00:00so we chose diapers because diapers the number one household plastic waste item number three
00:16waste item in a landfill and you know most babies go through up to six thousand diapers in their
00:24lifetime and every diaper takes four to five hundred years to break down the number of diapers
00:29that end up in a landfill every year can circle the earth 33 times per year and the very first
00:34disposable diaper is still in a landfill somewhere today so you know it's a it's a crazy thing there
00:41is a deleterious lasting effect that we haven't really thought about and considered because you
00:47know when you throw something away no one's asking themselves where's away and now that plastic is
00:53leaching back into our systems to a point where it's entered our own bodies our brains bodies and
00:58and bloodstreams to the tune of like a credit card a week inside these this little pouch our little
01:04friendly fungi that are sleeping inside and when the baby poops or peas you just literally take off
01:10the diaper you drop the whole pouch in you don't have to open it you drop the whole thing and you
01:14close it and you throw it away in the trash like normal and in a couple of weeks these little
01:18friendly fungi will be fertilized by our baby's poop or pee and we'll start growing and we'll start
01:23growing and then start eating the diaper which is cool and then eventually it'll break down
01:28hero uses a blend of fungi and they are very interesting plastic eating fungi which is obviously
01:36very relevant to our modern problems modern-day life gave us a lot of amazing things and many of those
01:41amazing things came with plastics anywhere from sterile medicine to cars and their safety and fuel economy
01:48but also we have an end-of-life problem with plastics in general broadly speaking and studies outside for
01:56example in a landfill or in a composting environment are very different in Michigan versus Florida and
02:02those conditions dramatically impact accelerate or deaccelerate that micro digestion process as we call
02:09it so we have to do enough studies to make sure we're within this scope but we see very quick growth in
02:16three to six months in ideal conditions but in order to make a consumer facing claim we have to
02:21have more data and again we hope to have that data in 2026 here we have our hero technology with a full
02:28size diaper in a jar and as you can see it's already started to take over the diaper and almost fully
02:34emerge it and here we have the same thing after six months so you can see that it's taken over even much
02:43much more here we're seeing the diaper being digested but you can see that the piece of the diaper sometimes
02:50referred to as the ear with the velcro piece is usually one of the last parts to get digested yeah
02:56here you can see three months after the first jar how it's all fully taken over you can't really see any
03:03pieces of the diaper and here we have roughly after nine months this end product is just digested plastics
03:15and essentially earth funny enough for evolutionary purposes essentially all plastic is made out of
03:22fossil fuels all fossil fuels is dead trees and animals and many many many moons ago fungi evolved to
03:29break down trees especially this hard to break down compound in trees called lignin which is carbon
03:35backbone is very similar to the carbon backbone of plastics because essentially they're made out of
03:40the same thing there's currently about 132 known species to break down plastics and here at hero we've
03:47studied many of them and many that don't have any public research yet and we focus on commercializing
03:53them making themselves staple for specific plastic use cases and training and evolving them to break
03:59down those specific plastics
04:29you
04:29you
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