Q&A with Gabriela Gurau, CEO
525 Solutions is a research and development company spun out of the University of Alabama's Center for Green Manufacturing in 2004 by Robin D. Rogers and Larry G. Canada. The company is currently owned by Rogers, Canada and Gurau, all graduates of UA. The company currently has three employees.
What does innovation mean to you?
Innovation to 525 Solutions means bringing creative new solutions to society, from concept to commercialization. Innovation is an integral part in advancing any technological breakthrough. Where we would be today without creative thinking? A great example comes from right here in Alabama. At the turn at 20th century, during the boll weevil infestation, George Washington Carver, an innovator and professor at Tuskegee University developed a laboratory dedicated to research and development of alternative crops to cotton, like peanuts and soybeans, advancing new products and applications that provided struggling farmers both with new markets to make money and inexpensive, readily available products to improve their own lives.
What ways has your company innovated and/or created meaningful impact?
Taking our cues from George Washington Carver and society’s desperate need to find replacement for plastics, we turned our R&D focus to turn shrimp farmers’ waste streams into valuable products that take advantage of Alabama’s unique renewable resources and help push society away from a dependence on oil that grows steadily more dangerous. We have pioneered a new technology for extracting biopolymers (cellulose, chitin) directly from biomass (trees, crustacean waste) and using them without modification in advanced materials. 525’s technology delivers not only suitable materials to replace plastics, but could also create a new platform that will lead to large quantities of on-demand biopolymers, paving the way for utilizing their full potential, thus resulting in fast commercialization of the technology and any resulting new materials.
525’s vision is to ultimately build a sustainable economy based on large-scale chitin extraction plants to combine our scientific knowledge base with local innovators, business and finance to assess current and new markets and business opportunities for our products, technologies and inventions, creating a sustainable future not only environmentally, but also economically, leading to new business opportunities.
