This week on Sea Change Radio, we learn about a small, innovative company that is recycling all sorts of plastics and turning them into gravel. We speak to the founder and CEO, Sebastián Sajoux about the technology and mission of his company, Arqlite. Then, as the sunny days roll on this summer, we thought it worth revisiting our 2018 conversation with Craig Downs of the Haereticus Environmental Laboratory about the havoc that far-too-many sunscreens wreak on fragile marine ecosystems.

Narrator  0:02  This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I'm Alex Wise.

Sebastián Sajoux  0:16 And of course this is not easy with it took us five years to develop the technology. But now Yeah, we can tell that we turn trash into into a long lasting sustainable product.

Narrator  0:29  This week on Sea Change Radio, we learn about a small innovative company that's recycling all sorts of plastics and turning them into gravel. We speak to the founder and CEO Sebastián Sajoux about the technology and mission of his company Arqlite. Then, as the sunny days roll on this summer, we thought it worth revisiting our 2018 conversation with Craig downs of the heretical environmental laboratory, about the havoc that far too many sunscreens wreak on fragile marine ecosystems.

Alex Wise  1:21  I'm joined now on Sea Change Radio by the founder and CEO of Arqlite. Sebastián Sajoux. Sebastián, welcome to Sea Change Radio.

Sebastián Sajoux - Hey, Alex, thank you very much. Thanks for having me here.

Alex Wise - So we'll get into the technology in a second, Sebastián. But first, what's the mission of Arc Light?

Sebastián Sajoux 1:38  Well, our mission is to tackle plastic pollution. So we work on developing technologies to to achieve this. And we do it by partnering with bigger organizations, by industry leaders, but also with a society. I don't know if you're aware, but every time you drop a piece of plastic on the beam, half of that it's still going to end up in a landfill or incineration on the worst case, you know, in the water Corps and contaminating the, the environment. So that 50% of plastics that no one wants, that's our raw material. And our first product that it's the one we're producing here in California, it's a smart gravel that replaces mineral and gravel in a variety of applications, right? We count on everyone, every everyone going out there and buying a bag of artists, smart gravel is automatically deviating all those pounds of plastics from the environment.

Alex Wise  2:45  And you have kind of a multi stage rollout plan for it when he kind of explained right now you're going to be available for smaller consumer purchases, but it's going to be ramping up to bigger construction scale soon, right?

Sebastián Sajoux 3:00  Yeah, totally. So when when we started working on this solution, we were aiming for a large scale solution for a large scale problem. That's why we got to this idea of making gravel right so gravel has a great variety of applications and very different markets. from let's say, starting from the from the bigger markets, you have concrete companies are interested in making light concrete, so they replace a mirror and gravel in the concrete mix by our gravel to get lighter materials and also the better insulated capacity of plastics in there, while also being able to offer green concrete to their their customers. Then you have like midsize markets, like the for example, hydroponic growers that are using our gravel as a replacement of expanded clay, because it's a great growth media for for that for those systems. And then we also offer it on smaller bags or retail. It's already on the big box retailers for small home gardening projects for also small hydroponics project...