Kelp Could be the Carbon Capture King

Water

The simple kelp plant could help us suck carbon out of the air in large quantities, and if so then we need more kelp – and fast! Kelp is a seaweed that naturally grows up to two feet per day, which puts it on a similar growth rate to algae which is similar and we’ve looked at before as a carbon sink. Kelp is so good at using carbon that a startup is currently creating a kelp factory that functions as an industrial carbon-removal service.

The company produces groupings of kelp that float on water and absorb carbon, when they get heavy enough the groupings fall to the ocean floor. It’s an imperfect idea and still being tested, but we must remember that climate change will be addressed by thousands of little solutions and not one grand gesture.

At its core, carbon removal is “a mass-transfer problem,” Marty Odlin, Running Tide’s CEO, told me. The key issue is how to move the hundreds of gigatons of carbon emitted by fossil fuels from the “fast cycle,” where carbon flits from fossil fuels to the air to plant matter, back to the “slow cycle,” where they remain locked away in geological storage for millennia. “How do you move that?” Odlin said. “What’s the most efficient way possible to accomplish that mass transfer?” The question is really, really important. The United Nations recently said that carbon removal is “essential” to remedying climate change, but so far, we don’t have the technology to do it cheaply and at scale.

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Collision: Replacing Plastics with Seaweed

Loliware presentation

At the last Collision Conference Loliware pitched their eco-conscious business and won. Today Sea Briganti provided an update on the company and the success they’ve had replacing plastic usage with seaweed. They have created an entire line of products which are carbon negative! The company continues to grow and we need more companies like this so our recover from COVID-19 includes a green economy built on making the planet better.

As the CEO of an interdisciplinary team of expert scientists, food technologists, and seaweed biologists,
Sea F. Briganti developed LOLIWARE Intelligent Seaweed Technologies (LIST) – a category of materials made from seaweed (a regenerative and carbon sequestering input) that outperform paper products & bioplastics.

We think about sustainability and impact throughout every aspect of LOLIWARE and our products.Why does our vision of a future free of plastic disposables matter?
Reducing our use of single-use plastics matters for both human health and planetary health. A dependence on plastic perpetuates a broken economic model built on the extraction of fossil fuels, which in turn accelerates the detrimental effects of climate change. Plastic disposables are particularly harmful contributors to climate change, and ultimately human health, as they require the ongoing extracting of petroleum to come to market, and then become one of the worst culprits of land and water pollution at the end of use.

Check it out.
I’m attending Collision at Home this week.

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