Biorecycling CEO displays a jacket made from pollution but says people still don’t believe it’s real or even possible
It can be hard to be optimistic about the future of Earth’s climate. Oceans are rising, autumn is unseasonably warm, and wildfires are raging. But some companies are taking lemons and turning them into lemonade—despite how impossible it may seem.
At Fortune’s Global Forum on Tuesday in New York City, Jennifer Holmgren, chairman and CEO of biorecycling company LanzaTech, discussed how her business is creating products out of pollution. For example, the company takes the carbon dioxide omitted from China’s commercial plants and pumps it into a bioreactor to create ethanol. It then converts that organic compound into a monomer that later becomes polyester, which can then be used to make things like jackets and other clothes.
But these types of advanced technology are so forward-thinking that Holmgren says she frequently encounters naysayers.
“Whenever you have a new technology, it’s almost like you’re going to the ‘Ministry of No.’ Everything is no, there’s always a reason why it doesn’t work, why it can’t scale, why people won’t want it, or why it’s not perfect,” Holmgren says. “The perfect being the enemy of the good is really the biggest thing we deal with.”
Many people don’t believe it’s possible to take pollution and create wearable products out of it—even if the CEO holds up the pollution-saving woven jacket onstage at an event, which she did at Fortune’s Global Forum. Holmgren says it’s difficult for her to make and win arguments about pollution-converting technology because people will always be skeptical. Ultimately, she says she needs help from like-minded individuals who see the promise of technology like LanzaTech.
“I need the allies. I need the people that we lean in to help us be successful,” she says. “The success comes from allies. It comes from people like all of you sitting in this room, who when people say, ‘Well, the LanzaTech technology can’t scale,’ you’re the one that comes in and says, ‘Well, but if it does scale, it will reduce emissions.”
Jim Fitterling, the chairman and CEO of Dow, chimed in on the conversation onstage. As a major company that partners with smaller businesses like LanzaTech, Dow is deeply invested in alternate solutions to pollution and climate change.
“To some extent, people believe what they want to believe until they’ve seen something different, until they’ve seen a future, or they’ve seen an opportunity that they can’t imagine,” Fitterling says.
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