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All right. Thank you. And and again, I'm Brian Haynes. What I'm trying, what I'd like to do today is kind of give a perspective on how, you know,

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a big company like Kimberly Clark, you know, how we address this this pandemic.

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And there's a few insights as we kind of go through the discussion that I think you'll find find interesting.

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And if you don't know Kimberly Clark, I don't want you to think this is a commercial, but it kind of sets the stage for the discussion later on.

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You're a relatively large company. About $19 billion. And hopefully you've heard about a lot of our brands and one quarter of the world's population.

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They use our our products every day. A lot of innovation over the years, 175 countries.

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So as you could see Camera Clark Big Company, we have a big global footprint with to make all these different products.

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It obviously takes materials and one of the key materials that's used in all of these personal care products and industrial,

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you know, surgical gowns, things like that. It's called non-woven and we have a division within Kimberly-Clark called Global Non-woven.

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That's where I work. I'm the technical director of that organisation and we're the largest supplier of these non-woven materials in North America.

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We're the third largest globally.

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A lot of innovation over the years to bring these different materials and these benefits to our to our different products.

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Now these materials that are used, for example, one of these materials,

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if you could make it a metre wide, it would go from the Earth to the Moon 25 times.

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So the message is there's a lot of material that goes into all of these products.

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Now, when the when the pandemic hit, it really turned things upside down, obviously, and it's like every day you heard about, there's mass shortages.

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We need more PPE for the for the hospitals, for the for the front line workers.

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And that's really where Kimberly Clark comes to play.

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It kind of goes back to what we talked about earlier in terms of all these different materials that are needed for our consumer products businesses.

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For example, how can they be leveraged to kind of help fight the the overall pandemic?

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One of the interesting materials, and probably one of the most important materials from a face mask perspective is called melt blown,

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and there's some interesting articles that were written. One said that melt blown is the new white gold.

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It's actually more valuable than your gold when you think about what it brings

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to the party in the Melbourne technology is produces these very fine fibres.

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They're on the order of one to three microns in the very fine fibre in the poor structures you could see in the ACM image.

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There's really what it allows us to filter out the coronavirus particles, so that kind of sets the stage.

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Now why? Why does it matter so much? And there's a few images here that I want to kind of point out.

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For example, North Carolina State, there's a non-woven institute there,

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and one of the things that really amazed me is how everyone jumped in to help, you know, fight the fight the pandemic.

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They actually had some pilot equipment at NC State where they actually, you know,

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normally they run experiments and trials and whatnot to help support the industry.

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They actually converted it to where they can actually make, you know,

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face masks material to go to, to go into product that could be used by the frontline workers.

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And even though it's a very small machine, you know, but running continuous operation,

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they were able to make a lot of material to kind of help fight the fight the pandemic.

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And one of the things I saw a lot of different universities,

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other facilities with part with pilot plan operations, everyone was chipping in, you know, to define it.

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I know at Georgia Tech I had some colleagues and I was speaking with and they said,

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you know, basically, if we're not working on COVID, we're not working on the right thing.

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Lots of individuals were, you know, using the 3-D printers to make the little ear savers, for example, for the for the face masks anyway.

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So it's like globally everyone was chipping in to, you know, to fight the pandemic.

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But melt blown is a very key material.

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And when I was in grad school, that was actually the technology that I worked on and I would get multiple calls every day.

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People all over the world were looking for melt blown to kind of help fill the mask need.

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This is a little fact that you may not know of, but the actual inventor in 09:05 mask is a gentleman, Dr. Peter Sy.

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He was in retirement. He went to the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. I knew Peter when I was in graduate school.

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He worked at the non-woven centre there. He actually came out of retirement to kind of help with the pandemic.

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Looking at, you know, what can we do to sterilise the masks? What can we do to make the masks better?

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And one of the things that was interesting and I call it competition is Peter, is, you know,

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if you call Peter and ask him a question, he would gladly, you know, give you an answer.

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He would point you in the direction of the information. He would share information on what to do.

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Even so, we could, you know, do a better job, you know, to make the masks more effective.

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And I call this competition. And what's interesting is, you know, five years ago, if I would have had a similar discussion with with Peter,

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you know, we would have wanted to get the agreements in place. And, you know, it's kind of this corporate veil of secrecy kind of stuff.

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But one of the things I noticed across the board talking with people is everyone.

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We were in this fight together, OK, we kind of had this common enemy and everyone was kind of rallying to try to fight it.

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So it's a way that, you know, you can still compete, right? But we cooperate and that's the competition.

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It's I think it's very important.

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If you look at what Kimberly Clark did, you know, we really leveraged our state of the art globe and our woven technology that we spoke about earlier,

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that we used to make all these different products to help address the PPE shortage.

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And when in 72 hours,

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we actually made almost eight million face masks for frontline health care workers because it kind of goes back to what I said before.

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We have a lot of capacity. We can make a lot of this material within four weeks.

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We're making face masks for internal use to protect our people because, you know, if you think about all the plants that we have globally.

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So we didn't shut down the supply chain to provide these very critical materials and products.

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You know, people still needed diapers and and and toilet paper.

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We had to keep our our our workers safe. So we needed to make sure that they had masks and even some of our key suppliers.

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We would actually, you know, make masks for some of our suppliers to make sure that we kept them.

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Well stocked within six weeks, we already had some internal converting face masks for external distribution,

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and within three months we had already approved a major capacity expansions to fuel our business growth.

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And certainly some of these you can actually see their press releases.

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But the thing that really amazed me was how quickly we moved.

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So when we when we have this very large problem to solve, things can happen very quickly.

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OK, so when we get motivated and we get aligned, it's easier to kind of drive these things.

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I'm pretty amazed. You know, looking back at this, what all we did in such a short amount of time.

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So we kind of set the stage of of of how we responded to to do to get the capability in place.

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But now what we want to do is where can we go next? OK, and I call this the next frontier.

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And one of the key things that I think if any of us have more of a face mask all day long, it's really about comfort.

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We all saw, you know, images of the front line workers with the with the masks on there, their faces talking about how laboured it is.

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If you have to breathe through an N95 all day long.

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So what can we do to make these masks better for the front line workers?

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You know, for for current and future use, because I guess it's not a matter of if, but when there might be another pandemic.

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So we want to be ready. Next slide. So.

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Again, if you've ever wore these all day long,

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there's lots of things we got a lot of good feedback from consumers in terms of it feels like it's suffocating.

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It's very hot. We've unfortunately, we've heard of things like mask breath.

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It can be kind of an unpleasant it just doesn't feel right. It's very hot and moist around your face.

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So what we're doing now is we're looking at our technology on how we can make the experience more comfortable for the users.

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And what's really bad is there's actually people that and you see this all the

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time where they'll put the mask down below their nose and to be comfortable,

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they'll actually put the mask in a position where it's not giving them any, any protection at all.

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Right. And then I've also seen studies where example a cloth mask, if it's if it's not a like an N95 type,

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masks where it can actually break up the respiratory droplets and actually atomiser make it worse versus if you're wearing and like an N95 mask.

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So we've done a lot of learning during this exercise,

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but our focus now is how can we make these masks more comfortable and also more efficient for the consumer?

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And the pandemic really, you know, caused us to kind of focus more in this arena so we can have a better experience for it,

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for our consumers and to kind of close things out.

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I think one of the key messages is how the industry worked amongst ourselves and also with academia,

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for example, to to fight this, this problem through the Co-op petition.

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And I kind of noticed that this, you know, the corporate veils of secrecy kind of dropped a little bit because we had this common enemy.

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I was really inspired by the opening video.

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You're talking about the need for more competition or cooperation between industry and academia to solve these big problems.

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Obviously, the pandemic was a major issue that we've all kind of lived through,

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but there's other huge, monumental issues out there that we're all experiencing globally.

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Yo yo energy, the issue with plastics that we all hear about the plastics in the ocean.

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And I think there's an opportunity for us through competition and working more closely together that will be able to solve these problems.

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I mean, think about it if if you have two companies in four competing against each other, but then if the oceans die, where does that get us right?

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So we need to work on things together to solve the problems.

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I think all of the examples you've heard about today is is really shows that we can do this if we're motivated and want to do it.