**The Innovator’s Loneliness**
I was sitting at a table in Subic with a group of people who work with plastic waste. On the table in front of me I had real products — furniture I made from fluff plastic, different sizes and colors of consistent lumber, and printed tarps of stuff I make. Actual things you can use and build with.
I tried to explain what I see: that some of the messiest, most difficult plastic streams can be turned into proper, usable material at scale. That post-industrial sheets nobody wants because they’re printed could feed real production instead of just being collected or stored. I wasn’t pitching a theory. I was showing them what I’m already doing.
Only one person in the room actually understood what I was talking about. And even he didn’t say, “Let’s do this.” He just got it. That was the high point of the conversation.
Everyone else either looked confused or gently steered things back to what they know — cleanups and EPR credits. That’s where almost everyone is right now. The work is still mostly about getting plastic out of the environment and helping companies meet their compliance targets through collection and reporting. Actual production — consistently turning waste into sellable products — is still rare. Most people and organizations haven’t really stepped into that part yet.
So when you sit there with finished furniture made from the fraction everyone else struggles with, or you talk about taking several tons of printed PETG sheets and feeding them into a production process, you’re speaking from a different place. It’s not that people don’t care. It’s that their entire frame is still removal and compliance. Cleanup is visible and fundable. Production is slower, less certain, and requires a different way of thinking about the material.
That’s the loneliness I’m feeling right now.
It’s not dramatic. It’s the quiet understanding that I’m already thinking about manufacturing, consistency, and higher-value uses while most of the room is still organized around collection and credits. I keep running into the same gap. I have several tons of clean post-industrial PETG sitting here — good material, just printed — and it’s hard to move because the people who could use it aren’t yet thinking in terms of production. They’re still thinking in terms of cleanups.
The strange thing is that this loneliness also tells me something useful. If most of the activity is still at the cleanup and EPR stage, then the space for real production is still wide open. The people who are already making consistent products from difficult streams have more room than it feels like on the surface.
I’m not going to keep trying to explain the full picture in rooms that aren’t there yet. I’m going to keep building what I can actually build, keep the proof in front of me, and look for the smaller number of people who already think in terms of making things instead of just moving them. The furniture is already here. The lumber works. The PETG is still waiting for someone who wants to run production with it.
Being this far ahead feels lonely sometimes. But it also means I’m not competing with many people yet. I’m just early. And I’d rather be early and a little alone than surrounded by people who can’t see the next step.
