Thank you everyone for bearing with us. We'll have one more joining us in a few moments, but for those that do not know me, I'm Evan Tylenda. I lead a European GS SUSTAIN research team out of London. You know, the circular economy remains a massive theme, I think is quite underappreciated at the moment and is a personal passion for me. You know, to kind of kick things off, we see three key drivers for the circular economy. You know, namely, one, we're seeing resource prices spiking. We're running into a critical material crisis that's putting a much greater emphasis on material efficiency and recovery by consumers and corporates. Second, we're seeing a rising focus, as we've all learned, on net zero emissions, biodiversity in the last panel. This is all going to require a circular economy to actually become a solution to solving for net zero emissions and biodiversity. You know, for example, a lot of resource consumption is a big driver of biodiversity loss. We want to start to think about limiting the amount of virgin material that we are consuming to help contribute to net zero and biodiversity. And then lastly, regulation is certainly picking up, and we're seeing the economics become quite attractive for the circular economy, which we'll talk a little bit about. We have a great group of companies. They're here that cuts across the value chain from raw material manufacturers, distributors, innovators, and you know, helping to dematerialize the economy through the adoption of not just circular techniques, but also just simply good old-fashioned innovation, which I think brings both economic and sustainability benefits. So for our panel, we have Willie McLain, Chief Financial Officer at Eastman, Stanley Bergman, Chairman, Chief Executive Officer at Henry Schein, and Emily Leproust, CEO and Co-founder at Twist Bioscience. So thank you all for joining us. Let's get started. We're going to talk first about strategic business and sustainability priorities. Willie, why don't we start with you? Eastman launched its six principles for a circular economy. Can you talk us through these? How does the circular economy fit into your core business and your sustainability strategies? Thanks, and happy to be here today. You know, key to the circular economy and bringing that to the polyesters, we support, you know, reduce, reuse, and recycle. Also, we believe that new technologies must be material to material, and not waste to energy. New technologies should also, I'll call it, improve the quality of life, and in that, lower carbon emissions. Additionally, mechanical recycling has a place, and we think it must be complementary with existing mechanical. As CFO, you would expect, these must have economic returns with them as well, and that's a core principle as we look at this. And then companies must be transparent. There has to be transparency to be successful. And as you think about that, that could be with mass balancing, et cetera. You know, Eastman's been a world leader in co-polyesters for durable applications, as well as cellulosic biopolymers for decades. And what we're doing with these processes is we're bringing to bear the circular economy now, and as we bring those, we're doing it in a way that not only creates a circular economy, but it does it in a manner we hold the bar high of it's got to reduce carbon emissions. It should be better than existing technologies are bringing so that you can have a circular economy and a better climate together. Then handing over to Stanley, Henry Schein operates a very large distribution network for hundreds of thousands of products across the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Can you discuss some of the sustainability strategic priorities for your business and highlight where you think the circularity fits in? Thank you, Evan, for inviting us. Good to be on this panel today. Thank you all for being here. You know, Henry Schein is the largest provider of products to dentists and healthcare practitioners outside of the hospital. So, our focus is essentially on helping practitioners operate a more efficient practice so that they can provide better clinical care. This whole area of environmental concern is, of course, understood by our customers. They know it's the right thing to do. I would say our customers in Europe are more tuned than, for example, in the United States. The challenge is how to turn this into something that's practical. And for our customers, we are working with them on explaining how they can use more environmentally friendly products in their practice. So we came up with a program some years ago called EnviroDent, environmentally friendly products in dentistry, and Practice Green, a product offering of basically the major products used by dentists that we launched about a year and a half ago. It started in Australia, now in the United States and in Europe. So educating that there are multiple options on products, but you can use an environmentally friendly product and why. And then what's important on our infrastructure? We manufacture many of the products we make, and we distribute practically every product that a dentist or physician may use in their practice. So the whole logistics, advancing the logistics in an environmentally friendly way, is a program that is key to us, as well as on the manufacturing side. So these are very, very important. Now, we also repair, install equipment, repair equipment, of course, maintain the equipment. It's done through a fleet of over 1,000 vehicles in the United States and another similar number throughout the world. How do you make this more environmentally friendly? A key part of our strategic plan. Of course, the electric vehicles are very helpful, but they're not really available in rural areas, the charging capability. It's in our plan. We're advancing this. And then the key is with our suppliers. Many of our suppliers are large companies, relatively easy to understand what they are doing. It's the smaller manufacturers that we're committed to helping them advance their production and the availability of their products, logistics, in a more environmentally friendly way. So those are just a couple of the areas we're working on. It's our results and the direction we are heading in and reporting against. The The direction is contained in our annual sustainability report. That's, that's perfect. We'll dive deeper into some of those. Emily, over to you. Can you discuss Twist technology? What is silicon-based DNA writing? What are some of the use cases, and how can it be leveraged in various sectors to enable not just circular outcomes, but more sustainable outcomes? Yeah, thank you very much for the invitation. Great pleasure to be here. So at Twist, we write DNA from scratch, and you know DNA is four letters, ACGT. And so we built a printer that prints DNA on silicon 3D printing, because we've miniaturized the chemistry. So instead of our competitors, they use about 50 microliters to do the synthesis, and that's the size of a teardrop. And then we've reduced that to 10 picoliters. It's, you know, hard to comprehend. But the bottom line is that we reduce the volume of reagents by 99.8%, and so that is less COGS, and so we just have a cost advantage, and that's how we can be extremely competitive making DNA. Not only the way we make DNA is more sustainable, but in addition, our customers use the DNA to do great things. It's used to diagnose and treat diseases, sorry, which obviously that saves the most important capital of all, is the human capital. And then, it's being used for materials, either to do a drop-in replacement, where instead of getting fossil fuel from the ground to make chemicals, you can take biomass as and then use enzyme, E. coli, algae, or bacteria to do fermentation. And fermentation is the conversion of biomass into alcohol and CO2, so that's beer, or in France, where I'm from, it is called champagne. And so instead of... If you change the genes of yeast, instead of making alcohol, you guys, we can redirect the chemical engineering that happened inside the yeast to make any chemicals you want. And so, one thing is just a drop-in replacement, where now you have the same chemical, you can't tell the difference, and third, it's more sustainable. You know, frankly, nobody cares. The driver is that it has to be cheaper. If it's cheaper, people will switch. And then there's an opportunity to make new materials that you could not make from oil. And so if the last hundred years was the century of plastic, I think in the future, we'll be able to engineer protein to have the same characteristic or even better than plastic. But, obviously, it will be more sustainable to have a protein economy instead of a plastic economy. And then, one last use case that our customer use our DNA for is for the engineering of plants. And, you know, the idea is the opportunity is to make plant more productive, and so you reduce the amount of land you need. So actually, that increases biodiversity outside of that very intense production. And you can also adapt the plants to a changing environment, more extremes of weather. You can also adapt to using more natural ways of doing pest control. So instead of using harsh chemicals, you could synthesize the natural pheromones that insects use and trick insects into not reproducing. So there's a number of great things that can be done with the DNA we make, and the DNA we make is done way more sustainably than other ways of making DNA. Excellent. Well, let's get into capital deployment and the economics here of some of these technologies. So Willie, I go back to you. You know, talk us through some of the customer demand landscape. What does it look like for circular solutions? How is Eastman deploying capital around that? And then if you can dive into some of the economics of these initiatives, what are the IRRs? What are the project lead times for these circular investments? And I guess, how does that differ from the overall business? Well, it's a very timely question because we're getting ready to, to operationalize our first world-scale facility. As I think about it, each of us in the room are consumers, and really, this technology existed, you know, decades ago. But in the last five years, there's been a growing momentum, and that momentum is each of us are willing to pay, along with the brands, higher prices for recycled content versus fossil fuel. Mm-hmm. And we've been able to test that in the marketplace with some bridge technologies that brands are performing extremely well. So one, consumers, there's a demand for it. Two, as we think about, you know, leveraging, I'll call it in the polyester environment, we're bringing that to bear with our facility in Kingsport. So we're bringing that. We de-risk what we're bringing, because that's where we produce our polyesters from for our first facility. Since December of 2021, we've more than doubled the brands that we've signed up for our first facility. We have enough pipelines that we have lead generation that could sell out that first plant. And this is for our specialty products. Like I said, we've been in this for a decade. As we think about where we think this can go, we have projects in France as well as a second U.S. project, and we've got baseload customers that are signing up today to support the fundamentals of this project to meet their sustainability goals. So as you think about what we're trying to do, it's meet the sustainability goals of our customers in ways that they can achieve that through the way the marketplace is today. From a return perspective, we have two business models. One is our specialty business, and we expect with that first facility to have return on invested capitals of greater than 15%. The other solution is bringing solutions like we're bringing to PepsiCo, and I call that our circular solution. This isn't about providing a, a polyester. This is about providing a sustainable solution that they can achieve today in the marketplace through mechanical, and we can bring that at a world scale. Those projects we expect, because of the returns and the business model, to be greater than 12%. So we're excited about where we are in this journey. We expect to have revenue around year-end, and we're bringing a world scale where mechanical can't provide that solution. Excellent. May come back to some of that. But switching back to Stanley, you know, Henry Schein provides repair services for handpieces used in dental practices every day. Can you give us some stats on the size of that repair market for handpieces? How are the margins on some of those services, and are there any other categories that you see, you know, where you could offer more of a sizable repair component, or is there opportunity to work with suppliers for other pieces of equipment? So the handpiece area, it doesn't seem like it's a very exciting area, but every dentist uses a handpiece. And the business we are in is, of course, ensuring that dentists have the right handpieces and exactly in the right place at the right time, and to have the appropriate sterilization requirements dealt with each day. There's a lot of activity that goes into that, that can impact the use of energy, environmentally friendly usage of products, and that is an area we're focused on. Our business is relatively small in that area. I mean, we're a big market share. It's $200 million, but I would say that's a great area. The area that is really exciting from a energy point of view is the repair of in-office equipment. So think of it. You sit in that dental chair, and if that chair is not working, that dentist is out of business. So we have the largest network in the world of people, technicians, that go into the practice, install the equipment, repair their equipment when it's down. So where we're investing, Evan, is in software to limit, preventative software, to limit the number of emergency calls. Mm-hmm. Every emergency call is a result of a piece of equipment not working, a delay in the efficiency of the practice, and more important, a truck that has to go out, use up a lot of energy, pollute the environment. If we can reduce the number of trucks that go out with technicians, it saves the practitioner money, and it's more efficient for us, and it's profitable to us. We are investing significantly in driving the efficiency of the technology used in the practice, the equipment used in the practice, through processes that ultimately result in maintenance of the product, or in fact, repairing an issue, a problem in the practice, virtually through video or through a telephone call. These efficiencies will drive our profits for Henry Schein, tens of millions, and probably hundreds of millions in terms of saving of the cost of utilities, labor costs to the practitioner, and efficient operation of the practice, so that the capacity of the practice can increase. Mm-hmm. Right now, there's a bit of a challenge because there is more demand for dentistry than capacity. Mm-hmm. We will free up capacity. You add all of that up, we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars, perhaps billions of dollars around the world. So, if I hear you correctly, it sounds like there's the element of predictive maintenance, which, you know, the whole goal of that is to reduce downtime, promote better asset utilization. You know, certainly circular.... I mean, can you talk maybe a little bit more about some of the demand you're seeing for some of these new solutions, or is it still too early? No, no, no. It all relates to preventive maintenance. In the end, fewer visits- Mm-hmm. To deal with problems in the practice, maintenance problems that could be avoided. So the demand is increasing. Dentists are not aware of it necessarily. Our field sales consultants are making the dentists aware of this, and there's a tremendous uptick. Generally, making the whole maintenance process, preventive maintenance process, more efficient is highly profitable for us, for the customer. Maybe there's less visits, as I said, but also more chair time, and we're educating our customers on this. This technology, a lot of this is AI-driven, is relatively new in our industry at any rate, and the demand is there. It's growing as education grows. That's excellent. So boosting revenue, reducing costs, you know, that's helpful definitely to the economics. Emily, back to you. What are some of the best metrics for investors to measure the financial success and the sustainability benefits of your products? I know when we connected, you talked about revenue, margin, market share, you know, but just, you know, what are you replacing as well at the same time, and what are the benefits that come with that? Yeah, no, definitely. So as far as the, I'll do an answer in two parts. The first part is with related, and the other is our customers. So from a Twist point of view, it's about revenue, growth, margin, and cash in the bank at the end of the year. And again, because we miniaturize the way we synthesize DNA, we have lower costs, which gives us a competitive advantage. And recently we've measured how much are we saving? And so we analyze what is the carbon emission to make the gene. And so again, if you go on our website, it's in your vector. If you've cloned in your life, you know that cloning is a 21st century equivalent of coal mining. It's really, really tedious, but we do it for you. The old way of making genes to make one gene is the equivalent of driving a car for 59 miles. But our way of making a gene is the equivalent to carbon emission of driving a car for 0.09 miles. So if you buy a gene from us, you save about 59 miles of carbon emission. So buy one gene a day from Twist, and you save your commute away. And so that's the benefit that we bring, low emission while we do it as a business. And then for our customers, they are leveraging the new technology of synthetic biology to achieve, you know, great, great things. And our customers are really swinging for the fences. You can think of, for instance, blue dye to make a jean. It's the indigo dye. The production is incredibly polluting. But you could engineer a cell to make that same, same dye, but by fermentation, which is very non-pollutive. And again, it is the same dye, but you have to pay more. Our customers don't believe that, that, that will work. They will have to make it in a way that's less expensive. Or another opportunity that our customers are going after is, can you digest plastic with an enzyme to go back to the, to the monomers? As we all know, plastic bottles are recycled, but in practice, they are not. It's just, it's just a marketing ploy to make customers feel better. But with an enzyme, you could actually go back to the true monomers and achieve a true recycling. And so in the grand scheme of things, what our customers are trying to do is realizing that everybody individually, they are willing to make small sacrifices, but nobody is willing to make big sacrifices. And so to make changes at scale, we'll have to just deploy technology such that we offer a better lifestyle, and you get sustainability for free. And I think that that's what our customers are driving towards, and they are leveraging our technology and our DNA to get there. Maybe really quickly, what are some of the roadblocks that you're facing in terms of adoption of some of the new technology? We're doing really well. I think this year we guided, I think $240 million revenue. I have to be careful because it's our week 52, so, end of fiscal year, my favorite week of the year. And then next week is my second favorite week, week one, we go again. So, you know, we're doing well. However, at the same time, when I look, we actually only have 4% of customers use us, even though we're better, we're faster, and, you know, we are more sustainable. So there's still a lot of market shares to go get for us. You know, some of the roadblock is just inertia. It's the alternative is good enough, and so we are laying in wait. As soon as the competition makes a mistake, we grab the customers, and we have a really, really, really great retention rate. We're like the hotel concierge. You can check out, but you can never leave. So once we get a customer, we can build on that. But yeah, it's all spreading the world, and in the near future, we'll start to use sustainability as a marketing tool. We have not done it yet, and so far we've been winning on the merit of our products. Again, we're faster, we're better and cheaper. But, now that we have carbon emissions measured and validated, we'll go to customers that have their own carbon reduction targets and use our data to convince them that by switching to us, it will help them achieve those targets. Excellent. I mean, Willie, back to you. You mentioned some of the projects coming online. You know, what are some of the key milestones that the crowd should be aware of around the commercialization, and what do you, you know—when and what do you expect the cash flow financial impact to be in, you know, when it's operational? As we think about the goals of our circular economy, we're investing $2.25 billion, so it's not a small investment. We expect that we're going to deliver roughly $450 million of EBITDA by 2027 as a result of that. We're not going to have to wait to see that. As I said, we're going to have revenue around year-end. We expect incremental EBITDA in next year of roughly $75 million from our first facility. By the end of 2025, we expect that to grow to a run rate of $150 million. So as we see the path that we're on, the brands that we're aligning with... And the criticality is, you know, the plastic bottle right there on the table is a better feedstock than fossil fuel. It's already been cleaned, it's already been processed, and we can take that and basically make the molecule identical to virgin. As we think about alternatives like mechanical recycling, in many cases, it can only handle clear. There are so many things that we use as consumers in our houses, as we go out to eat. Many of you are probably looking at a clear clamshell today of plastic. You know, in the future, we want that to be recycled, and if it's food contact, you want to be sure that that it's from something that's been through a process that's been purified. So both from, you know, how we are bringing this forward, it's here today, it's not theoretical. You know, we've been a company for 100 years. We've produced polyesters for 70. We've been practicing methanolysis for over 30 years, and we're bringing that to the market today, and we're aligned well with brands that believe in that, because many of you are supporting that. We realize that there needs to be change, and ultimately, that it needs to be more like the model from aluminum, that things are recycled and that the change will occur, and that there will be policy that's enabled. But we're showing today that we don't need policy to actually generate financial returns. What we need policy for is to make the supply chains more robust, because the scale at which we're talking, it's small today relative to the global polyester industry. Maybe, maybe sticking with you on... You know, can you talk to some of the biomaterial? Because there's already a cellulosic business that Eastman has, and, you know, give us some of the figures on the split between, you know, chemical recycling, bio-based feedstock. I mean, what do you see that we should be aware of? We've been in cellulosic for 100 years. As you think about that, it's wood pulp, in many cases from certified forests. Mm-hmm. Additionally, as we think about that, we have Carbon Renewal Technology that we can use to process that pulp into a biopolymer. And today, so you can have recycled content for roughly 50%, and you can have certified wood pulp, and you have a true biopolymer today. We're being successful in that in textiles, so we're bringing textiles in. We could process that into the feedstocks, and then produce garments that you may wear today, like activewear, in the textiles industry. Where we're going and where there's a real need also is like with Aventa. You know, as you think about protein trays, as you go to your grocery store, they're looking to replace the polystyrene that are, you know—if you look at your chicken, it's on a yellow clamshell, right? As we think about the future, that can be with a Eastman product called Aventa, that biodegrades either in industrial or in home applications. So you can achieve both end of life in a manner that also had recycled content. So we're excited about what that can bring, and we've talked about that, you know, growing from something small to what we believe can be $200 million dollar business with primarily our existing assets. We don't have to make investments. Well, that's excellent. And Stanley, going back to you on one thing you mentioned in your intro remarks, is the electrification of your fleet. Technically, that is circular. Talk us through some of the goals there and the progress on that. Yes. Well, obviously, if you can take a repair truck and move it to a more efficient methodology for-...visiting the dental office, or you can have less visits, the cost will go down, better for the environment. But, Evan, I think what is really important is what we're doing in healthcare in general. We are driving efficiency. For example, when you go to the dentist, well, the traditional way of getting a crown or bridge would be to take an impression, send that impression to the lab, come back to the dentist, and then, likely have it fitted and maybe not perfect, send it back to the lab, come back. What we are doing now is, same-day dentistry. In other words, mill the crown and the bridge on exactly the same day. Within an hour or so of, the taking the scan, you can have your crown or bridge, put into your mouth, installed, adjusted by the dentist. Think of the convenience, how many less travel hours are involved. We're doing the same on, and now, of course, not only through chairside milling, but 3D printing is advancing. This is driving efficiency, improving on the use of the efficiency of the practice and, of course, the patient's time, but also the whole movement from taking care of procedures in the hospital to the ambulatory surgical center and into the practitioner's office. Huge convenience and a significant reduction in transportation costs and utilization of environmentally unfriendly products, namely, in particular, gas. So the whole efficiency in healthcare, same-day service, walking out of an ambulatory surgical center immediately after the procedure, same day, is driving down costs. We're in the middle of all of that. We're driving it in a significant way, and it's totally environmentally friendly. That's just good old-fashioned efficiency, driving real economy outcomes. Emily, back to you. You know, you announced a partnership with Polycarbin to circularize plastic and laboratory consumables. Can you elaborate a little bit on that and also give us a sense of, you know, the DNA sequencing space? What are some of the innovations potentially on the horizon that we should be aware of? Yeah, no, great, great question. So we announced a partnership where the plastic that we use to make genes is recycled and reused. And so we go back into the circular economy. And you know, the report says that we have 7,000 lbs of plastic that we took out of landfill. And so first it's great, but at the same time, I just mentioned that you know, our guidance for the year is $241 million-$242 million. And so really the important metric to me is that we're gonna make $241 million-$242 million of revenue with only 7,000 lbs of plastic. So that, that is really the, the real punchline, is that, because we've matured all the chemistry that we use to make DNA, actually it's, it's an extremely, small number of, of, of, small amount of plastic that is needed to make all those, those genes and have all that big impact. And I think what you are referring at the end was, in addition, there's a, there's a future use of DNA where you can store data in DNA. So instead of data as zeros and ones, you can store data in ACGT, and you could put, I think, dozens of Google data center in a sugar cube. So you can imagine that, you could store data in a very dense fashion, which, would save a lot of energy that is currently needed to keep those, data centers going. Maybe what we have. We're running out of time, but want to do a quick one for everybody here, you know, on regulation. How will regulation be needed to support the Circular Economy? Are there any differences in what you're seeing across markets? You know, certainly EU is progressing quite fast on their Circular Economy Action Plan. You know, you're seeing recycling requirements for packaging, textiles, you know, electronic equipment recycling, all sorts of things. Anything that anybody wants to take first? Well, there's more regulation. There's more illogical legislation, but there's also a lot of good happening. So we need smart people, and we need uniformity around the world, because to move medical products around the world today is very complex. It's costing us a lot of money, it's costing the patients a lot of money, and it's not enabling... It's preventing good products that could help health from being available to consumers or to practitioners around the world. So good legislation is important, but efficiency and ability to move product and make it available to all practitioners is very important. Go ahead. I'll just echo. You know, it needs to be smart regulation. As we think about the balance, we need public-private partnerships. Also, we need, you know, the investments in networks and supply chains that don't exist today if we're gonna continue to make the progress. Reverse logistics is a big one. Emily, any thoughts? Well, I mean, we'll take your good regulations, but I think for us, our view is that, you know, to get really true change, that is sustainable, we need to just make those new products that are just so irresistible that people go away from carbon, from fossil-based materials and lifestyle to a more biomass-based lifestyle. And if the products are better and cheaper, we don't need regulation to get there. It's just the people will en masse move to that better way of living. Perfect. Well, I think with that, we're out of time, but, I want to thank all of you for joining, and, thank you.