What if we stopped trying to recycle and just used all our trash instead?

UBQ Materials makes bio-plastics from entire trash bags—dirty diapers, greasy pizza boxes, chicken bones, mixed plastics. Everything. 100% utilization. Nothing returns to landfills.

The material works in existing manufacturing equipment, costs the same as virgin plastic, and can be recycled 10+ times. It's already in Mercedes interiors and McDonald's products.

CEO Albert Douer spent eight years in stealth mode perfecting the technology before selling a pound. The original plan: three years. Reality: ten. Most VCs would've killed it. He kept going.

Now UBQ operates an 80,000-ton facility in the Netherlands proving the technology works at scale. The implications for waste, plastics, and the circular economy are staggering—and Albert's journey reveals what it actually takes to bring impossible-sounding innovation into the real world.

Show Notes

Guest: Albert Douer, CEO

Company: UBQ Materials

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When any part of the economy modernizes, it electrifies. New HVAC systems? Electric heat pumps. Autonomous vehicles? Battery-powered electric cars. Next-generation factories? Not a smoke stack in sight. Which means the US needs to build as much grid infrastructure in the next decade as we built in the last 50 years.

Schneider Electric is a 189-year-old infrastructure company that makes everything from the cooling systems in AI factories to the switchgear moving power across the grid. Jim Simonelli, their SVP of data centers, joins Supercool to explain why efficiency is now a core business necessity, not just an environmental virtue. Every watt that doesn't reach compute is lost revenue, which changes everything about how you design and operate at gigawatt scale.

Vincent Petit, who runs Schneider's research institute, breaks down why 15 years of flat electricity demand means we've lost the muscle to build infrastructure. And why the answer isn't just more generation—it's rethinking the entire system.

Show Notes

Guests: Jim Simonelli, Senior Vice President & Chief Technology Officer, Secure Power and Vincent Petit, Senior Vice President, Climate & Energy Transition Research

Company: Schneider Electric

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Mass Timber is growing fast—expanding from a handful of commercial wood buildings in the U.S. just over a decade ago to more than 2,000 today, with 24,000 projected by 2034. Once considered niche, mass timber is moving mainstream—competing on price, speed, and domestic supply chains, not sustainability alone.

Sterling Structural is leading that shift. As America's largest CLT manufacturer, the company produces one cross-laminated timber panel every 65 seconds, sourcing 100% of its wood from domestic sawmills. Sterling has recently produced its one millionth panel.

This is mass timber for the masses—standardized, modular systems that contractors already understand.

Michaela Harms, Vice President of Mass Timber at Sterling, joins Josh Dorfman to share how mass timber went from alternative to mainstream in a decade. She discusses how Sterling supplied 1,100 prefabricated CLT panels for Amazon’s new facility in Elkhart, Indiana, and why the industry is scaling by competing directly on price, speed, and practicality—with the carbon and forestry benefits included.

Show Notes

Guest: Michaela Harms, Vice President of Mass Timber

Company: Sterling Structural

For more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:

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