Materials from Sweden

At Trifilon’s Stockholm office, about once a week, we get deliveries of delicious hemp-seed shakes made by Hempster, a startup based just outside of Stockholm. This podcast features Bettina Schutz, one of the founders of Hempster. She tells the story about how she and her partner started making tasty health drinks.

Could a certificate system get companies to recycle products more? Hanna Ljungkvist Nordin from the Swedish Environmental Research Institute, better known as IVL, gave a lecture about such a certificate system at the Plastteknik Nordic, plastics tradeshow. This is the 6th and final in the series from that tradeshow.

What are Legos made from? Allan Verner Rasmussen is a materials consultant with loads of experience in the plastics industry. He currently works for Plastix and also has his own consultancy Altha Aps. In recent years he also worked for Lego.

Tons of plastics are used to make fishing nets and ropes. In this episode we speak with Hans Axel Kristensen, the CEO of Plastix, a Danish recycling company that gathers up fishing nets and ropes from marinas around the world and gives them a new life.

What is neutron scattering? In this podcast Andrew Jackson from the European Spallation Source tells us about a large project in Lund to build a center where researchers can shoot neutrons at materials in order to study them.

How can government make plastic production sustainable? This podcast is the second of six we recorded from a trade fair called Plastteknik Nordic (Nordic plastics technology). Tobias Nielsen is a postdoctoral fellow from Lund University in the political science department. He works on the STEPS-Mistra program.

Can you get plastics from sugar beets? This podcast is the first of six we recorded from a trade fair called Plastteknik Nordic (Nordic plastics technology). Niklas Warlin is a PhD student from Lund University working in the chemistry department on the STEPS-Mistra program.

Cars, buses, trains, planes and… electric scooters? In this podcast we speak with Joel Franklin, a researcher from KTH, the prestigious engineering institute in Stockholm, about his field of transportation studies and urban initiatives to green up transportation.

Few people know about waste in Sweden with the range and depth of knowledge of this podcast's guest. Åsa Stenmarck works for IVL, the Swedish Environmental Research Institute. Her realms of expertise include consumerism, waste management, and recycling.

Ever find a balloon in your fish dinner? This guest did. Patricia Villarrubia Gómez is a plastic pollution expert at GRID-Arendal, a Norwegian foundation that works closely with the United Nations. She has also worked as a research assistant at the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

If you’re a product designer, and you need to know what materials are out there, you can always browse at a material library. This pod’s guest Björn Florman was one of the founders and is now the creative project manager for Materialbiblioteket, or The Materials Library, based in Stockholm. He has seen material aesthetic trends come and go.

When we make paper products, there are heaps of a byproduct called lignin, which is typically burned. This pod’s guest, Christopher Carrick, developed a way to make plastic from lignin and started a company RenCom to bring the technology to the market. That plastic would be derived from tree material and is likely biodegradable.

Ever throw something away, like an old vacuum, and think there’s no way the materials will get separated and reused? This pod’s guest, Taina Flink, helps companies think about designing products for their afterlife. She works for ÅF Pöyry as a “consultant in circular design.” She previously worked for Stena Recycling as a “design for recycling specialist.”

Sidd Kumaraswamy is a materials engineer who specializes in composites. He currently works for Volvo cars and is working towards a PhD from KTH. Sidd worked for Trifilon a few years back before moving on to study at the Max Planck institute.

Gustav Stenbeck currently works as the CEO of Mestro. He also gives lectures about sustainability. And he also acts as an angel investor, supporting startups with sustainable business ideas. One of those is Trifilon.

Amit Paul is the Managing Director of Paxymer, a Swedish company that produces flame retardants for plastics that are safer and more sustainable than other technologies. Amit knows about the history of flame retardants in Sweden and about the chemicals used in flame retardant technologies.

David Sandquist was recently hired as the Head of Research and Development for Trifilon. He comes from the prestigious VTT Research Centre in Finland. David has expert knowledge about forestry and biocomposite technologies.

Richard Blume is a Senior Sustainability Advisor for Sustain in Time, an advisory company in Stockholm that works with an array of organizations to develop more sustainable businesses.

Materials from Sweden features free-form chats with experts about consumer products, what they're made of, and how sustainable they are.