Cruz Foam — Biomaterials Investment for a Better Future

Written by: Jack Wielebinski, One Small Planet Fund Manager

I spend a reasonable amount of time running. A habit I have formed over the years is picking up trash as I run. It makes me feel a little better about my day, no matter what else is going on. When I started writing this, I was in Uvita, Costa Rica. I would run on a rather remote beach there daily and pick up every piece of trash I saw, and the very next day, find it had all replaced itself. I think anyone alive today has encountered this problem, the endless waste streams, that more and more seem to be finding themselves in more remote corners of the globe.

Plastics and their ilk, polystyrene and polyethylene (EPS and EPE, respectively), think styrofoam, are materials that are by and large highly effective. Case in point are the fragile packages shipped and received every day that would be damaged without these foams. Beyond being highly functional, EPS and EPE are incredibly cheap. This is part of the problem; they are highly useful and cheap materials, which have become a necessity in our modern life.

Part of the reason why EPS and EPE are so cheap is some of the input materials are made from Petro-chemical waste by-products.

Part of the reason why EPS and EPE are so cheap is some of the input materials are made from Petro-chemical waste by-products.By using a waste by-product that someone else might throw away, you tend to get it for very low prices. As a result, over recent decades, we have seen an absolute explosion in the amounts of foams used in our daily life. EPE is a much better material than EPS (which is a bit like saying I would rather have the flu than have cancer, but ultimately, neither is anywhere close to ideal), as it is non-toxic, and can be re-used by being melted down, while EPS is toxic, and non-reusable. Unfortunately, given the nature of our inefficient recycling systems, a very low percentage of the waste streams are actually re-used, as little as 30% according to EPE Global.

By and large, these foams have never biodegraded since they were first invented (hey, they are durable!). So, what does all this mean? Let’s look at one more statistic first.

According to Statista, in 2022, there were 15.6 million metric tons of EPS and 110.1 million metric tons of EPE produced globally, in that one year. If you are like me, that number is so big as to render it meaningless. Let me say it again, 110,100,000 metric tons, which is to say 110,100,000 x 2,200 pounds of EPE foam was created and used in 2022. That’s over 242 billion pounds of foam. When I first started looking at this data, I had to stop and try to simply grasp what those numbers meant. The great pyramid of Giza weighs apparently 5.9 million tons (13.0 billion pounds). In short, the scale of annual production of foams alone (not to mention plastics) is creating massive volumes of materials, in billions of pounds, which by and large is sitting in landfills (and oceans) around the world.

How do you solve this sort of a massive, global challenge?

Enter, Cruz Foam. Cruz Foam started with a mission of making environmentally-friendly surfboards, and experimented with a material known as Chitosan. Chitosan is a biopolymer made from a material called chitin, found in the exoskeletons of crustaceans, in this case shrimp shells. It is a bi-product from the shrimping industry, and ultimately, Cruz Foam discovered a way to make and EPE and EPS replacement material that is fully-biodegradable, can turn into a useful fertilizer, and … that’s right, it’s made from recycled shrimp shells as opposed to oil-extraction byproducts.

Chitosan is a biopolymer made from a material called chitin, found in the exoskeletons of crustaceans

There is another piece that makes this product critically important and relevant. There are other foams in the world that are biodegradable, but they are often way more expensive. As mentioned, EPE and EPS tend to be very cheap which makes them challenging to compete with. Cruz Foam prices on par with regular EPE and EPS, because it is made from a food waste by-product. That means companies can buy and use Cruz Foam at no extra cost and provide a fully-biodegradable alternative, which I earnestly hope replaces the full-scope of 242 billion pounds annually.

“Well why wouldn’t you want to use this?”

Cruz Foam is genuinely what I think we all want to see in an impact story — turning perceived waste into something useful, with no extra cost. It’s something almost anyone can gather around and say, “well why wouldn’t you want to use this?” That is certainly how we felt at One Small Planet. It is our biggest investment to date, because we believe in the mission and vision that we can help replace harmful materials that hurt the planet with good ones, and make the world a better place, all while working with companies we all know and love with no extra cost.