What's the Problem?

In order to mitigate the millions of tons of CO2 generated annually by the paper, plastics, and paints industries, they are searching for new carbon-reduced raw materials. The challenge lies in finding alternatives that don't change existing processes or facilities and don't increase costs. Currently, these industries use high amounts of calcium carbonate, which has the potential to be carbon-negative and reduce product emissions. However, the existing method of extraction through mining is carbon positive. Scalable solutions for carbon negative carbonates are still lacking because physicochemical methods consume excessive energy or produce chemical waste material and biological ones have complicated purification processes.

How are they Solving it?

We’ve developed an innovative solution using cyanobacteria from extreme environments to precipitate carbon negative calcium carbonates for these industries to significantly reduce their carbon footprint on final products. Moreover, our calcium carbonate additive is implementable without changing processes, and is cost-competitive. For this we are leveraging our cyanobacteria that perform photosynthesis, so they do not consume feedstock or electrical energy to fix CO2. By thriving in extreme salinity, they enable open pond use with low contamination risk and using calcium from industrial waste results in a scalable process and extracellular mineral formation allows simple purification of high-purity carbonates.

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Vexxel Biotech

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