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ECO SPEAKS CLE
ECO SPEAKS CLE is the podcast for the eco-curious in Northeast Ohio. In each episode, we speak with local sustainability leaders and invite listeners to connect, learn, and live with our community and planet in mind. Hear from the people and organizations that make our region a great place to live, work, and play.
ECO SPEAKS CLE is hosted by Diane Bickett and produced by Greg Rotuno.
ECO SPEAKS CLE
A CLEANR Way to Wash with Max Pennington
Did you know that laundry is the #1 source of microplastic pollution? With every load of laundry, millions of tiny plastic particles come off our synthetic clothes, down the drain, and into our waterways. In this episode, we speak with Max Pennington, Co-Founder and CEO of CLEANR. Max and his partners may have the solution to plastic pollution we've been looking for. His Cleveland-based company recently launched a patented filter that captures up to 90% of all microplastics from your washing machine before they enter the drain. Max developed this breakthrough technology with fellow engineering students Chip Miller and David Dillman within the Sears think[box], an innovation lab at Case Western Reserve University.
Their VORTX filter design was inspired by the gills of fish, specifically by the way manta rays and basking sharks filter feed. This biomimicry-based design creates a vortex that keeps the filter from clogging while effectively capturing harmful microplastics. These young entrepreneurs recently launched their company CLEANR, with a filter that easily attaches to any washing machine.
Hear how Max and his partners plan to bring this technology to market. Their CLEANR filter is currently available as an external washing machine attachment for $299. The ultimate goal is to integrate it directly into washing machines, making microplastic filtration as standard as lint traps in dryers. The company is also exploring applications beyond laundry, including whole-home water filtration to protect against microplastics entering our bodies through drinking water.
Capturing microplastics before they enter our waterways could be a real game-changer, especially if supported by legislators and policymakers. Would they go for it? Max thinks so. Already, five U.S. states have introduced legislation requiring microplastic filters on washing machines, with similar momentum building in Europe.
With synthetic fibers from our clothing accounting for 35% of all plastic pollution in our water systems, the implications extend far beyond environmental protection. Recent studies have found alarming connections between microplastics in the human body and increased risk of heart disease and other health conditions. These plastic particles have been discovered in human blood, brains, and even the placentas of newborn babies. With an estimated 22 million pounds of microplastic particles entering the Great Lakes annually, the Cleaner team aims to make Cleveland "ground zero in the fight against microplastic pollution," tackling it one laundry load at a time.
Learn More:
About our Guest, Max Pennington, Co-Founder and CEO of CLEANR
About CLEANR
About buying a CLEANR Filter
About Sears think[box]
About microplastics and laundry
About Microplastics and the Great Lakes
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You're listening to EcoSpeak CLE, a podcast for the eco-curious in Northeast Ohio. My name is Diane Bickett and my producer is Greg Rotuno. Together we speak with local sustainability leaders and invite you to connect, learn and live with our community and planet in mind. Hello friends, it's plastic free July season season again, where we cover topics related to the problems of plastic pollution, and if you listened way back to episode 14, plastic Free July is a global movement started in 2011 in Australia that challenges people to stop using single-use plastics like water bottles and other disposables for cleaner waterways and oceans.
Diane Bickett:But campaigns like Plastic-Free July are important to raise awareness and change consumer habits, but even the most conscientious of us cannot do much about all the thousands of microplastics we release every time we wash our clothes. All those synthetic fibers coming off of our clothes make up about 35% of all plastic pollution in our waterways. Stay tuned, though, because we've got some good news for you today with our guest Max Pennington. Max is a Young Case alumnus, and he and his partners just launched their company called Cleaner C-L-E-A-N-R. It features a special filtering system they invented at the Sears ThinkBox located on the campus of Case Western Reserve University. Their Vortex filter captures 90% of all microplastics coming from your washing machine before they go down the drain and into our wastewater and our lake. This breakthrough technology, inspired by fish, may just be the solution to pollution we've been waiting for. Welcome, max, thank you.
Diane Bickett:Thanks for joining us.
Max Pennington:Excited to be here.
Diane Bickett:No pressure right. You got all the entire plastic pollution solved with your cleaner vortex technology Exactly, cleaner vortex technology. But I was excited to attend your launch party at the Great Lakes Science Center on June 3rd, where you had some pretty impressive people there.
Max Pennington:Yeah, it was a wonderful turnout and thank you for coming. I was looking over the Great Lakes, Lake Erie and at the Great Lakes Science Center. It was a beautiful night and exciting to launch our filter out in the market.
Diane Bickett:Yeah, and it just kind of set the stage for how big this is going to be. I mean, you had investors there, you had some heavy hitters. You had Chris Rone in the county executive talking about the Freshwater Institute that he's created. You had the head of case, president of case. You had Marcus Erickson in from California. He's the head of the Five Gyres Institute and has done a lot of research on plastic pollution in the oceans. So let's get into a little bit about what this product is that I'm looking at. It's about. Let's describe it for our listeners.
Max Pennington:Yeah, so it's, I'd say like shoebox sized, it can go on top of big shoebox.
Max Pennington:It can go on top of, next to beside or on the floor by your washing machine, so it works on any maker model. On the back of the filter we have an inlet and an outlet, so you basically take the existing washing machine hose that's in your wall, you plug it onto our inlet, we send you a new hose that goes from the outlet back into your wall and then our filter is able to remove 90% of microplastics that otherwise would have been sent directly out into the environment and is ultimately ending up back in our bodies.
Diane Bickett:Wow, Wow. When did you first become? We'll get into the details, the specifics, but when did you first become aware of plastic pollution and how did that turn into this new business for you? Because you're just 25, I mean a newly graduated person Tell us about how all this came to be.
Max Pennington:I think I originally learned about microplastic pollution in 2020. And I was doing an internship back home in Cincinnati working on life cycle assessments for packaging, and while I was doing that, I was trying to figure out if paper packaging or plastic packaging was more sustainable, which is a hard question to answer outright Ongoing argument.
Max Pennington:But one of the big things that they didn't account for was what happens if the paper or the plastic gets out into the environment and gets littered. And I thought that was an important benefit of paper that wasn't being accounted for in the study. So I ended up diving into all the different ways that plastic was getting out into really the world, from the supply chain of making paper and the supply chain of making plastic, chain of making paper and the supply chain of making plastic. And that's when I learned that there's washing machines were somehow the number one source of microplastics pollution and tires and secondary sources of microplastics. But really got sort of hooked on the washing machines and came back to case.
Max Pennington:After that summer went to Chip and David who were the two co-founders we were all in Sigma Chi together and we said, hey, if that's true which it was hard for us to believe, just because it's so sort of surprising that your clothing's somehow the number one source of microplastic pollution but we said, if that's true, we should be able to take a cup with a mesh on it and put it on our washing machine hose in the sink and see a bunch of stuff. And we did that and we saw a lot of stuff and we were hooked. I mean we thought, hey, this has got to be pretty easy to solve. There's ThinkBox on campus, we can just go start 3D printing filters and get them onto the washing machine and we can get rid of the number one source of microplastics. And three years later, and a lot of development and prototype iterations later, we have a filter that's able to do it. So it was a lot harder than we thought it was going to be Right.
Diane Bickett:Yeah, talk about that a little bit, because it's not just a normal filter, because I think everyone talks about well, why can't we just filter this stuff out? Well, microplastics come in various sizes and now we have nanoparticles. Tell us about how biomimicry comes to play with what you designed.
Max Pennington:Yeah, so sort of at the beginning. So microplastics any plastic less than five millimeters in size. So once you start getting down and down to one micron and then you start getting into the nanoplastic range. But with a microplastic you also catch everything else if you're going to catch the microplastics too. So with the washing machine we catch 90% of microplastics down to 50 microns in size. But we also catch hair, we catch sand, we catch dirt and in the early iterations, the existing forms of technology that are in the filtration world, like dead end and crossflow filtration. If you put them onto a washing machine they clog up right away. So I remember we put on some early iterations of filters that already exist today on my washing machine in my apartment and it actually flooded my apartment.
Diane Bickett:Yeah, loose change clogging the filter or whatever. Yeah, exactly.
Max Pennington:So we pretty quickly realized okay, nothing that's out there today is actually going to work. And we were doing all this iteration at the ThinkBox down on the third floor with the 3D printers and the prototyping equipment that they have, and as we started to realize that the existing forms of technology wouldn't actually get the filtration job done, that was when we ended up turning to nature and we sort of learned from how fish filter, sort of learned from how fish filter. So a fish like a basking shark or a manta ray actually use their gills to create a vortex that keeps their gills from clogging as they're filtering out their food, and similar to that. We actually just got our patent for our vortex technology, which is inspired by manta rays and basking sharks and how they filter, but we use a vortex to keep our 50 micron mesh from clogging as we filter out the microplastics from a washing machine so how does a vortex filter work then?
Diane Bickett:it's spinning, then no, so it's static, okay.
Max Pennington:So what happens is the water comes in from right to left and then, basically, the way that it flows over the rib, it ends up creating a lower pressure region where it swirls, and then that swirl creates a shear force on the mesh, and the shear force is what actually keeps the particulate in suspension and moves it down so that it's separated and moves into the pod oh.
Greg Rotuno:It looks like a giant plastic corkscrew for people listening who can't see it.
Diane Bickett:Yeah, and the outside of it looks like a cone filter for your coffee maker.
Max Pennington:Yeah.
Diane Bickett:So the water, the big stuff circles, gets suspended within the vortex itself, the twisted part, and then the water comes out of the filter-y.
Max Pennington:Yeah, so the water's always coming out of this, yeah exactly, and then all the particles get pushed down the vortex and they get pushed into the pod, which is the part that collects all of the microplastics. Once a week, as a consumer, you have to take the pod out, you throw it away and you put in a new pod.
Diane Bickett:Help, describe what a one micron size might look like. Can we see it with the naked eye?
Max Pennington:I probably couldn't see it. I mean, you could see it like a piece of dust or like the diameter of a human hair is, like down on the 30 to 50 micron scale.
Diane Bickett:Okay. So when you were testing your different models, how many variations did you come up with and how did you test it? You're looking, literally looking at what's collected on our microscope and counting them somehow it took a while.
Max Pennington:So we've tested in every way that we can imagine. So we've done tests by weight. So you'll weigh what you put into the filter and then weigh what comes out of the filter and then you basically say, hey, if we captured 90%, then only 10% should come out of the filter. If we also have done like dynamic image analysis, which you basically take two samples and then you send it to a laser that gets shot through it and then looks at how the light deflects and then estimates the size and the number of the particles, we've done microscope analysis, where you actually look at the different pods under a microscope and count them by hand or with an algorithm. Those are the main ones we've done.
Diane Bickett:Did you develop this as students or did this come later? Was it a class project?
Max Pennington:It wasn't a class project. It was more of a passion project. We started when we were students. So we started when I was a senior and Chip and David were juniors and we were doing it really in our free time and it turned into all of our time.
Diane Bickett:You have free time. As a case engineering student, I'm impressed.
Max Pennington:Not much, but we put more and more focus on cleaner, maybe to slight trouble of our schooling needs, but it's what cleaner needed.
Diane Bickett:Yeah, but you're on your way. Very exciting. So is the idea that individuals will buy this or is the idea that you will install these, like in industrial applications, like on college campuses or work? Ultimate goal is to see the technology integrated into the washing machine across all of the washing machine makers, so we work with most of them.
Max Pennington:We're trying to get it as a feature that comes pre-installed, just like a dryer lint filter, where you basically open up the washing machine, you already have a microplastics filter and it's on the inside, because we think that's ultimately how to scale the solution and how we're really going to have the biggest impact. The external filter is a stepping stone to show A that people care about this, so people that buy the filter early on. We use that data to work with the washing machine manufacturers and show that there are people that care that microplastics are being dumped out of their washing machine and that they're actually willing to do something about it. So all of that data and early support is critical in terms of actually getting it into a washing machine. We're also working with universities, so we've installed on three different university campuses. We've installed at Case Western Reserve University, the University of Akron and the University of South Alabama, and we are also selling on our website so you can go to wwwcleanerlife and buy a filter today.
Diane Bickett:And how much will it cost me?
Max Pennington:They retail for $299. And then obviously we're working on driving that down. We think it'll be substantially cheaper on the inside of a washing machine.
Diane Bickett:But yeah, that's awesome. But yeah, that's awesome. I think you know we all want to move more towards natural clothing and fibers. But it's really hard.
Max Pennington:I mean, we've covered this on our show a lot and it's hard to find stuff that is a pure item, that is, doesn't have some kind of plastic in it yeah, I think that can also that I've found that to be like a misconception at times with people if they think like they're wearing cotton and it's like, totally fine, where they don't like look at, okay, but what's the dye made out of? That is on my cotton t-shirt, what, like other types of additives are like? Because you end up with this like core cotton fiber but it's sprayed with a lot of plastic additives where you really don't want that going out into the world either or into your body wow.
Diane Bickett:So what's the potential impact for, like, if I install one of these and I wash four loads a week? What's the impact in terms of what I'm reducing going into the environment?
Max Pennington:millions of microplastics, every load of laundry that you do.
Greg Rotuno:For every load.
Max Pennington:Oh, yeah, yeah, and we actually estimate the number of microplastics that you've removed in our app. So all of the filters are smart enabled and you can download an app that will track how many loads of laundry you've done with the filter and we actually estimate the number that you've removed in terms of credit card equivalents, so like the weight of a credit card of microplastics, and it will like build a credit card as you use the filter and then tell you how many that you've removed.
Diane Bickett:That's a really cool thing to incorporate in that whole app, so you can there's like instant feedback that you're doing something.
Max Pennington:Yeah, and it will tell you, like when you need to clean the filter, you can buy replacement filters directly from the app. And then we're always working on expanding it so like we've done a fair amount of piloting and then learn that people really like the app. So we're trying to add new features and listen to what people are saying and just make it like a really nice experience as you're removing microplastics to a learn about where else are microplastics coming from? What else can I do about it? And then how much of an impact have I made with the filter?
Diane Bickett:Wow. Well, I think I read on the Alliance for the Great Lakes that 20,. On their website they have a stat from Rochester Institute of Technology that 22 million pounds of microplastic particles enter the Great Lakes every year. It's it's kind of scary it's very scary.
Max Pennington:Yeah, there's been three papers that have come out recently that sort of scare me. Them like. There's a paper from the american college of cardiology that found those with microplastics in their um I forget the exact name of how it was worded, but basically in in the part of the body they were studying were more likely to have a heart attack than those that didn't. And then there was a study recently from Case that found microplastics concentration in the body to be in the top 10 indicators for non-communicable disease correlation. So both of those were pretty terrifying to me.
Diane Bickett:If you did all the right things, you would still be exposed to plastic pollution because it's so pervasive in the environment.
Max Pennington:You really got to cut it off at the source, I think. So you have to stop it at the source, and our vision is to not only help people cut it off at the source and reduce their emissions, but also reduce their intake. So we want to remove microplastics not only leaving your home, but also coming into your home. So we're working on different applications of our vortex technology to actually, you know, filter out home, whole home water filtration or tap water filtration, so that your tap water will be microplastic free too.
Max Pennington:So that's that's our vision, that's what we're trying to build, and you know, all the early support and getting the word out helps as we continue to build to that.
Diane Bickett:Yeah, capturing at the source makes so much more sense than trying to clean up an ocean. I mean some of those technologies. I think they play well on social media. Buy a plastic bracelet made from recycled plastic.
Max Pennington:That came out of the ocean. I think I'm wearing one, okay.
Diane Bickett:But I think to really have an impact you got to do what you're doing, which is capturing it at the front end. What kind of other applications do you foresee growing into, like treatments for wastewater treatment plants or outflows, you know, combined sewer overflows and that kind of stuff?
Max Pennington:We're interested in. I think part of the problem too, like I've often been asked the question well, why don't you just make the vortex really big and make it so that everybody doesn't have to have a filter and just there's one big filter at the wastewater treatment plant and the problem is like as soon as it leaves the washing machine it gets diluted by all the other water that's leaving your home and everybody else's home. So it's like it's combined with the shower water and the sink water and the toilet water. So then the microplastics that were in 50 liters of water that you could have gotten are now in 300 liters of water. So it's like already a harder job to be done. And then it all gets combined with everybody else's water. So you're talking about like millions of gallons of water that you have to try to deal um. So I mean, I think it would work at that scale. I just I think the problem is can you actually have the impact and can you filter down to the same level that you could on the washing machine itself?
Diane Bickett:yeah, one step at a time, very american.
Greg Rotuno:American solution to the problem, just make it bigger.
Diane Bickett:Yeah, exactly, let someone else deal with it. So you're from Cincinnati, yeah, yeah, and you mentioned to me on the way in here that the Sears ThinkBox kind of drove your decision to come here.
Max Pennington:It did yeah.
Diane Bickett:Tell us more about this facility and how it's helping you launch your product as a young entrepreneur.
Max Pennington:Sure. So the Sears ThinkBox has been critical, I think, throughout our whole development. It's a seven-story open makerspace. It's the largest open makerspace in the United States. It has really everything that you would has a woodworking shop, metalworking shop, has conference room space and it has an incubator floor on the seventh floor, which is where our office is based out of. And it's this idea that you can have everything you need to start a company in one building, including all of the equipment and the resources, and it's all free and open to use. You really just have to pay for your materials and if you don't want to do that, you can bring your own materials. So it was the perfect launching pad for what we were trying to build with Cleaner, and I think it's made my love for Cleveland grow. It's made my love for Case Western Reserve University grow and it's part of the big reason that I think Cleveland can be the ground zero in the fight against microplastics pollution, and I think the whole Cleaner team believes that too.
Diane Bickett:That's exciting. I like the vision. Are you making these here?
Max Pennington:We are not making them here. Okay yeah, so we've prototyped and designed.
Diane Bickett:Not a manufacturing facility at scale.
Max Pennington:Yeah, so it's great for prototyping and design, but for mass production not quite. So yeah, it helps you get. I didn't think so. Yeah.
Diane Bickett:And you're from Cincinnati.
Max Pennington:Yes, yeah, from Madeira. And then I was trying to decide where to go to school and saw the think box and saw what I thought was a ton of opportunity to come up here and decided to invest in myself and came up to Case instead of some other schools that I could have gone to like basically for free, back in Cincinnati, and came up to Case instead of some other schools that I could have gone to like basically for free back in Cincinnati and haven't looked back.
Greg Rotuno:Well, there's so much innovation going on here in Cleveland and love that we got some big minds moving, you know, willing to move here and work on these issues.
Diane Bickett:There's so much innovation that can happen around water. That's already happening through the Cleveland Water Alliance, who came on our podcast, and other work being done in the region. What role so entrepreneurs play a role? What role does government and legislation play in requiring this sort of technology?
Max Pennington:I think they're going to play a key role.
Max Pennington:I think, really, the more that we learn about the health consequences of microplastics, as it becomes more concrete, as more people become aware of the fact that we have a spoonful of microplastics in our brain, that microplastics are in our blood, microplastics are in the placenta of newborn babies, I think people are going to demand a change and I think that legislators are going to be the key decision maker in terms of driving that change so that the washing machine makers actually have to listen and put it in all of the washing machines, because that's how it really gets the scale.
Max Pennington:I think, to start, hopefully, we can get it on the inside of a premium washing machine and have some level of if you pay a little bit more so that the washing machine manufacturer's margins stay intact that you can actually get a model with an early microplastics filter. But to get it at scale where everybody has an integrated microplastic system, it's really going to fall on the legislators to demand that that's part of what is in the washing machine making industry. Yes, there's five US states that have introduced legislation that would require microplastic filters for washing machines.
Diane Bickett:Really, what are those?
Max Pennington:California, oregon, illinois, new Jersey and Pennsylvania, and they're all a little bit different, but the one that's the most different New Jersey has actually introduced a rebate program, which we think is particularly interesting for the US consumer, where basically, if you go buy a washing machine or a washing machine filter, you would get a federal rebate for doing so the washing machine if it has a microplastics filter, which none do yet.
Max Pennington:But we think that's a really nice win-win-win where the government is helping to subsidize consumers that want to take the early step to actually have microplastic filtration technology on washing machines. So we really like that model in terms of getting some early adopters. There's also EU-based legislation where France passed, actually, a bill that would require microplastic filters in all newly produced washing machines by 2025. It is 2025. So that hasn't happened yet. It got a little fuzzy because they went out ahead of the rest of the European Union and the rest of the European Union said hey, we can't have French consumers driving across the border into Germany to buy a washing machine without a microplastics filter for cheaper, so you're going to have to hold off on that law and wait until we do it at an EU wide level.
Diane Bickett:Wow, you really are poised to do this thing, except for, maybe, ohio. What's going on with Ohio?
Max Pennington:I know I'm trying, Got to get them going with us.
Diane Bickett:I'll introduce you to Tristan Rader. He's a new state legislator and he's an environmentalist.
Max Pennington:Yeah, please.
Diane Bickett:He would be interested, I'll send him a link to this episode.
Max Pennington:Perfect.
Diane Bickett:He's been on the show before when he was with United, thank you. Thank you, greg. What other innovations would you like to see to reduce microplastic pollution?
Max Pennington:I think one of the big ones that I'm always asked about is what are we going to do to protect ourselves Like, how are we going to make sure that microplastics aren't coming into my body or coming in through my tap water? And I think that's where I'm really excited about working to take the Vortex and applying it so that it filters out water coming into your home as well, because I think that's really it will help raise awareness. I think there's a lot of people that feel really scared about the level of microplastics that are coming into their home, and to use the technology and work to make that a reality. Just, we've been asked so many times when that's going to come, so we're really excited to start working on that.
Diane Bickett:Okay, exciting. So I think I never finished my thought when I asked you where you're actually making these. Oh, do we skip over that Maybe? Where are you making them?
Max Pennington:Yeah, so we produce them in Asia today, so they're produced in China and then shipped over into the US.
Diane Bickett:Okay, Do you have a goal of onshoring production? I'm sure you do.
Max Pennington:Yes, the external filter. For us, like I was saying, it's really the stepping stone into the marketplace. So it was more important about speed to market. I think, once we get to the integrated forms of the technology, if the manufacturing is still in our hands which we're still trying to decide whether or not that's something that we want, if we want to be a manufacturer as a company, there's some advantages to it, there's some disadvantages to it.
Max Pennington:Part of us, we want to license the technology and give it to the washing machine makers so that they can produce it in their facilities that they have today. And some of the washing machine makers had said hey, you already produced the Vortex, why don't you keep producing the Vortex? So it's going to be a balance between what do we want to do and what do the washing machine makers want. But at the time that it would be integrated into the washing machine and we scale up production, we would want to have it scaled up in the country that it's being sold in we would want to have it scaled up in the country that it's being sold in.
Diane Bickett:So, and your business model is still TBD, I guess get these out there Looking for investors.
Max Pennington:So we, actually we just like finished up our latest investment round, which we're super excited about. That was sort of the, I guess, in between our Series C and Series A round. So then we're going to raise our next investment round sort of in the next like 12 to 18 months.
Diane Bickett:Good luck. How much are you trying to raise?
Max Pennington:We're still trying to decide how much we're going to raise at the Series A. It depends on, like, how many adjacencies we're trying to go after. So if we're going after whole home water filtration and we're going after hospital laundry, then we might need more capital than if we're get picked up by one of the big washing machine makers and they want to sell 10 000 of our external units. So we're trying to wait and see to. You know kind of look at our cards and then figure out how much we want to raise at that point.
Diane Bickett:Do you have a patent pending on the filter itself?
Max Pennington:then yeah, we actually. So last week we got the patent for the Vortex.
Diane Bickett:Oh, congratulations, thank you. That costs a lot of money just to get that far right.
Max Pennington:Yes, yeah, a lot of money and a lot of time, but we got this golden sheet from the uspto that was, you know, signed and everything. So it was a cool moment for our team to look at it and we got the technology for washing machines and then use cases beyond washing machines, so it wasn't specific to washing machines okay, that's smart um, which was really great because we to a year ago won the american filtration, filtration and Separation Society's New Product of the Year for the Vortex.
Max Pennington:So we've had a number of incoming requests from companies just in the filtration space asking if they can use the Vortex for their specific filtration challenges, and some of those have actually, most of them have nothing to do with washing machines, so it was really great to get that broad of coverage.
Diane Bickett:Well, you probably haven't even considered all the various applications that apply to learning. How do you sell the this to the need for this to consumers? I know you know the folks listening to this podcast probably totally get it. But the general public. How do you sell that idea? What's your marketing strategy there?
Max Pennington:I think part of it is seeing is believing. So we actually have a lot of microscopic images of what we're capturing coming out of the washing machine and we plan to show those. So we've been doing a lot of like social media marketing. We've started some influencer campaigns where you can actually go like see influencers with our filter installed in their house and then they were taking their pods and taking microscope images of them and really trying to grow and raise awareness at a broader level that washing machines are the number one source of microplastics pollution, because I think now people understand what microplastics are and that they're scary and we probably don't want them in our bodies.
Max Pennington:I think there is a big gap still that clothing is the largest source of microplastic pollution and that there's something that you can actually do about that, where you can filter them out, and that you can actually see the impact that you're making. And I think another part is the app. We really hope it helps spread word of mouth. So one of the things we're going to do is have a shareable feature where you can show how many credit cards you've removed while you're using your filter, and we're also starting to think with the Nest thermostat you can like see where the other like Nest users are around you. So it could be kind of fun to be like, hey, there's this many cleaners in your neighborhood.
Max Pennington:So we're like looking at different features to help build like a cleaner community around the early adopters that are willing to really step up and help us show that there's demand for a product like this, and that kind of demand is what's key for us getting it on the inside of a washing machine. So we're trying to make sure everybody feels like a community and knows how grateful we are for the early support and on the mission to really try to cut off microplastics pollution. I mean, I like to say it a lot but I really do think that Cleveland can be the ground zero in the fight against microplastic pollution and we're proud to be building this in Cleveland and just excited to keep going and bring it to market and start going after other sources of microplastic pollution and the way that they're coming into and out of your homes.
Diane Bickett:Well, max, thank you so much for doing this work here, for coming up with this product and excited to see where this grows.
Max Pennington:Thank you, it's very good Thanks for having me.
Diane Bickett:I wish you well. Yeah, thank you.
Greg Rotuno:We hope you've enjoyed this episode of EcoSpeak CLE. You can find our full catalog of episodes on Spotify, apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes are available the first and third Tuesday of each month. Please follow EcoSpeak CLE on Facebook and Instagram and become part of the conversation. If you would like to send us feedback and suggestions, or if you'd like to become a sponsor of EcoSpeak CLE, you can email us at hello at EcoSpeakCLEcom. Stay tuned for more important and inspiring stories to come.
