[snewman]

I love to see creative approaches like this! A couple of naive questions:

1. How long will the carbon remain bound / out of the atmosphere?

2. How quickly can you scale, and what are the limiting factors that (if eased) would allow you to scale faster? (Hiring, refining the tech, refining the business proposition, finding customers, building hardware, ...)

[haakonzen]

1. Great question! Different academic experts claim lignin would be very stable in roads and stay there for a long time, and that when some degradation eventually happens, it will sequester downwards and become part of the soil. Deepdive: We have made roads 14 years ago which are still stable and in good quality today, indicating there hasn't been much degradation of the lignin to speak of. Adding here also a quote from an academic paper: “... the end-product of lignin decomposition in nature contains partially decomposed, fragmented lignin (humus) that enters the soil cycle, and remains in this layer for many years. Release of H2O and CO2 as decomposition products in this layer is extremely limited. Soil bacteria, microfauna, and even physical processes may play important roles in the final breakdown of humus. This is a slow process and some lignin degradation products have soil residence times of centuries (Ziekus, 1981).” - So, while we don't have the complete answer to speed of degradation yet (workin on it!), it seems it would stay beneath the ground far more than long enough to help our planet.

[gus_massa]

Where is the road made 14 years ago? Does lignin resist fungus/bacteria in a hot humid place like Brazil?

[hansarne]

"Great question, we would love to crush carbon in South America! Our 14 year old road is in Heart Valley in Norway. All of our experience is from Norway so far and our current binder works well in similiar climates around the globe. So places like Brazil we will need to do testing to find the best binder for those environments. We are already in talks with Brazilian ligning producers btw. Our goal is to have a sustainable binder tailor made for all environments

[haakonzen]

2. With the Crushers we have today, we can reduce 25.000 tonnes this year, but we could in theory make 10x more Crushers for next year taking us to 250.000 tonnes next year. The demand is definetely there, scaling the sales & operation is the thing we work hard on. That's also why we are working on launching our crushing as a service model which will ease both operations and logistics globally. Refining and building hardware is not a limiting factor per se.