Founder Highlight Series: ULUU

For this month’s Founders Series, we have the privilege of delving into the visionary mind of Dr. Julia Reisser, the brilliant founder of ULUU, an innovative company dedicated to sustainable material development. 

Dr.Reisser shares her journey from being an Oceanographer studying plastic pollution to founding ULUU. She emphasizes the need for alternatives to fossil plastics and introduces ULUU's groundbreaking approach using seaweed-based polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs). 

The interview covers ULUU's process of making biodegradable pellets from seaweed, the challenges faced during development, and the company's collaborations to drive innovation. Dr. Reisser provides insights for new founders, highlighting the importance of passion and perseverance. The discussion also touches on ULUU's environmental impact measurement, its upcoming projects, and the call to advocate for better composting systems in the circular bio-economy.

1. Can you tell us a bit about your background and how ULUU was founded?

I am an Oceanographer, I studied Oceanography in Brazil and during my Master's degree in Brazil, I studied the feeding ecology of green turtles and mapped the reefs to see what the turtles were feeding on, so I could advise the governments on which areas to protect on the reefs. Through that work, I realised that the turtles were not only eating seaweeds but they were also feeding on plastics.

I started to get more interested in the topic but I decided that for my PhD I wanted to go abroad to learn English. So, I came to Australia in 2009 and when my English was good enough, I did my PhD in Ocean Plastics Pollution in waters around Australia. After I finished my PhD, rather than just doing the science, I wanted to work more on helping translate the science into actions on the ground.

The first job I got was with a not-for-profit, called The Ocean Cleanup, which is based in the Netherlands. I worked with them as their lead scientist trying to understand better the problems, mapping the amount of plastics that are coming out of different rivers around the world, and also mapping an area between California and Hawaii called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

I loved that exposure because it was my first entrepreneurial experience. We went from just the founder and me to a team of 60 people and more. But, I decided that I wanted to work a little bit more upstream so I  came back to Australia and then I accepted a job with the Minderoo Foundation. There, I supported the investors and invested in recycling areas so I’ve done quite a lot in plastics recycling, both mechanical recycling and chemical recycling. This was very good and I’ve learned a lot but I realized that recycling is just another form of cleaning up the tendency that we have in fossil fuels-based materials which create persistent pollution from the production to the end of life.

I then decided that I wanted to work even further upstream around helping to find alternatives to fossil plastics so really moving into a future where we are replacing fossil plastics with materials that deliver the things that we need from plastics in our modern society, for instance, lightweight, waterproof and so forth, but then that doesn't have those bad components. So, I realised that to find a compelling alternative to plastics, there are two things that we need to be looking at:

One is feedstock. We produce about 400 million tonnes of plastics per year. So, when it comes to producing material at that scale, we need to find the feedstock that we can scale without creating another set of externalities. And, then on the material side, we need to find materials that behave like plastic and that can be melted and re-melted and are waterproof and have moisture properties to wrap our food for example while being truly biodegradable and biocompatible, and giving us a choice at the end of life to either re-use/recycle but most importantly compost. 

I realised that on the feedstock, the solution is farmed seaweed, and on the materials side, the solution is this group of natural materials called polyhydroxyalkanoates; or PHAs for short. Why is this the case? Seaweed, which is a marine crop, can just grow with sunlight and seawater and that is because seaweed is good at mitigating two other problems we have. One is climate change,  so by planting more we can remove carbon from the environment but also nutrient pollution. 

So, through sewages and industrial runoffs, there are a lot of excesses nutrients that get into the ocean and by farming more marine plants, we can clean the water, so I thought that creating a material that creates more demand for farmed seaweed that would be something that will be good for both climate change and ocean health. 

On the material side, why PHAs? it is a material that is natural so what it means is that it is made by nature alike cotton, paper, and silk but with the difference that it behaves like plastic, so you can melt and re-melt, it is lightweight, it repels water so it could truly replace plastics with the difference at the end of its life you can reuse it and recycle and you can also compost it. And if for some reason it gets into the environment, for instance, if we make a t-shirt with ULUU materials, the microfibres are going to biodegrade in the environment. So we are excited about the potential it has! I’ve realized that nobody was doing this in the commercial world and we decided to create ULUU to be working on making seaweed based PHAs a reality. 

2. How do you measure and communicate the positive environmental impact of your products?

We are still quite early stage on our journey to date so we are not selling ULUU yet. We started working in 2021 and during that first year, we did a ‘seaweed market research’ and found that if we were going to make a material with some existing seaweed farms, we needed to know which farms to work with. We imported 50 samples of seaweed from across the world from places like Indonesia, the Philippines, China, South Africa, and Australia. In our laboratory, we proved that we could produce PHAs with all those seaweed kinds but to put the production cost down, we needed to choose one and optimise the process for that seaweed. 

So, in 2023, we started working closely with Indonesia with the seaweed kind that we selected, called Gracilaria; Which is a red seaweed. In mid-2022 we built what we are calling a test plant, so now we are producing about 1kg of PHAs per week and the materials are going into product development and trials with prospective consumers. We have been doing a lot of R&D, particularly on fiber development for some fabric applications to become garments.

In terms of KPIs, at the moment it is mostly a plan for when we start to scale but for us what we want to be measuring is the carbon offsets of our operations in terms of how much carbon is our seaweed absorbing and then how much of the biomass is replacing carbon-intensive commodities,  so we measuring the impact of mitigating climate change is very important for us. And, then of course the tons of plastics that we are managing to replace are crucial too. 

The other one is that we also sell two commodities. One is the PHA but we have a protein that we want to sell to replace fish meal in aqua feed pellets. Another metric that we also want to measure is how much animal protein is getting replaced with our vegan protein. Those are the things that we want to be reporting to the board level. Recently, we've been going through an audit in terms of how we get to a point to apply for B Corp, and through that process, we realised that the social impact side of ULUU is also very interesting. We visit Indonesia a lot and we partner with seaweed cooperatives there so we might start tracking some of those social benefits that we bring to the farmers in Indonesia, but it is still a work in progress. 

3. Can you explain ULUU’s process of making biodegradable pellets from seaweed?

What we're doing is purchasing seaweed from Farmers, and the first thing that we do is cook the seaweed, the technical word for that is ‘hydrolysis’. We break down the carbohydrates in that seaweed into fermentable sugar, so things like starch on their biomass. It gets broken down into what's called glucose, which is a sugar source. 

After this process, those sugars that came from the seaweed carbohydrates go into a fermenter and inside the fermenter, we have a special microbe capable of digesting those seaweed sugars and then accumulating PHA inside their cells. So basically, PHAs work similarly to fat in our bodies, it is the way we save energy for later.

What we're doing is feeding them a lot of seaweed sugars and then also have a lot of cells inside the fermenter and they are fat with PHAs. We then extract the PHA from the cells, and then from there, it looks like a white powder that we can melt and make what's called pellets. Pellets are the commodity that plastic manufacturers purchase from petrochemical plants, so we want to replace petrochemical plants with our seaweed processing plants and sell those pellets so that plastic manufacturers can just plug and play our pellets rather than a plastic pellet into their existing manufacturing gear.

4. What were some of the most significant challenges your team faced during the development process? 

As a biotech company trying to become a biomanufacturing company,  I guess there are two main challenges that we are facing at the moment:

The first is around seaweed feedstock. So a lot of our claims rely on sourcing traceable seaweed from the market and there is a lot of work that needs to be done around creating trusting relationships with the farmers and creating that supply chain that's traceable, that can allow us to claim that we are good for the world.

The existing seaweed off-takers are quite price sensitive and are highly commoditized and those farmers are often used to the cheaper the better while for us it's not about that. We want to be working with seaweeds so that we know the source and the working environment and make sure that everybody gets paid properly, but also ensure that it is done in a way that respects the environment. So, I think that's one side of it, from sourcing seaweed that is traceable but also at the volume that we need and at a price that is fair for the farmer but still allows us to create a business with that seaweed. 

That's something that I have been personally working a lot on,  I'm always in Indonesia and learning a lot from seaweed farmers and preparing to scale up our production and get that seaweed.

The second one is the technology side of it. Even though seaweed is a very exciting field and so is PHA, they are still emerging technologies, and there's so much investment that still needs to go into research and development for us to be able to put the production costs on par with fossil Plastics. So there's a lot of hard work that needs to go into making that as cost-effective as possible so we can be replacing fossil plastic at scale in the years to come. But also the work that people like yourself do and organisations like Subak do is very important because there are things that the governments can be asking for which would help us enormously.

For instance, if fossil fuels were not subsidized and seaweed farming was, it would make life easier for us. We need to move into a future where not only fossil energy is being replaced by renewable energy, but also fossil chemicals are being replaced by renewable chemicals. So yes, of course, that's a challenge that we're working hard on so that we can create a future where we decouple both our energy and our materials economy from fossil fuels.

5. Collaborations are often key to driving innovation. Can you share any exciting collaborations or partnerships that UlUU has engaged in to further advance sustainable material development or promote eco-conscious practices?

We are a  highly collaborative organization and we need to be because we are creating a supply chain from scratch! In Indonesia, we just co-founded our joint venture which is about creating a traceable seaweed supply chain, not only for UlUU but all the emerging businesses that also need that seaweed. That's our vehicle, we then work straight with Farmers and support them with whatever they require. Some cooperatives are starting to give them loans that allow them to improve their practices and so forth. 

 On the technology side, we're working with quite a few universities in Australia. We are co-located with The University of Western Australia in a building that's called the Indian Ocean Marine Research Center. We are working quite closely with them on some engineering and biotech projects. We are also working with the Department of Fisheries of Western Australia on turning our protein by-product into a feed for aquaculture. And, then we have Deakin University which has a very strong team of textile engineers and we ship a lot of PHAs to them and they are working towards making a fabric with our materials. 

We also work with the University of Queensland which is very strong on wood PHA Composites. We use a lot of wood-plastic composites to make furniture, construction materials, and packaging, so we are super excited to replace the plastic with PHA and have a wood composite that delivers the same benefits. We work with CSIRO as well, and we've done some work on material science with them and we are now working on optimizing our fermentation process, the process that turns the seaweed sugars into PHA.

6. It has been so exciting to watch ULUU progress over the past year! What is your biggest tip for new founders out there?

I think something I’ve learned is that the communities, the people, and the resources that you need to execute ideas will come as long as you find something that you are super passionate about. If you have that direction, that objective, that determination, and that grit to move toward a certain goal, things kind of fall into place. 

I believe sometimes, people can get lost trying to find which opportunities are the best but I think it is more of an internal exercise. Finding something you are very passionate about and something you want to channel your energy into is more critical for things to work out. My experience has been that the more clarity I have on what I'm working on, the easier it is to find the right people, the right resources, and the places to execute that.

Throughout the journey with ULUU, I’ve learned to be able to see it as a journey. You can get bogged down by always thinking “ I want to create that perfect product for the world and everything needs to be perfect.” The seaweed must be perfect and the process must be perfect everything has to be incredible from day one. But if you think that way,  you quickly end up giving up.  So, being able to break down a massive victory into little pictures is essential. 

It was important for me to learn that everything is a process and things are not going to be perfect from day one, but they still can be better than the past. Nowadays. I have lots more empathy for other people doing business and also for the not-for-profit sector; it is a journey towards a better world and we need to give ourselves grace and patience.

7. What is the action you believe needs to happen for a future with ULUU? Are there any exciting projects or developments on the horizon that you can share with us?

I think my call there is to realize that the bio-economy is also circular and composting systems and see that as a form of recycling nutrients out of that I think for ULUU  to empower a better future, we rely on better biological Systems and influence structures around us. So at the moment, we have this massive problem, which is food waste ending up in landfills and emitting methane as a result of that. 

We behave a bit like food waste because we are organic just like food and if we had a future tomorrow with a lot of ULUU on it and we didn't have composts to feed that ULUU into, that would create a problem just like food, it would create methane. So, I think something that we need everybody to be advocating for is better composting systems, where our food can go into most of all, which is the main kind of waste that we produce, and then as we move towards this renewable material, that they can go into those bio-economy systems as well.

I think that is something that's always on the side of my mind. We need that system/infrastructure to scale alongside ULUU and we need everybody to push governments to create better systems to make landfills something of the past. 

Yes! Something that we are working towards at the moment is the launch of a limited edition of a simple product with an outdoor brand to represent our joint commitment to deplastify the fashion industry. The campaign is going to be mid-January 2024 and we are creating quite a bit of visual assets and also to spread the word about ULUU in January. So we are excited and getting ready for it at the moment!