Why Nandina REM abandoned the green sales pitch for something far more practical

Every year, the world’s commercial aviation fleet discards hundreds of retired aircraft, sending multi-million-dollar structures of advanced carbon fibre and high-performance composites to bake quietly in desert boneyards. To the traditional aviation executive, this is simply the cost of depreciation. To the environmentalist, it is an ecological tragedy.

But to Karina Cady, the CEO and co-founder of the Singapore-based advanced materials firm Nandina REM, these graveyards represent something far more lucrative: an unmined, sovereign reserve of strategic materials.

Cady did not enter this space to build a conventional recycling firm. Founded on the premise that high-value materials should never be downcycled into lower-grade commodities, Nandina REM has spent the last few years quietly engineering a closed-loop supply chain that extracts aerospace-grade carbon fibre from decommissioned jets and repurposes it for high-stakes industries. 

It is an enterprise that aligns perfectly with this year’s Power List theme, A New Form, which honours leaders who preserve the core conviction of their work while radically transforming the business models and platforms around it. Cady has looked at the limitations of the circular economy and rebuilt the structure entirely. 

Yet the question lingers: Can a startup born of environmental frustration truly survive by embedding itself in the hyper-pragmatic, hawkish world of global defence?

The death of the green pitch

In the early days of Nandina REM, Cady attempted to operate within the established vocabulary of corporate responsibility. She attended the mandatory roundtables, spoke with legacy aerospace firms, and pleaded the planet’s case. 

The response was a polite, bureaucratic wall of inertia.

“I started this company because I was completely fascinated, and largely annoyed, by what happens to aircraft when they retire,” Cady recalls. “We are talking about the most highly engineered assets in the world. Hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of hyper-advanced performance materials, and the industry-standard global solution was to dump them in a desert, chop them up like old drink cans, or incinerate them into toxic ash. It made absolutely no sense to me.”

The realisation that the aviation industry would not save itself came slowly, then all at once. “At first, I tried to play nice,” she admits. “We closely engaged the aviation industry, sat in endless roundtables, and tried to collectively problem-solve within their existing frameworks. It felt like a waste of time. The breakthrough didn’t happen until we completely abandoned that legacy-industry mindset. You can’t solve a crisis using the exact same thinking that created it in the first place.”

Cady’s pivot was a masterclass in structural reframing. She stopped viewing her company as an environmental cleanup crew and began viewing it as a mining operation. Consequently, she made the highly unorthodox decision to strip the word “sustainability” from her primary sales deck. In a market saturated with greenwashing, it was a tactical gamble that defied modern corporate wisdom.

“Sustainability alone doesn’t move industrial buyers,” Cady explains bluntly. Engineers care about price predictability, material performance, and reliable supply chains. The moment we stopped pitching ourselves as a green utility company and started pitching ourselves as a manufacturer of high-performance materials with our tech validated by the world’s leading organisations, everything changed.”

It is, perhaps, a cynical take on corporate nature, but one rooted in industrial realism. By treating carbon footprint reduction as a mere byproduct rather than the headline, Nandina REM unlocked access to capital and clients that standard green startups could only dream of. 

“We don’t sell our materials to make people feel like good citizens at a cocktail party,” Cady observes dryly. “We sell them to the teams who want to completely dominate their sectors.”

The defence pivot and the steel within

This hard-nosed commercialism eventually pulled Nandina REM out of the commercial recycling bin and into the inner sanctum of global defence logistics. The company’s appointment as the trusted local partner for AV’s Project Vanda marked a dramatic evolution from circular-economy experiment to an asset of geopolitical resilience in Southeast Asia.

Critics might question the ethics of a sustainability pioneer pivoting toward military supply chains, but Cady views it through a lens of pure utility. In an increasingly fractured world where global superpowers are desperate to secure domestic manufacturing pipelines, her reclaimed carbon fibre represents independence.

“When foreign military frameworks with the most stringent security protocols in the world aggressively fast-track your clearance and vet your team, it isn’t a gesture of goodwill,” Cady says, dismissing any notions of corporate sentimentality. “They do it because you possess a capability they cannot replicate domestically. Whoever controls the supply chain of defence-grade carbon fibre controls the future of air power.”

This rapid scaling has demanded an aggressive defence of the company’s operational independence. Cady has consistently refused to allow legacy aerospace giants or traditional venture capitalists to dictate terms or slow her velocity. That uncompromising stance extended directly to early valuation debates, where institutional investors tried to discount the value of recycled composite material.

“I knew the purity and performance of our carbon fibre was unmatched, so why should I compromise on the valuation of our innovation?” Cady asks rhetorically. “Holding that line was terrifying at the time, and we got a lot of heat and some vicious criticism, but it established us as an elite-tier player. We didn’t beg for market share. We took it.”

No room for fragile egos

This uncompromising ethos dictates the internal culture of Nandina REM. Cady has zero patience for academic pedigree detached from operational execution, a philosophy forged in part by the immense personal toll of founding a company. 

Managing the relentless pressure while navigating severe autoimmune challenges — which culminated in a severe case of facial shingles that threatened her eyesight — forced her to view her personal health not as a luxury, but as a corporate asset.

“If the ship sinks in a startup, the team doesn’t take the fall,” she notes with quiet gravity. “Nobody remembers the names of the employees who lost together — they only remember the founder who failed alone. Accepting that absolute accountability is shockingly lonely and has required a level of internal steel I didn’t know I needed.”

As a leader, that steel translates into an environment that leaves little room for fragile egos. “Academic credentials don’t equate to operational agility,” Cady asserts. “We look for individuals capable of actually executing, of taking the personal reputational risk to be rejected over and over. If I see the floor needs sweeping, I sweep it. I refuse to lower the bar or coddle ego just to keep the peace.”

Beyond earthbound physics

To understand why Cady belongs on a Power List celebrating A New Form, one must look past the defence contracts and toward the horizon of what her materials make possible. The advanced materials industry remains paralysed by the legacy assumption that recycled materials are inherently inferior — a dogma Cady routinely dismantles with basic chemistry.

“The molecular structure of high-purity carbon fibre doesn’t care about its history,” Cady states simply. “Science is science. The source is completely irrelevant; the material performance is what counts. If you are manufacturing hypersonic assets or space-bound hardware, the stakes are life-and-death. You don’t care about legacy assumptions; you care about who has the material that wins.”

Currently, the United States suffers from a critical domestic manufacturing gap in low-cost, high-purity carbon and phenolic felts — a structural void that Nandina REM is actively filling. But the ultimate validation of Cady’s new form lies in how these repurposed aerospace materials are bridging the gap between deep-space exploration and terrestrial medicine.

Nandina REM’s ultra-lightweight, rapid-production composites are now being utilised to shield autonomous bioreactors designed for microgravity environments in space. This technology allows researchers to conduct cell crystallisation experiments necessary to unlock next-generation oncology therapies, such as advanced cancer drugs like Keytruda, at a fraction of the traditional cost.

“That means the next breakthrough cancer treatment won’t be delayed by decades because space research is an elite luxury,” Cady says, her tone softening slightly as she sketches out the ultimate trajectory of her work. “It starts with a parent or a child sitting in a hospital room today, and it ends with automated laboratories orbiting the Earth, printing life-saving proteins on hardware built from repurposed aerospace assets. We are proving that the materials the industry used to dump in a desert can literally become the vessels that cure terminal illness.”

It is an audacious vision that successfully bridges the gap between cold industrial pragmatism and profound human impact. By altering the form around the core asset, Cady has proved that the future of innovation does not require abandoning our past creations — it simply requires the audacity to reshape them.

Photography: Lawrence Teo
Art direction: Ashruddin Sani
Styling: Dolphin Yeo
Grooming: Angel Gwee, using Chanel and Davines

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