On Reinventing Insulation with Tara Love: Co-Founder, NANOPLUME
For our inaugural CFFN Spotlight, we sat down with Tara Love, Co-Founder & CTO of NANOPLUME and a member of the Cambridge Female Founders Network. NANOPLUME is reinventing insulation through bio-based aerogels – a technology with the power to cut emissions, reduce energy poverty, and reshape construction and cold-chain systems worldwide.
You’ll learn how NANOPLUME grew from an early waste-valorisation experiment into a scalable platform, why bio-based aerogels could redefine insulation, and what it will take to bring climate-tech to scale.
How was NANOPLUME born?
I began my career as a geoscientist at Durham University, focusing on energy and climate-related challenges, before completing a PhD in Chemical Engineering at Cambridge.
My first startup was in microfluidics, tackling drink spiking incidents at Durham. It taught me the importance of choosing the right co-founder: cultural fit, work ethic, and vision.
Afterwards I founded an educational consultancy, writing courses for universities worldwide. But I still wanted to build something climate-focused. That led me to Carbon13 in Cambridge, which stood out for its human-centric culture and mission to support ventures that can deliver at least 10 million tonnes of CO₂ reduction at scale.
I entered Carbon13 with an idea around diaper waste, aiming to create a super-absorbent aerogel that could improve diapers and, if landfilled, absorb leachate. When I pitched the concept, two people kept coming back: Theresa, a materials and process engineer with venture-building experience, and Tafadzwa, a chemical engineer skilled in scaling lab work to industry. Together we started out as T3 before forming NANOPLUME.
We soon realised that while diaper recycling is urgent, it lacks the climate impact and investability we wanted. We asked: what else could we do with the same material? The answer was aerogel insulation: a solution with far greater climate and human impact.
That’s how NANOPLUME was born: transforming recycled materials into advanced aerogel insulation, with both climate and human impact at its core.
You talk about reinventing insulation at NANOPLUME. What does that mean?
Insulation has been around as long as humans – and even animals. Today the dominant materials are mineral wool and fiberglass, with about 80% of the market still petrochemical-based. The mineral wool industry in particular has barely changed in decades.
Innovations do exist, but they’re often bought up and shelved because the status quo is profitable enough. Manufacturing is energy-intensive, embodied carbon is high, and there are health hazards for those handling it. Yet performance isn’t meeting today’s needs.
Take the UK: by 2030 rental properties must reach EPC C or above, up from the minimum of EPC E. Retrofitting with existing materials can require wall insulation of up to 50 cm. It’s often impractical and very costly. As a result, partial fixes like roof insulation are more common, though these can risk condensation, mold, and unhealthy living conditions if poorly designed.
When we say we’re reinventing insulation, we mean: how can we deliver the performance required now, without rebuilding houses?
Aerogel has been around nearly a century but hasn’t been scaled for construction. It’s an ultra-porous structure that can be made from materials like silica, graphene, or carbon. Yet outside academia, aerogels have seen limited uptake in construction beyond niche uses.
Industry typically only moves under regulatory pressure. The EU is phasing out flammable petrochemical materials like polystyrene and pushing for at least 20% of construction materials to be circular or bio-based. Mineral wool, with its high embodied carbon, is unlikely to survive long term.
That’s where we come in. We’re scaling bio-based aerogel insulation. It’s not just sustainable – it’s higher performing. Our aerogels are bio-based composites made from cellulose and natural minerals, which add flame retardancy – a common weakness in many bio-materials. The goal is to create the highest-performing insulation possible, one that also happens to meet climate goals.
Where is NANOPLUME today, and how are you thinking about future applications?
We’re still at lab scale, but our long-term goal is the built environment. Housing is where we can touch the most lives, both individually and in terms of climate goals. But the volumes required for construction are typically enormous, so we’re starting where smaller amounts can have outsized impact: the cold chain and thermal bridging solutions.
We’ve completed our first toll manufacturing run and are exploring contract manufacturing. Traditional aerogel production uses supercritical CO₂ drying, which is costly and difficult to scale. Using an adapted proprietary tech process, we’ve cut drying time by 70% and energy use by 50%. This is a major breakthrough for scaling.
Rather than dominate the whole aerogel market, we’re focusing on niches where low-volume, high-performance materials matter most. Right now, that means biopharmaceutical cold chain packaging.
We’ve shipped material for a pilot with cold shipping boxes in the US, and soon to complete another with a drone company transporting hospital samples. These boxes must maintain 2-5°C, but every extra gram of weight adds cost and reduces range.
Our aerogels are dramatically lighter: commercial silica aerogels are 100 - 150 kg/m³, while ours is 18.5. That means lower shipping costs and longer cold life. Vaccine losses from cold chain are estimated at $34 billion annually. With our material, packaging that lasts 70 hours could extend to 150, making international shipping feasible without breaches. That’s our immediate value proposition: cost savings, reliability, and sustainability in one.
From there, our roadmap expands into three product lines: low-density aerogels for shipping and cold chain; high-strength aerogels for retrofits in high-rise buildings; and flexible aerogel blankets, comparable to mineral wool, for applications needing bendable insulation. All share excellent thermal performance; what differs is whether customers care more about weight, strength, or flexibility.
Why now? What’s shifted across technology, regulation, and markets – both in the UK and globally?
We see this as a global market. In construction and cold chain, even if a company is based in the US, it ships worldwide. That’s why our CEO is US-based and why we’ve built a flexible, international culture from the start.
Few customers lead with sustainability. It’s usually a “nice to have.” Priorities are cost, energy efficiency, and performance. That’s why we position ourselves as an energy efficiency company: better insulation lowers shipping costs, reduces fuel use, and cuts emissions.
Cold chain has been quicker to adopt innovation. For example, refrigerated vehicle manufacturers face strict EU wall-thickness regulations. They can’t reduce wall size, so weight becomes critical, especially as they move towards EV fleets. Our lightweight aerogels are a perfect fit.
By contrast, the built environment moves slowly. At a company level, cost dominates, and regulation is the main driver. In the UK and EU, the healthcare burden of poor insulation is stark: overheating homes in summer, dangerously cold homes in winter, and rising energy poverty. Post-Grenfell, flammability standards have improved, but the bigger push comes from EPC targets (C by 2030). Europe, especially Germany, is leading here.
The US (depending on the state) and Japan are different: there’s plenty of innovation energy, but regulation is weaker. The culture often prioritises speed and upfront cost over long-term efficiency in housing, so the cheapest insulation tends to win – for now. That said, we’re modelling ROI with international customers who do recognise the value of energy efficiency and space savings.
What impact will NANOPLUME have over the next decade?
Our vision is for NANOPLUME to become an industry-standard name. But beyond that, it’s about impact. We believe energy efficiency is the silver bullet for climate goals. Everyone focuses on new energy generation, but conserving what we already use will make the biggest difference.
In Europe, 75% of buildings remain energy inefficient due to poor-quality – or even no – insulation, contributing around 36% of emissions. In ten years, we want to see that number fall dramatically. If we can reduce energy poverty – keeping homes warmer in winter, cooler in summer – and cut energy waste at scale, that would be phenomenal. That’s the knock-on effect we’re working toward.
What kind of ecosystem needs to exist around you for NANOPLUME to scale faster?
Our next step is a scaled, optimised plant. Once proven, we can contract manufacture globally, closer to end markets.
Long term, we’re excited about waste valorisation: modular production that adapts to local feedstocks, such as paper mill waste or forestry residues in the UK. At present, we use commodity-grade raw materials with stable supply chains. The challenge with waste is fragmentation. What’s missing is a market infrastructure where waste streams are standardised, traded, and matched with companies that can use them.
The ideal ecosystem combines industrial partners who can scale manufacturing with networks that enable waste valorisation – a culture where end-of-life materials become inputs for new industries. Alongside skilled people and strong partnerships, that’s the infrastructure we need to scale globally.
We’re incredibly thankful to Tara Love for sharing the vision behind NANOPLUME – an exciting breakthrough in insulation emerging from Cambridge, set to reshape energy systems worldwide.
🔗 Learn more about NANOPLUME here
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