9.26.23-Sustainability-Atacama

JOSE DOMINGUEZ: Hello, my name is Jose Dominguez. And I'm the co-founder of Atacama Biomaterials, where we develop low carbon materials powered by AI. We named our company after the Atacama Desert in Chile, which you can see in this picture. Unfortunately, it looks like this right now, covered in plastic waste, a horrific reality that repeats all over the world and inspired us on a lifelong mission.

Accelerate the engineering of sustainable packaging. The packaging problem builds upon three major challenges, the need for sustainable materials, constant disruption on global supply chains, and a material science industry that isn't able to provide solutions at the required rate of change. Climate change, pandemics, random disruption in these supply chains, feedstock availability, shifting consumer preferences, but their constant requirement for new products, require us to rethink the way we make materials.

At Atacama we believe that current developments in AI and robotics are key to accelerate the deployment of sustainable materials that rely on regionally available feedstock, shortening its time to market and reducing uncertainty in supply chains. Our technology unlocks AI-powered agile tailored innovation for more sustainable packaging solutions.

So how do we do this? Our AI and robotic platforms rapidly reformulate our materials to develop tailored sustainable solutions that comply with our clients' needs. And even more interestingly, this is a two-way process, that allows us to adapt those formulations to the properties of regionally available materials, allowing us to deploy factories locally and scaling this process globally, lowering supply chain disruption, carbon footprint, while providing reliable performance for our clients, all of this 10 times faster than how the industry is doing it right now.

The unseen impact of these plastic materials is in our health. Research has shown that everyone in this room will ingest the equivalent to 70,000 plastic bags in the form of microplastics, with health implications we haven't even understand yet. Unlike any other company, at Atacama we are building products that solve this challenge from its origins, reaching global impact.

So Woodpack, our first platform material, is an 100% bio-based flexible film. It is home compostable and paper recyclable and has an AI performance that ensures that it will match our clients' needs. So our first experiment was about increasing the material's tensile strength. Through our AI platform we were able to increase the value by 600%, work that we have extended to other specs in the material.

Furthermore, it has an 85% carbon reduction when compared to incumbents. How do we do this? This is the result of a low carbon production process that allows the use of renewable energies, unveiling net zero materials. Our techno-economical analysis shows that through our AI reformulation tools, we can scale at a lower cost when compared to polypropylene, polyethylene, or other incumbents.

And this material is market validated. We worked with Roche Pharmaceuticals, Latin America into replacing their fossil-based flexible films. We started with their polybags in internal logistic operations. We extended that work towards wrapping large medical devices. Building upon that success, we use our AI platform to develop a tailored formulation for their cold-chain logistics operations, a formulation that has been validated and is going through a certification process, showing the work of our AI platform.

Our customer research shows that we have cross market obligations. And we want to test our technology with you. If your company is facing packaging challenges now, reach to us at the exhibit or email me at the email you'll see at the end of the presentation. It's time for the Atacama Desert to blossom again. With your help we can do that today. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

SPEAKER: Thank you, Jose.