Beyond Carbon Neutral: CarbonCure’s Latest Investments to Manage our Carbon Footprint & Scale Carbon Removal

To reach the climate goals set out in the Paris agreement, the world needs to embrace all the climate tools that are available today—while developing and scaling new strategies for the future. 

At CarbonCure Technologies, we’re committed to the goal of keeping warming below 1.5℃ to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. That means not only continuously innovating, deploying and scaling our carbon reduction and removal technologies for concrete producers—but also taking responsibility for our own emissions.

How We Evaluate and Offset our Emissions

To tackle our CO₂ impact, we need to measure it first. We regularly review our energy usage, business travel and other sources of unavoidable operational carbon emissions, then identify ways to counterbalance them, using The Oxford Principles for Net Zero Aligned Carbon Offsetting to inform our approach. 

These principles provide a framework for organizations seeking to reduce their carbon footprint. They recommend that organizations reduce their own emissions to the greatest extent possible, and—when no further reduction is available—purchase carbon credits to offset any remaining emissions. The Oxford principles recommend that credit buyers support projects that permanently remove carbon from the atmosphere, similar to how the CO₂ mineralized in CarbonCure’s concrete stays locked away for millennia. Furthermore, creating demand for new carbon removal solutions helps grow the voluntary carbon market and scale the CDR sector.

CarbonCure purchases carbon dioxide removal (CDR) credits through the carbon credit platform Patch to offset these emissions. Patch offers a portfolio of credits from a variety of high-quality carbon removal pathways.

Where We Invest and Why

We diversify our carbon removal credit selection across a variety of solutions, including ocean-based CDR, carbon mineralization and multiple forms of biomass carbon removal and storage (BiCRS). This diversification allows us to support other startups across the carbon removal field while advancing a wide range of natural and technological carbon removal solutions that the world’s top climate scientists have advised we need to scale by midcentury. 

CarbonCure’s credit purchases include:

• Carbo Culture: Based in California, Carbo Culture combines nature and tech to permanently lock carbon dioxide away. The woman-led, Finnish-American company converts waste from forestry and food production into an ultra-stable material called biochar.  Its process locks the carbon contained in organic matter into a stable, solid form for thousands of years.
  
• Charm Industrial: Charm uses plants to capture CO₂ from the atmosphere. It then converts biomass into a stable, carbon-rich liquid (bio-oil) and pumps it deep underground, where it sinks and solidifies in place removing CO₂ permanently from the atmosphere, out of reach of wildfires, soil erosion, and other threats to the environment.
  
• The Future Forest Company: This startup produces biochar from forest waste biomass at scale, and co-deploys it with reforestation to grow healthy forests that fight climate change. It plants native trees on sites across the UK to create thriving habitats for wildlife, and also restores degraded peatland (important natural carbon sinks) in Scotland and Northern England.
  
• greenSand: greenSand permanently removes CO₂ from the air by enhanced weathering (mineralization) using a mineral called olivine, harnessing a process that has taken place in nature for billions of years. Olivine is a volcanic rock that makes up more than 50 percent of the Earth’s upper mantle. greenSand crushes and grinds olivine to increase its surface area and increase the speed of CO₂ removal. The olivine material is ground up and used outdoors in infrastructure like pathways, parking lots and railway lines..
  
• Levitree; The team at Levitree sequesters carbon by chopping deadwood (branches, stumps and other waste wood materials) into wood chips, adding water to make a slurry, and pumping the mixture underground into a subterranean, anaerobic space where they cannot be degraded by microbes. This process also has infrastructure benefits—it helps elevate properties to protect them from rising sea levels and flooding.
  
• Planboo: These innovators are using bamboo—the fastest-growing plant in the world—to absorb CO₂. It develops bamboo-planting projects with local partners in Sri Lanka to supply high-quality, high-integrity carbon removal credits for the carbon market.
  
• Running Tide: The ocean is the world’s largest carbon sink. Running Tide uses distributed carbon buoys that utilize macroalgae such as kelp to absorb CO₂ from ocean water, drawing down more CO₂ from the atmosphere. Once the kelp reaches full size, gravity naturally sinks it to the ocean floor, permanently removing the captured CO₂.

Our Path to Net Zero

CarbonCure has been carbon neutral since 2020, is a proud signatory of The Climate Pledge, and is a member of the Direct Air Capture (DAC) Coalition. 

As a climate tech company, we recognize that carbon neutral is simply not enough. The climate science is clear: We need to reach net zero. To do so, we’re seeking to cut even more of our emissions and remove from the atmosphere as much CO₂ as we emit.

We’re proud to invest in, work alongside and share knowledge with our peers in the carbon removal sector who are creating innovative strategies to ensure a healthy planet for future generations. We hope others will join us in this effort—and consider CarbonCure’s verified carbon removal program to accelerate the decarbonization of the concrete sector through the purchase of high-quality carbon removal credits. 

Learn more by contacting carbonremoval@carboncure.com.