbs, strip the wires, melt on the copper or reline the copper, put the bulbs back in. You get tangles of old half broken Christmas tree lights that go in one side, and then you get brand new Christmas tree lights that go out the other side.

Molly Wood: Wow.

Harry Tannenbaum: But you need to get the Christmas tree lights to that town.

Molly Wood: Right. Which is highly inefficient.

Harry Tannenbaum: It's hard right now.

Molly Wood: Yeah. Yep.

Harry Tannenbaum: But like you can, we kind of, we kind of do it the other way. You can kind of get anything in the world to you. So, you know, there's all sorts of kinds of things that don't feel like you could get the value out of them. But if you can get them to the right place, if you can get to the mouth of a chicken. You know it's value.

Molly Wood: Yep. I'm so glad you brought us back to the chickens because I, I, that's exactly where I wanna end with the hero of the story. Like now there have been enough Mills in the market for long enough that, have you, Harry been able to partake of like Mill-fed eggs.

Harry Tannenbaum: Yes.

Molly Wood: You have? I'm so glad.

Harry Tannenbaum: I, I mean, yeah, they're out there.

Molly Wood: Also, there should be a sticker Mill-fed.

Harry Tannenbaum: Yeah. This is a good takeaway. Okay. Put that on the, put that on the, maybe on the 20. We don't need to wait till 2031. Let's get together. That's some point in person and we can make an omelet with mil fed eggs.

Molly Wood: Oh my god. Let's totally do that. That would be amazing. Yeah. Okay. Done? Yep. Mill-fed eggs. That's, that's great. That's on the five year plan. There's gonna be a sticker. Harry Tannenbaum, thank you so much for the time. Congratulations on Mill Commercial. We'll be waiting, uh, for more announcements 'cause I know they're coming.

Harry Tannenbaum: Molly, it's a huge pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Molly Wood Voice-Over: That's it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool. Thank you so much for listening, and hey, if you would like to talk to people just like you, I have just launched a Discord server for everybody in the pool, listeners and fans, and any other interested people and want to talk to me and each other about whatever climate issues are on our mind. Specifically, I hope we will talk about adopting climate tech solutions like different kinds of transportation and home electrification, maybe a Mill and all kinds of new and cool news technology, myth busting the occasional despairing rant. If you need to. If you'd like to sign up, please click the link in the description right here in your podcast app of choice, or you can find it in the weekly newsletter, which you can subscribe to at everybodyinthepool.com

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