Saving the f#$%ing rainforests with Shara Ticku of C16 Biosciences

Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So chances are, if you brushed your teeth today, or did the laundry or swiped on deodorant or ate a protein bar. You came across palm oil. It's in almost everything, more than 50% of products on supermarket shelves to be exact. And there's a good reason for that. Palm oil is the reason toothpaste and shampoos foam up so nicely. It's why chocolate melts in your mouth rather than in your hand. And it's a really effective natural preservative for tons of food products. It's a dream ingredient for producers and consumers across so many industries. But there's a big reason why palm oil is also problematic, and it's not because of the ingredient itself.

It's totally plant-based and biodegradable, it's perfectly safe to use in food and household supplies, cosmetics. The real problem is the way palm oil is made. The way most of it is harvested today is incredibly destructive to the planet, because the trees that produce the magic ingredient only like to grow around the equator. and palm oil producers burn down rainforests to make way for more palm oil plantations, which disrupts habitats and makes the air toxic for entire countries in the process. There's a company called C sixteen Biosciences that wants to change all of this. It's doing that by producing a palm oil alternative.

Sheratiku helped co-found the company just a few years ago in 2018, but it was an early experience in her career that opened her eyes to problem of palm oil. She was sent to Singapore for a business trip and her company also sent her off with a pack of N95 masks with no explanation. And it's only when she landed that the reason became clear. As soon as I landed in Singapore, I understood why. The air was

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