Launch HN: Carbon Crusher (YC W22) – Carbon Negative Roads
Roads with cracks and bumps are often a result of unstable ground beneath the road surface. There are currently many ways of repairing such roads, all which are polluting. You can exchange all of the road, or mill up and reclaim parts of the road and bind it together with a substance with “glue-like” properties such as bitumen, or you could add new asphalt, concrete or gravel on top of the cracks and bumps, then you’ll likely get the same cracks and bumps a year later, since this doesn’t stabilize the soil beneath.
Our method is an enhanced, new way of full depth reclamation, with two main advantages: 1) Our proprietary built Crusher can chew and crush pretty much everything including stone and mountain surfaces, meaning we do not have to extract, transport and add any new masses and can re-use all of the road, even in rugged terrain like mountainside Norway. 2) Our binder. It’s based on lignin, a waste product from the paper industry, constituting around 1/3 of the volumes from trees. The majority of lignin is burnt, we make use of it as a binder in our roads instead, binding the carbon absorbed by the trees from the air. Our binder has no negative impact on vegetation, animals, humans or equipment. It is actually so harmless that our test-pilot Hans Arne often takes a sip of it to prove it to our customers and competitors! But it does not taste very good..
Here you see a video of our Crusher crushing large rocks (thrown in by Hans Arne): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1O1uWT5PARDWWHshac128hhv1tRk...
In combination, this results in approximately 20% lower cost compared to traditional methods, roads that on average last longer between each time they need repairs, and a reduction of Co2 equivalents from ~7-10kg positive to 5kg negative pr m2, or approximately 1 tonne net negative per 60 feet we refurbish, of a 2 lane road.
We are innovating to improve efficiency and the carbon effect of both the Crusher and the binder. For the Crusher we are working on making it smarter in addition to being powerful, with more and smarter sensor tech and from being dragged behind a tractor towards being autonomous, which could increase efficiency by 40-50%. For the binder we are experimenting with new combinations to store more CO2, adding to the lignin base we use now. We are looking at a range of new biological additions such as other types of refined lignin, other carbon negative materials and potentially programmable carbon negative molecules that can mimic the favorable binding properties, and we aim for a 5x increase in carbon capture efficiency within a few years.
We’re three climate vikings from Norway with big hearts, bound together from earlier tech adventures. Kris dropped out of college at age 19 to found his first software company, and met his hardware match Hans on another project 10 years ago. Kris invested when Haakon co-founded Katapult and started scaling sustainability and tech companies 6 years ago, and early last year we all excitedly decided to join forces to build Carbon Crusher. The very first road though, refurbished with our method, was made 14 years back in Hans Arnes hometown, “Heart Valley” in Norway. Being able today to drive, touch it and see how good it still is, is a nice unique competitive edge for us and that our recent customers appreciate. Even if volumes have been limited so far it’s good to also have actual recent happy customers (municipalities, cities, counties and a few industrial companies) as ambassadors, as the road business is very conservative; we have sometimes struggled with being nicknamed “t...
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[ 1.1 ms ] story [ 219 ms ] thread1. 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, ...)
You had me here! <3
Good luck!
In the attached video, was that crushing only or was lignin binder being mixed in as well? The output looks dark but kind of powdery, I would guess that's soil being mixed in, because I don't see a fluid tank on the back of that tractor.
It looks like resulting the particle size is quite small - I would assume that some amount of aggregate would be tolerable or even beneficial for material strength. Are there gravel sized bits under the top surface? Is the output uniform or are there distinct layers.
How long does the resulting road need to "set" before cars can start driving on it, and how does that compare to traditional techniques?
Demo video shows a ~2m wide output, is this system capable of making multilane roads yet?
Wish you the best, very clever idea. :D
Likewise, what would your source of lignin material? How do the transportation and processing costs impact your ability to generate the parent materials for this process?
And most rot is actually around the lignin. Amazing material.
We are working working with some awesome scientists at https://www.nmbu.no/en and we will dig deeper into global fungi tactics together with them
What are the biggest objections that your customers tend to have?
How much is the use of lignin a factor, in terms of long-term scaling?
There are huge amounts of lignin in the world which is the base for our current binder. With our current producer volumes and without leveraging synthetic bio we can reach USD 2bn in yearly global revenue. If we were to leverage all the current lignin supply in the world we could Carbon Crush 1.5million miles of roads every year.
What is the cost comparison per foot of road between traditional road repair and your approach (factoring in the maintenance interval increase)? Are there any regulatory challenges you've discovered that might be roadblocks to you scaling out? For example, Google Fiber had pole access issues due to regulations passed to benefit existing ISPs. Is there anything like this in this space?
Are there any niches where you see particular traction as being easier? You've got a big opportunity you're going after so I'm curious about where you're starting. For example, maybe you're especially attractive in adverse environments like snow + mountains. Or maybe cost-conscious towns where you can easily partner with local road repair crews and there aren't meaningful revenues for larger established players. Not actually sure, just curious where your land & expand strategy starts.
Transport is included in all of our estimates, but we haven't yet done the comparison for every location in the world. We are working on a tool so we can on the fly update the CO2 calculation for each customer based on the location in our next markets which are North America and Southern Europe. That said, traditional road repair uses bitumen from oil production, or fly ash from coal power plant, which would also have to be transported from their respective source, and both oil, coal plant and lignin plants can be found around the world. Our current producer has great coverage in Europe and also in North America, and we are constantly looking at growing our supplier network. We are also focused on transport by electric trains in the Nordics and have also ordered Tesla Semis that can help us move binders and equipment.
We are 20% cheaper than the traditional method, factoring in the maintenance interval (we have a few years longer interval). This is with a solid gross margin, so we could also go lower to increase demand when needed.
We see a lot of interest from Eastern Europe (Poland + Baltics) and also from gravel roads around the world where we have an even stronger USPs to the customers. In maintaining gravel roads - the only alternative to our method is to put more gravel on every other year, which is expensive, time consuming, and leaves a terrible Co2 footprint compared to our long lasting roads.
I’m sure your analysis is much more accurate than my native questions since you actually spent time in this space whereas I’ve spent none. Is there a paper you can share? I’d love to forward it to my friends in the space to bring you to their attention as doing cool stuff.
> Our proprietary built Crusher
Why is "proprietary" important ?
I watched your video with the Crusher. For most places having a subgrade of rock or good granular material as seen in the video would be a luxury for road construction. In general roads on this material are fairly stable and it is the more common subgrades of clay, silts and sands that have problems normally related to drainage issues. Does your solution offer anything for these scenariosm?
Short hand product notes: Lower carbon impact, lower cost. What is the product life compared to incumbents?
From a user implementation perspective (IE the city crew): - Do they need new training, new equipment etc, how long compared to traditional implementation? - Is it easy to import to North America? - What are the adoption risks?
Look forward to seeing this in the wild! Interesting that you are going for a subscription model.
We can supply the crusher hardware, our binders, onsite first time PM + remote PMs after that. We now do this in all of Europe, UK + North America. Imports are not an issue to North America and Carbon Crusher is an American company and we already have presence in the state of New York. There is no adoption risks as we see it, as long as the training is done properly.
The training is mainly operating training combined with daily and monthly maintenance. We have an extensive library of remote content for training purposes. Typical onsite training is 2 weeks, if the personell has experience with road maintenance. We are also looking at VR training to speed things up on the remote training side:)
Is the mix with lignin waterproof?
-5kg of carbon per m2? How? The lignin based binder absorbs more carbon from the air after it is placed into the road? I may be misreading but it seems like these numbers are based on the amount of carbon in the lignin itself (i.e. since it isn't burned which would be positive, you can count it as negative as it is not burned)
If I am wrong on this, please correct me. But it sure sounds like a lot of conveniently vague statements to make for nice sounding numbers. This would be a shame as even without misleading claims of CO2 reduction, the benefit of removing oil from the process and replacing it with a renewable source is clear and should stand for itself.
If the binder does indeed absorb C02 over time what is the rate? What effect does it have on the binders stability? Or if its used in its manufacturing how are you sourcing the CO2? What is the breakdown timeframe for the binder releasing any sequestered carbon back into the atmosphere?
Simple.
For warming we can use electricity generated by wind, solar, tides etc.
Do not move the goalposts.
If I run an industrial plant that's currently fuelled by burning waste lignin from the paper industry, and I decide to stop that and install some solar panels instead, it seems reasonable for me to claim that change is carbon negative (i.e. I've reduced carbon emissions).
Now if CarbonCrusher comes along and buys the lignin I no longer need, uses it to build a road, and claims the same carbon saving as I did, we end up double counting.
Which of us is wrong?
When you switched from burning lignin to solar, you reduced your carbon usage.
However, what happened to the lignin that you stopped using?
If it was burned somewhere else, the total carbon usage remained the same even though you changed your usage.
If it was stockpiled and is now decomposing over three years, the carbon usage was time-shifted and will be back where it was in three years. (However, total carbon usage will be reduced the first and second year.)
This is supposedly a usage of lignin that results in no release, so it actually is carbon-negative (assuming that the processing doesn't use more carbon), regardless of what other folks think that they did. That said, it's probably actually just time-shifted, albeit on a long time-scale.
Note that both coal and diamonds are actually time-shifted carbon usage, on the scale of millions of years.
In my scenario, CarbonCruncher bought the lignin I stopped using and made a road out of it. Crucially, in doing so they claim to have a negative carbon impact because they'd trapped that carbon in the ground. But I already claimed that impact when I stopped buying and burning it myself and switched to a zero-emission energy source.
So my (genuine) question remains: we can't _both_ claim the benefit, so who's right?
Thousands of people get "best grandma" coffee mugs each year. Logically, only one of them actually is, but who cares and why?
Thanks for pointing out! We are still a young company and need to work on our Scope 1-3 accounting :)
So my scope 1 emissions can be your scope 3 emissions if I emit carbon to make something that I sell to you… but the “real” emissions are always _somebody’s_ scope 1. Interesting stuff!
[0]: https://www.carbontrust.com/resources/briefing-what-are-scop...
However it's quite difficult to break its bonds in ways that yield useful compounds. And until there is a viable way of upcycling it, burning it for energy is what they do
Replace the lignin with some fantastical material that contains no carbon and requires no carbon to produce, and after it is laid on the road it quickly absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere equivalent to the amount of carbon that lignin contains.
Would you say that is carbon negative?
Nor is buying a bunch of stuff at the store that you don’t need just because it’s 35% off retail price “saving money”.
Cash flow positive is not losing money slower, it’s making more than you spend. Carbon negative absorbs more carbon than you spend. Including in chopping up an old road and recycling it, which is going to take a lot of power.
If I had a box that you plugged in that was actually carbon negative and I forgot I left it running while I was on vacation, I would not feel guilty. If doing nothing results in less carbon emissions than doing something, it’s not negative.
Making something takes energy, as you will recall if you weren’t asleep that entire semester in physics class. If the bit at the end cancels out some of the problems created earlier, you still have some of the problems created earlier.
That giant machine in their PR materials didn't just appear out of nowhere. It doesn't run on rainbows. It has a considerable embodied carbon footprint. It has an operational footprint, and a transportation footprint. It assuredly produces lots of pm2.5 and not just from the tailpipe.
Undoubtedly less that the process it replaces, but negative is an extraordinary claim, and I don't see any extraordinary evidence here.
My goal post is us not choking on our own filth. We are in a closed system. Any bullshit that moves pollution around in time or location doesn’t fix anything, and because of the laws of thermodynamics there are only very narrow envelopes where doing something is globally better than doing nothing. Cooling a house heats the planet more than the house cools.
We can’t be celebrating systems that don’t move us toward 50% of our current budget. And some solutions that move you a quarter of the way there but then get you stuck at that point are a form of bargaining. In the end you have to let those go and he longer you delude yourself the worse things are.
We need less driving and fewer roads. Fuel efficiency and road efficiency actually increase demand. We’ve seen this, it is known.
So.... you give up? This is stupid all-or-nothing absolutist thinking. I'm not saying OP YC is the greatest thing since sliced bread, but long-term sequestration of tree carbon is a carbon sink.
Solar/Wind is at LCOE parity with natural gas turbine. It will pass it soon, with basic subsidies (as if fossil fuels aren't subsidized) then storage won't be a disadvantage either. If not, emerging economies of scale and tech progress in wind/solar will leave natural gas in the dust.
So even if the grid is dirty now, there is a clear path forward, and the grid will adapt to the changing pattern, and we already have the delivery method solved (the grid). And there are opportunities to possibly scrub carbon from central generation. Not as much as the sociopathic petroleum companies would like you to think so they can go business as usual, but better than an ICE car.
If you find a better use for sawdust, great. But if you could invent a new saw blade with a smaller kerf, you’d be helping more.
Paper mills captures CO2 from trees (that are sustainably harvested, more trees planted than harvested p.a.) of which parts of it is released after some of the lignin is burned (inefficiently) for fuel. If they stop burning lignin for fuel, they need other energy sources, and then the question is how the paper mill chooses to do this: - The mills can choose to burn fossil fuels, get a renewable source, or buy electricity from the grid. We will only source lignin from players serious about sustainability and green alternatives (industrial broilers could also use green hydrogen), alongside prioritising maximised energy efficient operations - Even if they get electricity from the grid, the world is moving forward and we’re luckily reaching a point where additional capacity in the grid is coming from renewables, while fossil is decreasing - boosting new renewable buildout more
What’s very important in what you point out is that when we expand our lignin supplier base, we need to be careful in selecting our suppliers, understanding their alternatives and understanding our Scope 3 emission effects to ensure it aligns with our mission of saving the planet :) And that's what we will do - ensure that this ends up on the right side.
I'm sure there's a definition out there of carbon negative that means what you say it means, but if we're being honest carbon negative means that doing more of something reduces the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. You can't claim that not burning lignin is carbon negative since this product already exists as a byproduct in the paper industry (as you said). By repairing roads you're still emitting more carbon than removing from the atmosphere.
If the product of the whole operation ends up with less carbon in the atmosphere, then it is in fact removing carbon. Plus they aren't using binders that contribute to more carbon to the atmosphere.
Now, we can be extremely strict in this definition and unless a company actually produces 0 carbon and is still extracting it from the atmosphere would be the ones who could claim they are "carbon negative", but then I guess not even CO2 extractors could claim that because they still need to be built and consume power.
I don't think that will get us anywhere. By that logic not even trees are "carbon negative".
In the end it's a matter of perspective, because what we're actually doing most of the time is offsetting/moving carbon around, and there's nothing wrong with that.
If it's captured from the air by a chemical process, or stored underground, or if it simply is stored in a byproduct that's reused and never reaches the atmosphere, it's all the same.
It is very hard to do anything with biomass at industrial scale without emitting more carbon than the biomass itself contains.
Even look at biomass to energy, by the time harvest, transport, and process a tree for use to "offset" fossil fuel combustion, it's hard to say thats carbon negative.
Now you harvest the biomass, put it through some chemical engineering process to make a binder product, put this binder product in the hopper of some massive diesel powered behemoth machine that chews up, binds, and compacts and remakes roads. This obviously consumes a LOT of energy.
Is it a cool company? Yes, making effective nontoxic product out of another industries byproduct, to be used in something thats been foundational to human society for 1000s of years, roads, is maybe the neatest new company I've heard about in a long time.
Does it emit less carbon than some other ways of repaving roads? probably.
Is it carbon negative by ANY definition? OBVIOUSLY not (or I will eat my hat and throw an egg on my face.)
I'm honestly confused why there's ANY claim of being carbon negative, let alone it being front and center, when the underlying product can totally stand on its own??
That machine that chews up the road and lays it back down, how many kg of carbon per m2 does it burn?
I think too you have to compare the lifetime pollution of a bitumen patch versus the point source pollution of grinding a road up in the open air and putting it back down. There's going to be a ratio of resurface vs patch that has a lower cost than using either strategy exclusively. Especially if you use their chemistry for patches, instead of resurfacing.
Figure out how to mix red dye in with your binder and pave a bike lane.
What happens to the lignin when cars drive along it?
Does any of it end up as airborne particulates?
What about the run-off after rains?
How is it in cold climates where they put salt on the roads?
Further, we are working on new complementary road tech that can enhance and add to the carbon potential from our solution. This includes ... capturing and dissemination of energy captured by the roads.
I'm very interested in this part. Do you have any more details to share?
The carbon aspect is great, but I love how this attempts to address the unstable ground problem. Here in Quebec due to cheaply made road foundation and harsh freeze-thaw cycles, at this time of the year the roads have almost more potholes than... road.
Keep crushing it!