(Don't) get SCAMMED!

Welcome dear reader - but be warned: minor rant coming up.

Judging from the science news these days, there is no shortage of material innovations. Novel bio-based plastics, more efficient PV materials, strong permanent magnets that don't require rare earth elements, a nickel-gold mixture with surprising thermo-electric properties, the announcements keep flooding in day after day. That sustainable future seems just around the corner, doesn't it?

But... check up on such developments a few months later, and you will see little change happening. What is keeping all those new materials from really breaking through, from actually making a difference? I think there are seven factors at play, seven barriers to surmount.

First, scale-up. All new materials are born small. To publish their next paper - and let's be honest here: that's what science is about nowadays - scientists typically need only a tiny bit of the new stuff. But real-world impact requires not grams, not kilos, but thousands of tons of the new stuff. Just consider: we consume some 75 million tons of polypropylene per year world-wide. If that is to be displaced by - say - that new bioplastic you just read about in the news, then someone needs to scale up production by a factor of 1,000,000,000,000. Yes, twelve zeroes, you saw that right. I hope it is needless to say that such scaling up requires many, many years.

Next, the new material must be certified for use in the intended market. Not difficult in principle, but often a show-stopper in practice, or merely a show-slower if you are lucky. Plus, the new material cannot pass this gate unless you have a sizable quantity at hand. The astute reader will spot the chicken-and-egg we have on our hands here.

If certified means "officially accepted", then we can add that the material must also be welcomed informally - so, people must approve. Yes, with precision fermentation, we can in theory make you grow plastics at home, from your food waste or even from that... other waste stream. You know what I'm on about. But are people going to like that? Let's say that like the official welcome, this unofficial approval is also a potential hurdle.

Manufacturing is yet another big issue, and one that receives only little attention. The new material must somehow be brought into the right shape, joined, and finished. If we're lucky the stuff allows for "drop-in replacement" but that rarely happens. More often than not, there's a lot of hard work to do. Just talk to Bob Hendrikx and his team at LOOP Biotech, who make those amazing mycelium coffins. The material may have been step one, but manufacturing soon reared its unforgiving head.

Onwards, dear reader! New materials need to be produced of course, and if large OEM's have any say in it, at least by two different suppliers. This is the often-neglected issue of multi-source supply. Single sourcing is just not what OEM's want. So, prepare for lengthy negotiations, IPR management headaches, and other forms of delay. Yes, vertical integration in the value chain is an alternative, but one that also takes its time, thank you very much.

Are we done yet? No, there's engineering to consider, and by this I mean the entirety of procedures, approaches, experiences, and expertise required to take the material into the market in a safe, reliable and most of all, affordable manner. Engineering knowledge, as noted by Walter Vincenti in "What Engineers Know and How They Know It", is vastly different from scientific knowledge. Getting this stuff together can also take quite a while, for instance if you want to validate the long-term behaviour, or build up a statistically-sound base of use data. But especially for safety-critical applications, it's something you simply cannot do without. If you are familiar with the nasty phrase "form follows failure" then you know what I am talking about here.

And finally, hand in hand with engineering, there is design knowledge to build up, leading to design success - also distinctly different from what the scientists (now several papers ahead) are doing. If engineering is about getting it all done, design is mainly about creating the value proposition. Design thinking may be on the way out nowadays, but if you want the new material to start making a difference, you are once more advised to step up.

Let's take stock. We have:

·?????? scale-up

·?????? certification

·?????? approval

·?????? manufacturing

·?????? multi-source supply

·?????? engineering

·?????? design

Hey, that makes for a nice acronym: SCAMMED. It's what needs to happen before that new miracle material can start saving the world. If it doesn't, then we are forced to conclude that not the material but WE are the ones being scammed. Hence (are you still there? Thanks!) the title of my little rant.

Hope this has made your day - if so (or if not), tell me in the comments :-)

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