🌍 Carbon negative cinder blocks #05
Making cows fart less using seaweed, using mushroom roots to replace meat, and discovering a new climate hero
Hi!
Welcome to the fifth edition of the 'tings with impact newsletter 🌍
This week we are looking at Carbicrete who have developed patented technology to create carbon-negative cinder blocks, Volta Greentech who are trying to stop cows from farting so much by feeding them seaweed, and Mushlabs who are using the roots of mushrooms to create sustainable meat alternatives.
As a little 'ting we'll look at the potential climate super hero algae.
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👷 Carbicrete - Carbon negative cinder blocks
I've covered the topic of cement and concrete before. For those who are new to 'tings, we've discovered that concrete is the 2nd most consumed material in the world after water and looked at the startup Heimdal who extract CO2 from the ocean to produce carbon negative cement. In this edition we're looking at Carbicrete who have developed a process to create carbon negative precast concrete such as cinder blocks.
Before we go further let's have a look at the difference between cement and concrete. Concrete, which makes up most of our built world like buildings and roads, consists of cement, water, sand, and gravel. Cement acts like a glue that binds those materials together into something strong enough to withstand massive weights. Cement is created by heating limestone, clay and iron at very high temperatures (1,500C). The chemical reaction that takes place and energy required to reach such high temperatures results in massive amounts of CO2. Most of the emissions from concrete actually comes from cement production. Each tonne of cement produced releases 1 tonne of CO2 into the atmosphere, with 4 billion tonnes of cement produced annually, this accounts for a whopping 8% of global emissions! If cement were a country it would be the 3rd largest emitter of CO2 after China and the US.
There are companies such as CarbonCure, Solidia Technologies or Blue Planet Systems that are trying to optimise the cement making process to reduce CO2 emissions, but Carbicrete take this one step further by removing the need for cement altogether. Carbicrete use steel slag, a by-product of the steel industry, as a direct replacement for cement. The mixing of concrete and moulding of building blocks follow conventional methods, the real innovation comes at the curing stage. Carbicrete have developed a patented process where CO2 is injected into an absorption chamber to transform the steel slag in the concrete mixture into stable calcium carbonates, giving the concrete its required strength. Conventional CMUs (concrete masonry units, the industry term for cinder blocks) release 2kg of CO2 into the atmosphere, while Carbicrete CMUs do not emit but rather remove 1kg of CO2, making them carbon negative (actually 3kg better than conventional CMUs). A typical precast concrete plant could reduce its CO2 emissions by 20,000 tonnes and save 4,400,000 litres of water annually. The environmental benefit is significant but the big challenge to scale this will be the installation of these new, patented, CO2 curing systems.
🐄 Volta Greentech - Making cows fart less using seaweed
We all know that we should eat less meat to save the planet, but what we also all know is that this is going to be a very difficult thing to achieve. To changes peoples' habits is not very easy and even if we achieve this, the transition from beef to alternatives is going to take quite some time. So, in that transition period we do somehow need to figure out how to deal with the 1.5 billion cows living, burping, and farting on this earth. According to data gathered by Bill Gates and his team, if cattle were a country it would rank third in global greenhouse gas emissions (methane is a much more potent green house gas than CO2 but has a shorter lifespan).
No, the fact that two stories have this kind of figure in one newsletter was not planned, let's just call it a happy accident 😅
The need to address methane emissions from cows is exactly what founder of Volta Greentech Frederik Åkerman thought when he saw a reddit post about a seaweed with methane reducing potential. In a 2019 pitch, Frederik said when he found out about this he dropped out from studying electrical engineering to "build a company around making cows fart and burp less methane". The seaweed in question is Asparagopsis taxiformis, a type of red algae found in tropical waters that has the potential to significantly reduce the ability of cows to produce methane without impacting their health. Studies from UC Davis showed that adding 1% of this seaweed to a cows diet can reduce as much as 60% of methane emissions and a study in Australia showed emission reductions of up to 99% by adding 2% to cattle feed.
The key challenges that Volta Greentech are addressing are scaling the cultivation of the seaweed and coming up with a business model that incentivises farmers to implement the supplement. They have developed the right conditions in their test lab for the algae to be successfully grown and have raised another 1.7 million euros this year (more than €3.5M raised so far) to establish a pilot factory in Sweden to prepare to supply enough seaweed to eliminate a significant amount of methane emission from Swedish cattle. Volta Greentech have also partnered with the largest feed producer in Sweden to develop the feed of the future to reduce methane emissions by as much as 50-80%.
🍄 Mushlabs – Using mushroom roots to replace meat
While figuring out how to make cows less environmentally impactful is important, the development of new and more sustainable foods is also vital. The market for meat alternatives is growing at a rapid pace, with retail sales of vegan meat reaching $7bn in 2020. In Germany, an 1834 founded sausage maker, Rügenwalder Mühle, launched veggie/vegan alternatives and within 6 years matched the revenue generated from meat products. Their early bet on entering the meat alternative market paid off handsomely. According to a BCG report 22% of meat, seafood, eggs, and dairy eaten around the world will be made of alternative proteins by 2035.
Mushlabs, a Hamburg-based biotech startup, hopes that their alternative protein made out of mycelium, the roots of mushrooms, will play a big role in shifting our food system. Mushlabs cultivate mycelia in a controlled environment to serve as the seed for the production of meat alternatives. The mycelium is fed with waste products from agriculture and food industries such as sawdust, spent grain, cotton waste, rice husks or spent tea and coffee waste. The mycelium and waste products ferment in large bioreactors to produce a biomass that is rich in protein and fibre. This biomass can then be used to create a large variety of foods to replace meat.
So, what will these foods look/taste like? According to Mushlabs their focus is not on creating look-a-like products by using artificial flavours and chemicals but to focus on the natural flavours of mushrooms. Umami, the 5th taste, which is common in foods like meat, cheese and fish is also found in mushrooms, so the premise is that this will help create a satisfying savoury taste. The end products can then range from sausages, burger patties, to spreads. No products have been released so far, so we'll have to wait and see if they taste any good.
If it does taste good, we do not only get sustainable, plant-based, forms of protein but also have an extremely sustainable food that is able to deal with side products of other food or agricultural streams.
🌍 A little 'ting - Algae the new climate hero
We've discovered the amazing potential for algae to reduce the methane emissions from cows, but that only scratches the surface of what is possible with this new climate hero. Algae has applications in areas as far reaching as food, fuel, fertiliser, plastic, or the medical industry. There's a great video by DW Planet A that gives a brief overview of its potential in a little over 8 minutes. For a more detailed 15-minute video about seaweed farming I can recommend the following one by CNBC.
Thank you for making it to the end!
If you happened to enjoy reading this, why not send it around to a few friends so that more people can get an insight into what is being done to preserve the future of our planet 🌍
I am planning to start doing deep-dives into specific topics and would love to cover areas/questions that you have. Just reply to this email if you already have questions about the world of concrete for example or other topics like carbon tracking or carbon sequestration. I'm always happy to hear from readers 🤗
Until next time, much love,
Pascal