Vaissnavi Shukl
I love eating hot potato fries on a cold day. There is something very ceremonial about taking a stone-cold bag of fries from the freezer and seeing it sizzle in bubbling oil. But I would have never guessed that the potato waste generated in the process of making those fries could be used to make consumer products. We spoke to Rob Nicoll, co-founder of Chip[s] Board, a company previously known for developing a sustainable polymer called Parblex®, it is now in the process of developing eco conscious lactic acid utilising waste produced from industrial food manufacturing. Unlike existing offerings, Chip[s] Boards lactic acid does not reply upon the growth and manufacture of virgin crops as a feedstock. Whilst Chip[s] Board has since moved away from their focus on polymers they believe that their current product will help increase the sustainable credentials of countless products we utilise in our daily lives.

I am Vaissnavi Shukl and this is Architecture Off-Centre, a podcast where we discuss contemporary discourses that shape the built environment, but do not necessarily occupy the centrestage in our daily lives. We speak to radical designers, thinkers and change makers who are deeply engaged in redefining the way we live and interact with the world around us.

Full disclosure, this is actually the first time we’re recording with the intention of publishing it on YouTube with the video till now we’ve recorded the interviews on Zoom, but we’ve never really published the videos on YouTube. But this time everybody in the team was like, well, we’ve been recording on videos, so why do we not just put it on YouTube? So, yeah, you’re the inaugural interviewee with a YouTube video conversation.

Rob Nicoll
Fantastic. Hopefully I’m pretty enough.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Well, I haven’t even made any effort. So I think we’re okay with that. Let’s kick this off by just clearing out the air about these two words that everybody… they’ve kind of become buzz words in some sense. Everybody throws them around. So one is ‘circular economy’ and second is ‘cradle to cradle’ and I know you don’t use it lightly when you mentioned it as a large part of your philosophy working at sport, but enlighten us.

Rob Nicoll
Yeah, I think sustainable or sustainability phases at the moment, I think you’re absolutely right there. They’re very confused. I think even go further terms like biodegradability or compostibility. These are all terms which are massively broad terms. A lot of people use them as umbrella terms as well. So Circular Economy often gets spoken about, often used to mean sustainable but actually circular economy means it’s fully circular means as not breaking the chain. You can resource to a product back to a resource, so it’s an infinite loop. So there are companies that are incredibly sustainable. They’re not necessarily doing anything negatively impactful to the environment. However, they’re not circular because they do have maybe a start to an end, for example. So then the example of, of plastics, there’s some plastics that are designed to be, say, biodegraded but then they can’t be used. Well, it can be composted, and it can be used to plant seeds to grow the crops. Blah, blah, blah, but they’re not always intended to go full circle. Yes, they are intended to be biodegraded and turned back into the earth and absolutely harmless to the environment. However, to fully full circle, they would have to then be then introduced back into a feedstock, and then the loop would continue. So yeah, I think these are two terms. And that’s the same with Cradle to Cradle. These are two terms that are used really these days to mean sustainable, but actually they have a lot more specific meanings to what that… what that definition is you’re right, we don’t use that massively within our… within our communications Chip[s]board. And that’s because we are very weary that we want to make sure that if we’re using that term, we are fully Cradle to Cradle or fully circular. So we’d like to think that we have the ability to our processes can be circular. However, before that is communicated you need to make sure all of those boxes are ticked and it isn’t a part of the process that is then tangent and off into a waste area. For example, a lot of these people do mapped a certain company wouldn’t be a circle, it might be a circle with smaller circles limit, it might be a circle with offshoots, you get the sort of bizarre spaghetti answers begin to form when you actually really look at what these companies are doing. So I think that the circle is a beautiful shape to think about as a company but oftentimes isn’t a full reality.

Vaissnavi Shukl
So if you’re thinking about it as like a Venn diagram, you know, elementary primary school maths, within like the large circle of sustainability, both the concept circular economy and the Cradle to Cradle fit within sustainability, but not everything that’s sustainable belongs to the circular economy.

Rob Nicoll
Exactly. It’s… an example I use is like bourbon is a type of whiskey, but not all whiskey is bourbon. They fit where they fit within a bracket so yes, circular economy and Cradle to Cradle are sustainable products or business principles, but not everything is sustainable is circular economy. However, there’s lots of events, lots of talks, I’ve been to that are advertised as circular economy and obviously don’t want to knock any of these events because they’re actually wonderful things. But actually some… some of these conversations within that aren’t necessarily circular economy, they’re just extremely sustainable products or businesses. So I think circle… circular economy or Cradle to Cradle are very specifics that you need to adhere to to be those things. But again, it’s hard to knock because obviously everyone’s trying to be sustainable. That’s a great thing. So we don’t want to discourage too much.

Vaissnavi Shukl
When I was in grad school, they had the inaugural Circular Economy conference. I think it was done between a few different schools and they were really, you know, fleshing out the idea of circular economy, you know, what is the supply chain? Like what is the waste cycle like so? Okay, maybe… maybe I can go back and watch the videos, but now talking about Chip[s]Board, what is Chip[s]Board?

Rob Nicoll
Yeah, so Chip[s]Board is a sustainable plastics company. So we take industrial food waste, so currently working with McCain who are one of the largest potato processes globally, I’m sure the listeners or viewers will know them as being a bag in the bottom of their freezer of chips or waffles or Smiley’s or something that they can create. So we take this waste and convert it into sustainable plastics, these plastics so the initial flagship plastic is called Parblex, and this is being used, or we’re beginning to explore its use within the fashion industry primarily. Things like eyewear buttons, but also visual merchandising within fashion, so coathangers, mannequins, the numbers on changing doors, things like all these, all of these plastics that are often not really realised, so you don’t necessarily consider having a coat hanger in a fashion retail environment. Obviously, the numbers are huge. So that’s the sort of the primary application that we’re putting Parblex into currently. And that’s mainly because that’s where the poll has always been. So we didn’t necessarily create a product thinking let’s make a product for the fashion industry. But since we made sustainable plastic, the fashion industry sort of went for them first, and probably the majority to reach out so the material can be used in lots of different ways. It comes into pellet form. So it’s ideal for injection moulding, 3d printing, extrusion. But yeah, so currently, fashion seems to be where a lot of our energy is going in terms of trials and various other projects, with brands hoping to use that material. We are still within the development phase, we’re development to scale. And so we’ve, we’ve got the product ticked on bench scale. So we’ve… we’ve made varieties of iterations of polymer. But we’re now at a point where we’re scaling so we’re able to, or hopefully, very soon we’ll be able to provide material to all of these companies that have mentioned to start trialling the material or creating products with material and we’re hoping that we will begin to see products out there in the mainstream very soon.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Tell us… tell us how you get potato waste from McCain. And what does it go through to end up as… as a board that you know you very nicely like to do sunglasses, frames and buttons and even furniture and that’s something that I am going to get to a little bit later when it comes to the construction industry and the architecture industry. But what is that process like?

Rob Nicoll
So I would say I’m the best person to say this because I’m not this… I’m not the science in the company, which means I’m very unlikely to give away any intellectual property. But essentially, we can… When we take delivery of food waste, there’s a huge potential within… so we all know that you can turn potatoes into alcohol for example, into… into vodka. Through various chemistry processes, we’re able to take this… this raw ingredient and we can put it through processes which unlock various other ingredients that will transform components into other building blocks that we can construct into a polymer. I’m sure there’s someone listening that has a little bit of polymer science understanding or biochemistry understanding and they know exactly how, at least the sort of early footwork into how our process works. But unfortunately, I can’t go into too much detail. That’s what the extremely clever team of scientists we have at Chip[s]Board are there to do.

Vaissnavi Shukl
That feeds into my next question about science and design and innovation and amalgamation of all of those things when they come together. Oftentimes, it’s either designer that has to had to get into the head of a scientist to come up with some invention that then revolutionise something, or a scientist that would probably work with a designer to kind of come across something and now at least looking at like the construction industry, where people are trying, even at the very simplest basic scale to figure out what the composition of a brick is and the different materials that can go into making a brick that is more sustainable. Trying plastics, trying wastes trying, as he said, from the fashion industry, even using the fibres from fabric and then figuring out how they can be moulded into a brick. But I want to just think through this idea of science and innovation and design, and really know from your experience, what it is that you see in the current landscape of for the lack of a better word, the “startup industry” that is really trying to think in a more sustainable fashion that is really looking at taking the most of human like government policies and benefits for having a company that is more sustainable, that is more green and that is really pushing people to write from banning the use of single use plastic to innovating different packaging. The other day, very interestingly, I ordered something and that came in a reusable package. I mean, we could go into the details of what goes into getting that package back and the kind of carbon footprint that would generate when you return that package for the next use. But I mean it started happening and we… We see around us this sudden push towards mass consumption and starting to think like a very basic scale. What’s your experience with planning and designing in a company that is pushing towards that ideology?

Rob Nicoll
Awesome. So that’s prompts there, so I might pick up any one of those but please, please, please, please, jump me if I’m going off track. I’ll start with sort of the idea of collaboration between science and design, but this is really the story of Chip[s]Board. So myself and my co-founder Rohan, we studied design, so we don’t have any science… schooling or secondary school level science we don’t have any degrees or external, external education, I completely forgot…your upper education, higher education, around chemistry and science. So… but what we did do is we had a problem… we as designers were using a lot of materials. We wanted to ensure that the materials we use were sustainable as they could be. So we began to explore materials that we can use in our own practice, and through this, we can find a lot. So we started exploring, sort of creating our own. We were lucky that the university we were studying at was very encouraging of exploration and trial and error. So we were sort of smashing various bits of food waste that Rohan, who was working as a chef at the time, was able to get peelings and scraps from the kitchen. And we were doing a lot of this sort of ad hoc experimentation to try and create a panel material initially in the city. We’re trying to replicate chipboard or MDF. So that was sort of mostly the starting point of… of Chip[s]Board, it was just two designers trying to create a more stable material. Obviously, it got to a point where we were at almost a dead end with our scientific knowledge. So that’s the point we brought in someone with a chemistry background so they were able to take it to the next level. And really since that point, we’ve been able to grow the team based on lots of different backgrounds, lots of different knowledge pools. To really sort of fortify a team that really has a lot of our bases covered. So that came off the problem of design, development, and then became a scientific solution. And I think that’s something that we really encourage as sort of as a founding team, myself and Rohan, we go into universities and we talk about this a lot. You talk about the need to encourage cross… cross discipline, collaboration, because what we’re noticing is we’re noticing designers having a lot more interest in science and actually, science are having a lot more interest in, say, mainstream products. So actually, we’re seeing these collaborations happen a lot more already. And it’s 100. It’s 100% needed because it’s very easy to sit behind your door and each of the industries is so just I didn’t need to do anything to turn the corner design or do anything too fancy or stylish. For example, science. It’s all about the science, the numbers. But if you bring these two together, really that’s when innovation happens because each part of that puzzle starts to think slightly differently. And that’s how we’ve sort of found Chip[s]Board over the last few years we’ve been inspired by other members of staff and also we’ve been able to have input which really allowed us to lead innovation and sort of push what we’re doing

Vaissnavi Shukl
Big confession. I actually took design because I did not want to study chemistry anymore. That’s something that I was so sure I couldn’t do because it felt too abstract to me. I… I mean, I can see what it’s doing but I don’t understand the rationale behind why we’re doing what we’re doing. So I… I know what you mean, when you say you know, we’re designers and this is kind of not in our realm. But how has it been like working in such an interdisciplinary team with the focus of developing products and I want to launch you to go more into the architecture and the interior design industry. I know you’re prototyping something, and you’re planning to enter into the space. So I want to talk about that. Especially because that’s something that I’m really interested in. I mean, we… We had a debate in the house earlier this day where somebody mentioned something about using bottles and not recycling them and this and that. And I said no, we have to be, you know, sustainable if you need to reuse things and it’s like, well, if you’re talking about sustainability, are you gonna stop building houses because that loses a lot of ideas. And that’s what I always think about this. Like if…if there’s one way that we can really get into the nitty gritties of this industry, be it I don’t know materials, how are you approaching it? Whatever it is partly on your website, I couldn’t get much more info on the furniture part of it so I’m really curious about how you think.

Rob Nicoll
Yeah, sounds really interesting… the debate that you had because that obviously, is about do we continue to build and continue produce products because that’s unsustainable as well? Well, we can’t …Well, I said I stopped developing but really, the products need to be created as housing needs to be created, obviously as more people than ever on Earth. Some sort of fine balancing act, that we’re able to produce products, produce accommodation, transport, but also making sure that we’re being sustainable and responsible can be so yeah, that’s that. That’s a really interesting way to have and obviously it’s not one that you really have an answer to because until we have for every industry using sustainable materials, sustainable practices, even then, there are going to be practices that are not sustainable but need to exist for that industry to exist. In terms of product, so into architecture used to be a lot stronger customer focus spreads because I’ve said we sing boards and panel flat boards. And obviously, the conversation led to sheet materials so production of furniture, cladding, various things like this. As the company’s progressed, we transitioned from that board to a polymer. So then the polymer coming in pellet form means that really lends itself to slightly smaller products initially, because obviously the injection moulding type it’s a factory furniture is much harder than making furniture. So then, the conversation is still being around architecture, but then it’s more around trimmings or if you look at extreme extruding sheets you could extrude sheets but for if you look at plastic sheeting for example, above me, we have first lighting so the the take the lights, and then so becomes looking at the environment around us notice seeing what is made out of plastic and all the time if you spin around once you’ll be at some different things made out of plastic and then seeing how they’re doing and then if it’s something that we’re able to do. Do with our material things like channelling for wiring or cables or anything really. I think I’ve got a tangent here because as of yet, anyone listening on anyone watching, just pause for a second and look round the room you are in, there’s so many components of your environment that are made from plastic that actually a lot of these could be produced using that’s that’s still the conversation we’re having. There isn’t really a specific product that we are working on within architecture.. a lot of the big reasons for this is again, scale, we’re producing begin to scale our material but this is not millions of tonnes a year we’re talking a lot smaller numbers. So actually, the first one as a company is how we can create the most amount of product with the material that we have. So creating things like buttons in the fashion industry with a kilo of polymer you can make 1000s of buttons to go into shirts, or coats but to create a long four metre piece of extrusion for something to go within architecture, obviously that could be multiple kilos per one extrusion. So actually we are wanting to get products out there. Material outlet for us. We’re focusing on smaller components that can fully go from material to end product to really show the potential of what our material could do.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Before I ask you the last question, here is a dystopic thought, have you ever imagined a future where products or projects or switch which rely heavily on kind of waste being generated in our industry to develop things that are becoming so popular that these materials or these products are so that it doesn’t need to waste that’s already being generated? Like imagine, imagine your parents are these sheets are so popular that it’s more in demand, the amount of ways that McCain and then is there a flipside to how some day it will just become another I don’t want to say it tulip mania but it’s so much in demand that might have to like generate something for the sake of not like you per se but the industry would have to generate a waste only so that they can keep this going.

Rob Nicoll
Yeah, that’s a really… a really interesting concept. Something I like to sort of consider when I give talks is, a big trend right now is ocean plastic. So many things are made using ocean plastics. I like to imagine this almost comical futuristic scenario where we’ve cleaned up the entire arrangement using ocean plastics and then everyone starts panicking so we don’t have ocean plastic anymore but everyone wants to so we start throwing plastic back in the ocean to farm ocean plastic and it could be this dystopian ocean plastic farm. But when it comes to us specifically, we don’t just need to use potatoes. So that’s a big key. Right now. That’s what we’re using. Because we have a great relationship with McCain and that’s the access we have, although we are exploring feedstocks that all work equally well within our process. This is important because if we expand it … if we expand.. Internationally and say went to countries where potato processing or potato based products weren’t as sort of as popular as they are in the UK or Europe. We would be able to find other feedstocks that work within our process. So it’s important for us to make sure that we know that we don’t get demanded out of obviously as well. There’s always the option where if… if we did get hit by a cap and that just becomes the cap of materials so this is the potential we’re able to make in a year. And then it comes down to other people to find solutions. A lot of people say I’ve seen other people working on stable plastic bottles obviously want to keep an eye on but they’re not doing exactly what we are doing. We live in a world where, look around you, there are hundreds of different types of plastic being used. So if there’s 10 companies in our region working on stable plastics, great because there’s so many different solutions of plastics themselves, like medical plastics or biodegradable plastic. So many so many different advocates of plastics that actually were a family of innovations to actually try and try and replace the polymers being used in the environment. So demand is a great thing. Obviously there is the interesting, almost humorous scenario in the future where we are so popular potato waste is the value that goes through the roof because people just can’t get hold of it. If that happens.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Well, there’s always room for more innovation, so if not the thing. Now, this is the inaugural episode in our season now focusing on food production and waste so with that little bubble,  what is next for you? What is next for Chip[s]Board? And if you want to share anything interesting that you’re working on, right?

Rob Nicoll
Yes. So as I said, right now we’re scaling. We are in a really interesting point in the company where we’re attempting to get to that high level so we can provide a good quality material to clients that we have trials and collaborations signed up with so everyone’s all hands on deck so if you have ever heard some banging and clanging? That’s because sort of running around putting various face food waste through various machines and to try and see how they can scale. So it’s a really busy, exciting time for the company the moment it’s important. My co-founder with caveolin mentioned that the company going through investment rounds is opening up the investment round. So if anyone I’m sure they can come to your podcast, and we’d like to explore that as an opportunity to get in touch with the podcast and I’m sure that gonna be protecting the Yeah, I think there’s lots coming out. I can’t talk too much about what sort of things are covered in NDAs around who we work with. It’s very frustrating because I wish I could chat about that. But we just got a good answer from my team as well. We’ve got a team of 10 people working incredibly humble. Startups, often the ups and downs, you have good days you have bad days, but the team that we have on our board are incredible. Just they’re so passionate about what they do, and really we will heal now. I’ll finish by saying thanks. I think we’re working for pleasure because it’s 10 people and they are enthusiastic, excited about making this product work and we wouldn’t be here without them.

Vaissnavi Shukl
And I’ll end by thanking you. Thank you so much. wish you lots of good luck.
Special thanks to Ayushi Thakur for the research and design support, and Kahaan Shah for the background score. For guests and topic suggestions, you can get in touch with us through instagram or our website through our website archoffcentre.com, both of which are ‘archoffcentre’. And thank you for listening.