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Could your new home be carbon negative? It could be if the bricks used to build it were made with Carbon8 aggregate. The spinout from the University of Greenwich has pioneered a process it dubs 'accelerated carbonation', which essentially rapidly combines ash with carbon dioxide to form an aggregate which can be used as a building material.
For this breakthrough technique, and for creating a business plan to enable it come to market, Carbon8 has become the national winner in the Shell Springboard Awards and has received a strings-free £40,000 to accelerate the business. This comes on top of a recent £25,000 award from the Kent Innovation Challenge.
Carbon8's process is environmentally friendly in three ways: it sequesters carbon dioxide vented from industrial processes or landfill; it ensures that spent ash from incinerators does not need to be sent to landfill; and thirdly, it means aggregates do not need to be mined from the ground.
The Kentish start-up claims that using its rapid process, five tonnes of waste could sequester one tonne of CO2, giving the potential to capture 500,000 tonnes of CO2 a year within the UK's thermal wastes. And the materials that can be treated this way are not limited to incinerator ash. Slag from steel manufacturing, galligu from soap manufacturing, contaminated soils and water treatment sludges can all be used to capture CO2 and hold the hazardous chemicals inert.
The Shell Springboard prize is a national competition for small businesses starting out in green technology. The seed money is designed to give them the all important leg up -- without the strings that public sector finance usually brings with it. More than one of the owners and investors attending the Springboard awards bash at the Grosvenor House this week privately criticised the difficulty in obtaining public-sector finance for green innovations.
Other Springboard award winners in 2008 include Liverpool's 2D Heat for flame-sprayed heating elements that can require less energy than traditional cooker elements; Brigend's Econotherm which developed a high temperature heat pipe; Bath's Inspecs Innovations, which has developed a technique for mixing fuels within engines that improves efficiency; and Dundee's Oxy-Gen Combustion for its ultra-low emissions car engine, which ignites without the need for spark plugs. The company reckons fuel efficiency can be improved by 20 per cent with a better balance of fuel and air.
What impressed us about the awards was the focus on industrial innovation, something that Britain's small businesses and entrepreneurs are rather good at doing.
Most of the award-winners demonstrated tangible improvements in existing energy intensive processes, which is good because not everyone has the resources to invent the killer-apps in renewable energy. Energy conservation will have just as important a role to play, even if it requires many incremental improvements. Shell UK chairman James Smith observed that to meet the energy demands of a global economy in 2050 that's four times larger than today's, we will need to improve energy efficiency by a factor of two, and reduce the carbon-intensity by half.
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