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My father and his colleague developed a scalable process to manufacture Teflon without the use of PFAS back in the previous century; they had both been recruite
by ordinaryradical 3y ago
My father and his colleague developed a scalable process to manufacture Teflon without the use of PFAS back in the previous century; they had both been recruited heavily by DuPont which made it relatively easy to sell the patents, at which point they immediately disappeared and were never acted upon.
One of the interesting side effects of free markets is that when there are no consequences for mass poisoning / polluting, you will ignore opportunities to manufacture without doing so because there is often zero or negative economic consequences to change your process.
In DuPont’s case, it was more valuable in the near term for the shareholders to ignore this manufacturing innovation and not disrupt supply than to reconfigure with a new process. No doubt there were massive risks involved in trying a new process that made it a “safer” and wiser decision economically to continue to use PFAS.
I think about this every time someone tells us on HN how a freer market will solve our problems.
- tredre3 3y ago> My father and his colleague developed a scalable process to manufacture Teflon without the use of PFAS back in the previous century How is that possible? PTFE (teflon) is itself a PFAS, no? Did they "only" get rid of other PFAS used during the manufacturing of teflon?
- ordinaryradical 3y agoI just asked him. “Teflon is a high molecular weight polymer made using perfluoronated surfactants. Technically, PTFE is a fluorine-containing material but it is not the PFAS pollutants of recent concern. In the conventional synthesis, the real source of PFAS pollution is primarily those surfactants used in its manufacture. Our process made the use of those surfactants unnecessary.” Why do you DuPont never acted on your patents? “It was a cost of business decision because they had already invested so much capital in making Teflon with those surfactants.”
- OtherShrezzing 3y agoIs your dad forbidden from recreating this technology with DuPont in control of those patents? There's probably a tonne of VC money out there for an environmentally friendly disruptor to teflon.
- ordinaryradical 3y agoI’m going to link to another reply on this and provide some additional color: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36961328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36961328 Getting a product like this stood up is a $100 million endeavor at minimum. That’s before customer #1 presses “buy.” My father and the colleague I mentioned are both successful serial entrepreneurs (large exits, Sequioa backed unicorn, etc.). There is close to zero appetite from VCs in this. VCs seem to be allergic to these CapEx intensive businesses and I don’t blame them—the risks are enormous when compared to something like a SaaS. That said, if you know someone who’s dying to throw hundreds of millions at this problem, he’d probably take the intro. You can email me at super solenoid theory at gmail dot com.
- TylerE 3y agoOn the other hand, the capital intensive nature makes it a lot harder for a competitor to spin up their version overnight and eat your lunch.
- gottorf 3y agoAs pg said, "do things that don't scale".
- OtherShrezzing 3y agoI think Carbon13 and the other "climate emergency" accelerators would be interested in some capacity, at least as a starter. They've got a fairly strong network of Family Houses & trusts. I think you'd get seed money, and a network large enough to raise some serious capital in future rounds.
- at_a_remove 3y ago
- refurb 3y agoI'm pretty sure Teflon is made with tetrafluoroethylene, a gas, not with surfactants?
- amluto 3y agoAs I understand it (and I don’t claim to understand it all that well), the processing involved in turning tetrafluoroethylene into a useful form of PTFE involves the use of fluorinated surfactants to get everything into a solution or emulsion.
- mandmandam 3y agoThis remind me of the recent story here, about how tobacco companies knew that radioactive polonium in their tobacco leaves was causing an insane rate of lung cancer, killing 130 out of ever 1,000 smokers over 25 years. [0] They even had a process to remove the radioactivity, but, it made the nicotine a little less addictive so they didn't do it. Instead, they kept marketing to children with cartoon characters for another 20+ years until forced to stop. These same companies are still marketing cigarettes to kids where they can get away with it. At some point we need to start talking about self defense from this shitty system. And I feel like that point was the 60's. 0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36925019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36925019
- hedora 3y agoIt's been long enough for the patents to expire, so why not help a competitor commercialize the technology? Do you have a reference to the patent number?
- ordinaryradical 3y agoThis is no doubt correct. I’m almost certain they’ve expired, though I’m not going to include links here and associate my real name with my HN acct. But the reason they haven’t been acted upon (that I know of) is that economic difficulty of making a competing Teflon has to do chiefly with issues of manufacturing scale and large up front capital expenditure. This is true across the entire chemicals industry for any new product. Rule of thumb costs were, the last I heard, roughly 100 Million in development to get a single product into baseline commercial viability. Why compete against an established and “tainted” product like Teflon? Can you guarantee the PFAS free process is cheaper at any of the initial commercial scales you’re likely to achieve? Is there a market for an off-brand substitute? These kinds of risks delimit innovation in physical manufacturing far more than the possession of IP.