Dr. Luke Haverhals

Singularity Expert: Natural Materials, Nanomaterials, Agriculture, Manufacturing Technologies, Automation

Dr. Luke Haverhals is the Founder and CEO of Natural Fiber Welding, Inc. (NFW). Luke has deep technical expertise with natural materials, nanomaterials, agriculture, manufacturing technologies and automation. He has spent the last decade working on scalable technologies that will enable the circular economy and disrupt the petrochemical industry and plastics. More new tonnage of plant materials grows in a day on earth than the total tonnage of all synthetic materials (e.g., plastics) produced by people in a year. What humankind has been missing is a unifying technology to manufacture trillions of dollars of products – including textiles, furniture, footwear, packaging, et cetera using only natural materials with low resource (e.g., low carbon) footprints and in ways that eliminate pollution at the end of a product’s life cycle. NFW has solved these problems with several remarkable technology breakthroughs. After making core chemistry and manufacturing discoveries as a chemistry professor at the United States Naval Academy, Luke founded NFW to commercialize patented fabrication platforms that enables new high-performance materials for textiles and beyond. NFW is now leveraging the most abundant high-performance materials that nature provides to create complex composites that cannot be manufactured in any other way. Production of amazing new functional natural materials are being scaled by the NFW team right now and range from cost effective solutions that recycle billions of pounds of cotton and food waste into performance textiles and leather-like materials, to 'exotic' plant-based composites for clean water applications and even wearable capacitive energy storage. NFW is partnered with iconic fashion brands, global automotive OEMs, and performance footwear brands to displace plastics with products made from nutrients and that do not require petroleum. Luke and the NFW team are bring humanity out of the 'extractive age’ and into the 'regenerative age’. With NFW technologies, it is now possible to exchange polluting synthetics sourced from the petrochemical industry with tunable composite materials sourced from regenerative agriculture. In so doing, Luke and the NFW team are executing a mission to enable people everywhere to live abundantly and with less conflict over finite fossil resources by instead leveraging the power of sunlight, plants, and regenerative agriculture practices.