On his experience as a co-founder of a sustainable materials design company.
Paul Ceralde graduated from the Berkeley MEng program in 2019, where he studied Materials Science and Engineering. Since graduation, he’s co-founded a sustainable materials design company, Greenitio. Here, Paul speaks about his experience in the MEng program, entrepreneurial journey and passion for sustainability.
“The UC Berkeley atmosphere is full of innovation, change, and impact.”The UC Berkeley atmosphere is full of innovation, change, and impact. You go to a cafe and 90% of the people there are probably having meetings about potential ventures or how they want to make an impact on the world, and I’m ingrained with this mindset now. What inspired you to co-found a sustainable materials design company? I have a materials science and engineering background and I joined a program in Singapore called Entrepreneur First. That’s where I met my co-founder, Amit Kumar Khan. He earned a PhD in biopolymers and went on to develop a lot of products in pharmaceuticals — high-value, low-volume products. He approached me with the idea of introducing biodegradable polymers as sustainable alternatives into the mainstream market. We’re talking about cosmetics, fabric care, laundry care. The more I dug into those industries, the more I realized that the waste problem was not just the packaging but within the products themselves. I learned that so many microplastics are added to consumer products. For example, when you wash your clothes, the microplastics get rinsed off and enter the ecosystem without you noticing. There’s so much spotlight on the plastics in packaging, and on things that we can see and hold, but the microscopic side of the actual product is also highly significant and very impactful when addressing the issue of plastic waste. It’s even more dangerous because plastic packaging is easy to see and physically remove from the environment, and it only becomes hard to capture when it breaks down into microplastics, but microplastics that are added to the products themselves are invisible from day one. As a consumer, you’re often unaware of them. Big companies are not very transparent in that sense. They’re not telling you about the environmental impact of using their laundry care or their shampoo. However, this is changing in Europe, which is one of the impetuses that we’re leveraging. They’re banning intentionally added microplastics, which are non-biodegradable, highly persistent, and potentially harmful plastics that are added into products for functionalities. Historically, they have been petroleum-based/oil-derived and these microplastics are being released invisibly into the environment. The combined amount of plastic that we unwittingly release to the environment every time we use a product is almost as big as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch but completely invisible. These microplastics will be eventually consumed by fishes and other aquatic lifeforms. This is harmful to both marine life and humanity at large because a lot of these aquatic lifeforms can potentially end up on your plate. My fear is that we can face another environmental problem on a global scale similar to how the CO2 crisis came to be because the world allowed the situation to get out of hand. The tipping point for microplastics is very imminent. Recently we’ve been talking to suppliers in Europe and a lot of them still don’t have viable solutions to the incoming regulation, so there’s pressure for them to innovate as well. I see this as a good entry point for highly innovative start-up companies like our company, Greenitio.
“We can talk about how we want to save the earth as long as we want, but if the solutions are not really sustainable for business, or for user experience, it’s really hard to implement them.”What’s your favorite part of being a co-founder? Everything. I mean, even the stress is formative. I think that entrepreneurship these days is the easiest way to bring forth the change that you want, especially if you’re a highly ambitious person and creative or technical person. As a co-founder, being in a position where I can steer the ship towards the solution or the impact that we want is highly rewarding and I think that’s the biggest part of this. It’s very difficult and you learn a lot; you cry a lot out of both joy and pain, but at the end of the day, you ask yourself why you’re doing this, and every time you answer it, it gives you the energy to say, “okay, let’s take a rest, and then let’s do it again.” What’s one thing this journey has taught you? I’m surprised by how much we can learn about something. Many people are afraid of trying new things because of the uncertainty, but I’m surprised by our capability to learn when we’re interested in something, or when there’s an urgency to learn that thing. This entire start-up journey for me is really just like a learning process — I’m learning about the business, learning about the problem, learning about people, learning about everything really! Never underestimate your capacity to learn. It’s really amazing how humans can adapt and learn, and we’re at a particular point in time where a lot of this knowledge evolves very rapidly. In five years, the breakthrough that you see now would be commonplace, and then people will be thinking about the next big thing. Immerse yourself in something that you’re really interested in because it can be hard to learn something that you hate, but never underestimate learning capabilities. What was the biggest takeaway from your MEng degree? The networking was invaluable for me. From week one, we were exposed to networking events. It’s like you’re being immersed into this different kind of culture, and it’s very helpful, not just for business but also for finding friends.
Paul Ceralde, MEng ’19 (MSE): “Never underestimate your capacity to learn.” was originally published in Berkeley Master of Engineering on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.