Imagine you’re sitting on a public bench in Barcelona. Normal enough. Except that bench is quietly pulling CO2 out of the air around you.
Or you’re looking at a building going up in Dubai — 45,000 square meters of it — and the paint on its exterior is actively absorbing pollutants from the air.
Or you’re wearing a jacket, and the fabric itself is doing the same thing.
I’ll be real — when I first heard this I thought it sounded like something out of a TED Talk that would never actually exist in the real world. But this is not a concept. It’s not a Kickstarter. It’s happening right now. And it started with a guy who wanted to know what would happen if materials could think.
I recently sat down with Aldo Sollazzo, CEO of Pure Tech, on The Lexy Show: Fashion That Gives a Damn. You can hear the full conversation here. In the meantime, here’s what we covered.
Who Is Aldo Sollazzo and What Is Pure Tech?
Okay so first — Aldo didn’t come up through fashion. At all. He studied architecture, did a master’s in robotics, a PhD in computer science, and got completely obsessed with a question that sounds almost philosophical: what if matter could be programmed to do something?
Not a device. Not an app. The actual physical material an object is made from. What if it had intelligence built into it?
He started testing that idea through a design competition called Reshape, connecting computational designers with digital fabrication labs all over the world. The goal was to see what happened when you pushed the boundaries of both design and materials at the same time. And what happened, it turns out, was pretty wild.
The Competition Winner That Changed the Direction of Material Innovation
Early on, one winner from the Reshape competition stopped him in his tracks. Reshape was a global design competition Aldo launched to connect computational designers with digital fabrication labs around the world — essentially an experiment in pushing the boundaries of what materials could do.
A team from the University of Southern California submitted a fabric that absorbed oil instead of water — like a sponge, but engineered and programmable. According to Aldo, the project blew up. He says it landed on ESPN, Fox News, and National Geographic, and that the Miami Dolphins shot an entire calendar in it.
And here’s the thing, Aldo saw something most people missed. Everyone else saw a cool swimsuit. Aldo saw a cleanup tool. Put that fabric in a harbor. Attach it under a boat. It could pull oil right out of the ocean. The same material that looked good on a model could solve an environmental crisis.
But it never made it there. The idea was brilliant but the infrastructure to get it into the real world just wasn’t there. And that gap is what changed everything for him.
He told me he started drawing a distinction between two words that most people use interchangeably: invention and innovation. An invention is a great idea that exists in a lab or a competition entry or a prototype. Innovation is when that idea actually reaches the market, gets used by real people, and changes something. Most materials, even genuinely remarkable ones, die as inventions. They never become innovations. Nobody builds the bridge between the idea and the industry.
That realization is what made Aldo completely rethink his approach. Instead of running open competitions and hoping industry would find the good ideas, he started bringing industry in from the beginning — so that the path from invention to innovation was built in from day one.
How Does Pure Tech’s CO2-Absorbing Material Actually Work?
Pure Tech makes a mineral-based material inspired by the way minerals have always naturally absorbed CO2 from the earth’s surface. What Aldo’s team did was engineer that same capacity to work harder, more consistently, and at industrial scale.
The material absorbs CO2 and NOx gases, the pollutants responsible for smog and the air quality problems that make cities genuinely bad for your health and it keeps working over time.
Here’s what makes it genuinely interesting for fashion specifically: it integrates into existing manufacturing processes without blowing them up. No supply chain overhaul. No dramatic cost increase. It slides into how things are already made — textiles, paint, varnishes, cement coatings, paper.
Aldo calls it a Trojan horse. Silently changing what materials do without forcing the industry to change everything else first. And honestly? As someone who covers greenwashing for a living, that framing is what made me take this seriously. Because we’ve all seen what happens when a brand tries to blow up its entire supply chain overnight. It doesn’t work. This approach does.
Where Is Pure Tech Being Used Right Now?
This isn’t theoretical. Pure Tech is already in the world:
In Barcelona — public benches that actively absorb CO2. A painted harbor.
In Dubai — a 45,000 square meter building aiming to be one of the most sustainable structures in the world.
In fashion — a partnership with Stella McCartney, most recently integrating the material into denim at the SS26 Paris Fashion Week show, as well as a 3D-printed installation at COP28 in 2023.
When Aldo described Pure Tech as a Trojan horse, something clicked for me. That’s the only way material innovation survives contact with a massive, slow-moving industry. You can’t walk into a fashion house and say “rebuild your supply chain around this.” You have to make it easy to say yes. Make the new thing compatible with the existing thing. Let the change happen quietly, and let the results speak.
Why Sustainable Fashion Is the Perfect Vehicle for This Technology
Something Aldo said about why fashion matters to him really resonated with me — and honestly, it’s the thing I keep coming back to.
He said fashion speaks to the individual. That it has this unique power — unlike almost any other industry — to turn a single person into an ambassador. Someone who wears something and then just talks about it.
And I feel that so deeply. Because that is exactly what happens when I’m wearing something with a real story behind it. Someone asks about my outfit and I’m off — here’s what this fabric does, here’s where it came from, here’s why I actually care about it. That conversation is the most powerful thing sustainable fashion has going for it. It doesn’t require a marketing budget. It just requires the product to be interesting enough that people want to explain it.
Now imagine wearing something that’s actively cleaning the air.
That’s not a conversation starter. That’s a 30-minute deep dive. I would be insufferable at parties. I’m already insufferable about thrifted pieces — hand me a CO2-absorbing jacket and I make absolutely no promises.
How to Spot Greenwashing vs. Genuine Material Innovation
We can’t have this conversation without going there. And I was genuinely curious how Pure Tech stacks up, because this is exactly the kind of claim that gets greenwashed to death.
Pure Tech spent from 2017 to roughly 2022 — five years — doing nothing but validating the material. Running life cycle assessments. Pursuing ISO certifications. Understanding absorption cycles under real-world conditions. Five years of proving the science before bringing it to a single industry partner.
That’s not a PR strategy. That’s a company that started with the receipts and built outward from there. And as someone who spends a lot of time calling out the difference between the two — that matters to me.
Aldo told me the Stella McCartney relationship started through a sustainability expert on Stella’s team, and that it took about two years of working together to figure out exactly how the material could be integrated without changing the look, feel, or comfort of what was already being made. That process, he said, is always the tell — the brands that are genuinely committed show up willing to do that work. The ones who aren’t, don’t.
His advice for brands: get the certifications. ISO certifications are what the industry actually recognizes. Life cycle assessments are non-negotiable. Without them, you’re not in the room where sourcing decisions get made. And if a brand is making sweeping sustainability claims without being able to back them up with documentation? That’s your signal.
How Pure Tech Is Scaling Sustainable Material Technology Across Industries
Pure Tech started trying to sell directly to consumers — their own collections. It wasn’t the right fit. So they pivoted to B2B: selling the material to textile manufacturers, paint producers, paper companies, and construction firms, who then integrate it into their own products.
It means Pure Tech reaches consumers through partnerships rather than directly. But honestly, the impact is bigger that way, because the surface area is so much larger. A denim jacket is one garment. A painted building in Dubai is 45,000 square meters.
Both matter. But the math on the building is different.
The Best Sustainability Advice for Beginners — From Someone Building the Future of It
At the end of every episode I ask my guests the same question: what’s your top tip for someone just starting their sustainability journey?
Aldo’s answer was one of the most elegant I’ve gotten on this show:
Be curious about your decisions. Ask where things come from. Let that information actually drive what you do.
Not a 10-step plan. Not a perfect lifestyle overhaul. Just start asking questions you weren’t asking before, and let the answers move you.
And for anyone building something in this space, the line I haven’t stopped thinking about since we wrapped:
Don’t build the car. Build the bridge.
Create the infrastructure that connects researchers, designers, industry, and consumers in a shared cycle. The innovation follows from that. Not the other way around.
I’d genuinely never heard it framed that way before. And I think about it every time someone asks me what it’s actually going to take to change this industry.
Where to Find Pure Tech and Follow Aldo Sollazzo
🌐 pure.tech 📸 Instagram: @pure.the.tech 📸 Aldo personally: @aldo.punto.solazzo
They’re actively looking to connect with brands, creators, and people who share this vision — and by his own words, they are one email away.
Go listen to the full episode — we go deeper on the science, the Stella McCartney collab, how Pure Tech is scaling across industries, and what Aldo sees coming in the next three to five years for material innovation.
Lexy Silverstein, in sustainable fit from head to toe.
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