An engineer left Dyson to help save the planet. Adam Root - CEO and Founder of Matter - said his new venture is so important not just for him, but for the environment and everyone else out there.
Mr Root - who has been a mechanical engineer for 12 years - was 27 years old when he left Dyson in 2017. Having been designing products for the last 10 years, he saw what was happening with the climate crisis and realised he wanted to use his "engineering superpowers" to do something positive for the world.
Now, he specialises in making innovative new products that are going to solve some of the biggest environmental challenges we are currently facing. He has spent a lot of time building his company, now known as Matter.
He didn’t have a lot of resources or money when he started and he was unemployed for some time, but he didn't let that stop him. His journey began when he won a £250 ‘will it work’ grant for an idea he pitched to the Prince’s Trust.
The £250 he won went towards his idea for building a prototype to capture microplastics, which are miniature plastics, generally smaller than 5mm, that are currently being found everywhere. The Guardian states that microplastics have been found in 75% of fish in New Zealand, as well as having been found in human breast milk and blood.
The largest source of primary microplastics entering the oceans come from textiles and clothes washing. Mr Root said: "Tackling the biggest problems first, such as microplastictics released from your laundry, is key to protecting the health of our ecosystem based on mounting evidence of the potential harm they are causing."
Shortly after receiving the £250 'Will it Work' grant, he applied for the ‘Young Innovators' programme with The Prince's Trust and Innovate UK. He was ecstatic when he won the award, which came with a £5,000 prize along with mentoring and support from professionals.
The money from the Young Innovator of the Year award helped him to get Matter off the ground and to create an innovative product called Gulp which was launched in Bristol earlier this month. Gulp is a sustainable, long-lasting washing machine filter that catches up to 90% of all microfibres from every laundry cycle.
He said: "Matter is what we are all made from. It’s the constitutional parts that make all things. It’s the parts that bind us and what we all have in common.
"Matter as a company was built to mirror the natural environment through a circular economy. Just as in nature, there is no such thing as waste.
"We as a company are building a circular system for technical materials in the world and specifically the capture, harvesting and recycling of microplastics to prevent them from leaching into the bio cycle.
"In the natural cycle nutrients turn into plants which decompose back into nutrients. Humanity is trying to mirror this with the Technical cycle, this is why we don’t see laptops in gutters or expensive materials entering the natural environment.
"However, this is not the same for chemical and plastic pollution. They are leaching from the technical cycle into the bio cycle.
"Matter is the hard line between the two. We are a microplastic technology company turning our waste circular and removing pollution with new solutions and materials."
He added: "Bristol is home for me, we’ve been traveling round a lot to different places, but Bristol will always be home. There’s a lot here for what I want to do, there’s a lot of creativity here, access to talent to build an engineering company and one of the fastest growing tech cities."
You can back Matter's new project 'Gulp' by clicking here.
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