CarbonGood

The primary problem we're addressing is how to quickly and affordably advance healthy communities for a zero-carbon world, adapted to a warmer climate.

Climate change is escalating floods and drought, which in turn is disrupting food production and affecting both crop and livestock farming — with increased costs and price hikes impacting the impoverished most significantly. The concern over food scarcity is global; soaring prices and the threat of famine loom in vulnerable regions, spreading economic stress worldwide.

The world urgently needs scalable, low-cost, and community-friendly climate solutions addressing food security, soil health and carbon emissions through innovative and accessible technologies. This is the challenge we're specifically working to solve, starting in the locations where we currently work, including the Americas, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and South Asia.

Four key concerns are relevant to our solution:

1. Climate change, propelled by emissions, is causing a shift in our planet's temperatures, and disrupting weather patterns. These alterations are leading to significant changes in rainfall— some regions experience excessive precipitation while others face drought. These extremes drastically affect agriculture and natural habitats. Our technology is specifically designed to address and reduce emissions at their source, aiming to mitigate the climactic shifts that threaten our environment.

2. Adapting to unpredictable climates hinges on resilient communities with secure food systems. Agricultural productivity, crucial to this security, is threatened by climate-induced soil degradation and unsustainable farming practices. These result in yield drops and vulnerability to erosion and flooding. Addressing soil health is urgent, as studies, including the University of Sheffield's in 2014, predict limited remaining harvests. Our innovative approach revitalizes soil structure and boosts fertility.

3. Deliverability is an enormous challenge for most extant solutions. While various approaches to emissions reduction exist, it is apparent that none so far can be delivered at the speed and scale needed to significantly impact either emissions or food security in the time available. Complexity and / or geological requirements also make those solutions – save exceptions such as Direct Air Capture (DAC) and enhanced weathering – viable only on a few large single-point emitters, so unable to benefit communities or the vast majority of emission sources. Further, most require costly and complex CO2 separation. Our innovation circumvents these limitations, enabling swift, scalable deployment virtually anywhere. It benefits communities and targets numerous small (or large) emission sources for immediate positive effects.

4. Economic considerations remain paramount for many, overshadowing climate change issues, even in the West. Meanwhile populations in developing regions, focused on subsistence farming on depleted land, have very limited capacity to prioritize climate action, and very limited incentive to do so; survival outweighs climate change concerns. Our solution presents an economically viable and swiftly effective option suitable for diverse groups, including metropolitan areas, industrial sectors, and small communities alike.

CarbonGood presents a comprehensive, scalable, and readily deployable solution with proven efficacy and broad-reaching impact, embodying resilience and sustainability in the fight against two of humanity’s most pressing concerns - food security and climate change.

The technology emerges from foundational research at the University of Jordan, further refined through collaborations with the University of Sheffield and the University of Edinburgh. Our system offers a dual-benefit approach to addressing food scarcity and managing carbon emissions by utilizing one issue to mitigate the other. Its innovation lies in its design for immediate carbon capture at the emission source as well as its alternative, adaptable direct air capture (DAC) technology.

At its core, CarbonGood merges two established methods: the water-efficient practice of hydroponics and the long-term carbon storage solution of biochar. This fusion creates a synergistic, high-efficiency system that excels in CO2 absorption and enables rapid generation of biomass. When stationed directly at emission sites, the system harnesses higher CO2 concentrations to boost productivity. While less concentrated in urban DAC applications, placement in high emission zones still results in a considerable increase in output.

The design's modularity ensures that CarbonGood can be implemented in diverse locations previously unsuitable for carbon capture technologies. Free from harmful chemicals and risk, operating at ambient prssure and temperature, its deployment possibilities extend even to dense population centers without safety concerns.

The biomass produced serves immediate nutritional needs and provides for longer-term soil improvement when converted into biochar, thus sidestepping the greenhouse gas emissions typical of organic decay.

CarbonGood's utility extends into additional value-added materials, subject only to the limitations of supply, a constraint that CarbonGood aims to resolve. The system’s adaptability also allows the use of various forms of biomass to cater to local environmental demands.

The structure's design, conforming to ISO 20-foot shipping container standards, assures global transport compatibility, making deployment straightforward using existing logistics networks - by road, rail, or sea.

CarbonGood's operational model prioritizes conservation by recycling water and sourcing nutrients from organic waste. While energy requirements are minimal, all materials are cost-effective and globally accessible. Modular construction from commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components allows for local assembly, facilitating rapid dissemination. The configuration is adaptable, leveraging available space efficiently, and it integrates seamlessly with available commercial systems for biomass harvesting.

This solution stands out not only for its practicality but also for its ethical foundation. It aligns with numerous United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), ensuring sustainable and ethical operations. With no potential single point of failure or dependency on unproven technology, reliability is innate to the system. Furthermore, the unit's lifecycle ends with a clean slate, as it can be entirely disassembled for repurposing or recycling, leaving minimal environmental impact.

A functional prototype in Mexico stands testament to this technology’s contributions local food security and economic stability while addressing larger-scale environmental challenges.

CarbonGood exists first and foremost to empower local communities in addressing both carbon capture and food security. Our initiative offers local populations immediate access to nutritious food and fosters sustainable agricultural development. Manufacturing and deploying our solutions provide work opportunities, which can blossom into entrepreneurial ventures, proven by our Mexico project pilot.

By focusing on local production, we eliminate extensive supply chains, trimming losses and decreasing the environmental impact typically linked with them.

Our technology is especially transformative for regions where farming is challenging. In countless areas of subsistence agriculture, poor soil quality hampers food production, forcing families, particularly women and youth, to toil with little hope for educational or financial advancement. CarbonGood introduces a stream of quality, locally produced food, and biomass for biochar which can help to restore and improve soils, reducing the need for expensive chemical soil amendments. The further effects of doing so include raising populations’ social and economic prospects, at the same time removing or reducing key factors in social deprivation and unrest.

On a broader scale, CarbonGood reduces greenhouse gases, contributing to climate stability. For the younger generation, CarbonGood stands as a beacon of practical hope. CarbonGood will be very visible, and operate very transparently, with tangible benefits evident to all. Implemented at scale, and operated with an open public face that has nothing to hide, CarbonGood will provide powerful weight to a more hopeful view of the future. Our operations provide visible proof of progress—from cleaner air to more affordable food—fueling a more optimistic outlook for the future.

Opening up CarbonGood’s operations for open collaboration and open development is another key aspect. As an educational nonprofit working internationally, we are poised to maximize educational benefits and encourage collective action against climate change.

In reshaping local food systems with a clear, transparent, and inclusive model, CarbonGood aims not just to enhance local livelihoods but also to share a vision of a collaborative, sustainable future.

California-based nonprofit Ecocity Builders has been a frontrunner in the green cities movement since the early 1990s. We are pioneers in ecological urban planning and design, education, and policy, aiming to bring a harmonious balance between urban living and the natural world.

Our achievements are evident and influential, including the revitalization of Codornices Creek in Berkeley, California, from a cemented canal into a thriving urban waterway, one of America's earliest creek daylighting endeavors. We're also known for 'depaving' (converting parking into parks), 'slow streets' (using curb bulb-outs to slow traffic); 'ecocity mapping' (a method for identifying and reinforcing 'urban villages' in urban areas; ecocity general plan amendments, a solar greenhouse ordinance, and the Berkeley Residential Energy Conservation Ordinance (RECO).

Over the years we’ve taken our local experiences global, including via our international conference series, Ecocity World Summit, cultivating 'pieces of the ecocity' that demonstrate our vision—neighborhoods with calmer transit ways; streets adorned with fruit and nut trees; and buildings that fuse nature into their architecture. These are the signatures of our work. Ecocity Builders collaborates closely with international bodies like the UN Environment Program's Cities Unit and is adept at facilitating community engagement and focusing on neighborhood-scale projects.

Our CarbonGood team is comprised of professionals deeply invested in the environments they serve. The team, led by Kirstin Miller, Executive Director of Ecocity Builders, includes a Mexican engineer successfully running a CarbonGood system prototype, and the British inventor of the system. Moroccan associates have recently joined forces with us, with more international partners to follow, expanding the worldwide footprint of Ecocity Builders.

Remaining true to our not-for-profit ethos, Ecocity Builders will employ open-source licensing for the basic CarbonGood design, fostering a collaborative environment where users worldwide can enhance the system and share advancements. This ensures that the pricing is influenced by local economies and allows for regional customization of the design, enhancing performance under varying local conditions.

WHY “PROTOTYPE” STAGE?

The “prototype” stage has been selected as it accurately describes our current stage of development. The working "guts" of CarbonGood is the cassette, which is also the most difficult part of the solution to design and debug. Accordingly, prototyping work has been focused on the stand-alone cassette. With our limited team, considerable work remains to be done to optimize these to maximize yield and efficiency but even at this stage we are seeing promising performance.

WHAT HAVE WE ACHIEVED?

Our vision of a low-carbon, nutrient-rich global food system is underway!

CarbonGood addresses the complete brief for the Challenge, enabling a low-carbon and nutritious global food system, suitable for both large or small-scale producers and with local, short-distance supply chains that reduce both food loss and carbon footprint.

• In terms of numbers, even during the research and prototype stages, while subject to ongoing interruption for improvement, our single unit stand-alone prototype cassette, launched at our partner lab in Mexico, has produced approximately 120kg of dry biomass per week (equating to some 6 tonnes per year). Using 45% carbon content of dry mass, approx. 54 kg of carbon has been taken up. 
• From a food perspective, weekly output comprises 9kg of high-value wheatgrass, 9kg of micro-greens, and 7kg of fresh premium eggs from the chickens fed on the biomass. The unit provides part-time labor for two people.
• From a carbon capture perspective, if we converted all 54 kg of CarbonGood's carbon into biochar, comprising approximately 80% carbon, this equates to around 67.5 kg of biochar per week so 3.5 tonnes annually. That equates to up to 8 tonnes CO2e per year. (One tonne of biochar is estimated to equate to some 2.3 tonnes of CO2e). 
• By way of example for a single user, a typical passenger vehicle emits about 4.6 tons of CO2 per year, so one CarbonGood cassette could allow a car-using individual or family to completely offset their carbon footprint and have a valuable product to sell or use to boost their own agricultural yield by up to 50%.
• Finally, looking ahead to beyond prototype and into production, upscaling the cassette to an industrialised format the container-format unit, or HU, contains 10 cassettes. A 1000 HU installation (which stacked 9-high would take only around 1 acre) should generate around 35,000 tonnes of biochar so 80,000 tonnes CO2e.

• It is worth noting that demand for biochar carbon credits has doubled
  over each of the last two years. Buyers have included some major corporate names, including Microsoft, JP Morgan Chase, Swiss Re and Nasdaq. Prices on some transactions have been as high as USD200 per CO2e, with the overall average for 2023 at around USD150. The high output of CO2e from CarbonGood should make it highly competitive.
• Our team has completed parametric modeling using Onshapefor a single unit, with a comprehensive Bill of Materials (BOM). By converting the CarbonGood OnShape file into a PDF, we retain the richness of a 3D model while providing an accessible, simplified representation of the design that can be easily distributed, viewed, and used by people with varying degrees of expertise in digital design. This makes the information more democratic and can serve a wider audience, from DIY enthusiasts to professional fabricators.
• We have achieved 70% completion for the full-scale system's model design.
• A recent advancement is the establishment of a partnership with Innovative and Sustainable Solutions, based in Morocco. This alliance signals our commitment to international growth, bringing CarbonGood's model to Morocco and laying the  groundwork for expansion in Africa and elsewhere.

CarbonGood is expected to deliver a ready-to-go scalable solution within the next 2 years. Assuming this is achieved, the speed with which climate change is occurring, with increasingly deadly impact, coupled with rising food insecurity and growing populations makes very large-scale roll-out at pace a priority.

While the stand-alone units can be locally built and operated, even for small populations, the large-scale container form needed to meaningfully address global emissions and food security is a different story.

While designed to be low-tech, this will still require manufacturing facilities to be established and logistics arrangements made for handling, storage, transport, and large-scale distribution of both materials and units, as well as on-the-ground planning and preparation of locations, utilities provision, workforce hiring and training, etc. This will need to be done at very large scale (albeit subject to the political hurdles in some nations). 

Firstly then, while we have made great strides in CarbonGood’s development we are at the point where considerably wider R&D resources will be required to move the system forward, both in terms of system optimization and in terms of industrialization and upscaling.

Secondly, significant education and awareness-raising programs will be required to spread the message that CarbonGood is available and the benefits it offers, and to implement local distribution and support channels. These channels must ultimately reach almost every community and emitter if we are to cut our emissions sufficiently.

As a relatively small NGO, even with our international reach we are not in a position to handle the scale and complexity of these aspects, especially under the time pressures the planet faces. Our motivation in applying to SOLVE is to leverage your connections and partner base to assist with these essential aspects.

Both technologies, hydroponics and biomass for biochar, are well-established. However, our solution is innovative in that:

1.    We bring the two technologies together in a novel way in an integrated but simple fully-scalable highly flexible carbon capture solution

2.    No other carbon capture solution can be implemented at the scale and speed of CarbonGood thanks to the simple and established technology and use of off-the-shelf components, coupled with leveraging a global population of users at all scales.

3.    No other carbon capture solution offers the vertical or lateral flexibility and impact of CarbonGood. Vertical, in that it is equally applicable to any emitter from large-scale industry down to, for example, a school boiler house. Lateral, in that it is independent of geological or geographical constraints and of a location’s technological sophistication. Simply put, CarbonGood is a solution for everyone.

4.    No other carbon capture solution simultaneously addresses immediate food security, long-term food security, population resilience to climate change, and climate change itself.

5.    No other carbon capture solution is positioned to immediately make a positive difference to local lives and health and so to be welcomed rather than treated with suspicion and reluctance. This in turn removes one of the most significant hurdles to implementation faced by other solutions.

As a result of the above CarbonGood opens up the entire world’s climate change solution landscape, catalyzing both those joining us on the journey in our shared designs and technology, and those in the wider spheres of agriculture and in construction and architecture employing the new biochar-based materials, to make a positive impact in combating climate change.

It will similarly directly involve urban planners to bring local carbon capture into urban spaces, as well as inhabitants of towns, cities and villages to take an active role with employment in the systems, to themselves directly combat climate change.

Further, CarbonGood offers an enabling solution for many other sectors. It is possible to envisage for example versions for marine use, replacing some of the containers on VLCC with a mid-scale CarbonGood installation to mitigate their emissions. In view of the IMO’s signing-up to a CO2 reduction strategy in April 2018, such solutions will be in high demand.

More immediately, it offers a rapidly-implemented bolt-on plug-&-play solution for industries of all scales, with the option to start small and immediately begin to capture emissions, then build on that initial implementation using available space flexibly to fit the location. This allows industries to embark on real emissions reduction far more quickly than do large-scale technical projects that can take many months to commission, as well as offering much less demanding investment as spend can be phased with each increment.

By providing a fully-scalable go-anywhere carbon capture solution, CarbonGood also offers an enabler to extend other environmental technologies such as BECCS or biomass-fuelled industry, in turn allowing those to be more rapidly and widely deployed.

The majority of emissions are from millions of small and widely-distributed sources worldwide that are not only unsuitable for extant solutions, but where there is no motivation for implementing those even were they affordable or practicable in those situations. Poorer countries usually have far more pressing considerations than climate change, including feeding populations, and competition both internally and externally for resources; that competition will accelerate as water becomes scarcer and populations continue to grow. Addressing climate change will generally be a long way down such countries’ list of priorities, especially as extant solutions will be implemented and operated by foreign corporates and offer little or no real local economic or social value.

Further, following a number of highly damaging instances of foreign-owned corporate operations exploiting these countries’ resources and populations, often creating serious environmental harm and pollution and health issues, such countries are now often deeply suspicious of incoming foreign-owned operations.

Tackling emissions requires an appropriate tool able to be applied locally by millions anywhere, delivering globally far greater reductions, far more rapidly, than a few large players in a few locations could achieve.

As or more importantly, those millions need to be motivated to do so, able to clearly see benefits not only in the long-term, but also to see rapid and tangible wins for themselves and their families.

With transparent implementation by local players rather than anonymous corporates, and yielding immediate and tangible nutritional and food security benefits, CarbonGood will also have the visibility and ethicality to overcome local concern and suspicion.

Again, CarbonGood is a solution for everyone. Leveraging this scale and pace of roll-out to tackle the myriad of emitters unreachable by other solutions will significantly impact emissions.

Impact Goals for CarbonGood:

Transformative Reduction in Carbon Emissions — At CarbonGood, a primary goal is to meaningfully reduce carbon emissions, both locally and globally. We'll measure our success by the tons of CO2 our CarbonGood units capture, aspiring to reduce emissions substantially year over year.

Boosting Food Sovereignty and Security — Responding to the need to eradicate hunger and enhance community resilience, we strive to produce nutrient-rich food that meets the needs of local populations. We quantify this impact by tracking the volume of food generated and the number of people who gain access to fresh produce from the units.

Catalyzing Green Economic Growth — CarbonGood serves as a springboard for eco-economic development by revitalizing underutilized spaces. We track the creation of jobs and the revitalization of spaces as direct economic indicators, looking to showcase increased economic activity within communities hosting our installations.

Fulfilling the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) — Our solution aims at ticking multiple boxes of the UN SDGs checklist—from climate action to sustainable communities. Success is measured through an SDG alignment score that tracks contributions across relevant goals, visualizing a holistic approach to global sustainability benchmarks.

Establishing Sustainable, Ethical Practices — We promote a circular economy ethos encapsulated by our system's water and material reuse. Indicators include reduction percentages in water consumption and waste production against traditional agricultural and industrial methods.

Expanding the Model for Global Scalability — Proof of concept lies in our ability to replicate success across diverse geographies. Our metric? The number of CarbonGood units deployed in various countries.

At its heart, CarbonGood is inherently low-tech; there is no one core technology, rather the combination and development of two very simple and well-understood processes into low-cost modular units designed to maximize the performance and deployment of those processes.

This is a very deliberate approach, chosen to maximize potential take-up irrespective of technological sophistication of end-users, as well as simplifying material support, maintenance and training – all significant factors in any large-scale implementation.

In the same way, the avoidance of a single “key technology” ensures that no bottleneck exists in roll-out at scale. Further, making the technology as simple and transparent as possible helps to overcome the suspicion with which many view change, so helping to remove a key barrier to acceptance.

Throughout the development process we have striven for the simplest possible technical solution and minimum parts count in every aspect; the sole exception is the control system which, while maintaining this approach works with a secured app and the Internet of Things to enable the business models described below.

The main technology employed during development is application of the OnShape online product development platform, allowing the model to be shared and debugged both across the team during design and development stages, and with the global community going forward to enable and encourage the sharing of local improvement and optimization. This also permits digital modelling of sufficient detail to identify and resolve, for example, static or dynamic interfaces between components, saving considerable cost and effort at the physical prototype stage. The design files can be viewed here.

The second technology, key to the business models described below, uses a web/phone app in the Internet of Things to manage licensing and control of the systems, with each instance being digitally keyed to its system. Please refer to that section for detailed description.

1 part-time staff - Kirstin Miller

1 contractor - Isaias Baruch

1 volunteer (the inventor) - Mark Everson

Intermittently, over ten years. Most of the design work has been over the last three years, with preceding time being largely fundamental research, including feasibility discussion with the University of Sheffield and the University of Edinburgh. The last three years have been more intensive concept development to simplify and streamline construction and operation to optimize cost-effectiveness and ease of use.

At Ecocity Builders, we are committed to fostering a culture that embraces diversity, promotes equity, and ensures inclusion.

• We prioritize recruitment from diverse talent pools and cultivate an atmosphere where differences are celebrated and leveraged for their contributions to innovative and adaptive problem-solving.
• Our leadership team embodies diversity not just in cultural backgrounds but in professional disciplines, providing a comprehensive approach to building sustainable and equitable urban spaces.
• We set clear goals for increased diversity across all organizational levels, with consistent assessments to ensure alignment with our objectives.
• We enact policies to minimize barriers to entry and progression within our organization, ensuring equitable access to opportunities for all.
• We maintain a welcoming environment by fostering a sense of belonging, where every team member's voice is heard, respected, and considered foundational to our shared success.

We perceive equity as a right to access opportunity and advancement for all, recognizing and working to eliminate systemic barriers that limit participation. Inclusion to us is about actively designing environments of respect, support, and value to all individuals, enabling our team to thrive and propel our mission forward.

CarbonGood has two business models; “stand-alone”, and “container”. Both are managed operationally and commercially by phone/web app and Internet of Things. The app licence must be renewed every 12 months, ceasing to function otherwise (a 2-week grace period is granted); the controller may be "bricked" if not renewed. Fees will be sufficiently low to deter users from attempting to bypass the app, reinforced by the “bricking” risk. The app allows users to optimise operating parameters for their situation, but is otherwise secured. The app is digitally keyed to each controller, working only with those controllers, preventing users building and adding a look-alike since it will have no controller.

Further units can be added but must have their controllers digitally keyed to the app, handled via a web-based system. Users can modify non-controller elements (physical container frame or cassettes) and post such modifications to the OS database for others. They can also request local controller mods (e.g pump upgrades) to optimise performance with their climate or selected biomass; those require CarbonGood approval and an implementation fee would apply to embody into the app database.

The first model operates as one or several enclosed cassette units similar to the prototype. This will be structurally open-source licensed so users can tweak the model and upload to the cloud database improvements or local adaptations for others to use and build on. That will help create a global  community to spread CarbonGood – and so carbon capture and agricultural benefit – much faster than otherwise achievable.

Services (water, nutrient, CO2, temperature) are managed through a controller per cassette, controlled by the app.  Users have the choice of purchasing a complete “plug-&-play” cassette, a “flat-pack” kit of parts, or just the designs and controller to self-build. An annual licence fee per user would apply, level 1 covering up to 5 units and level 2 up to 10 units. Offering this purchase flexibility opens up the market to the full spectrum of potential small-scale users, from hobbyist to small commercial operation.

Limiting this first business model to 10 units avoids overlap with or threat to the second model, but allows sufficient expansion to encourage users to upgrade to that second model. Upgrading is facilitated by a “trade-in” route allowing stand-alone units to be cost-effectively returned and replaced by the container system. Returned stand-alone units can be almost immediately re-sold; given these have already been paid for, and this fast turnover, there will be no or minimal resulting inventory cost.

The second model is the container-format version, holding 10 cassettes (a different design to the stand-alone) with services again managed through a central controller for each container, controlled by the app. Again, the user has the choice of buying fully-assembled “plug-&-play” containers (facilitated by compatibility with global ISO container handling infrastructure), a kit of parts, or just the design plus packaged control system.

The two business models do not overlap, but between them provide full coverage of the complete user base, from hobbyist to large-scale industry or city.

Our strategy for achieving financial sustainability at CarbonGood is multifaceted and is embedded in our mission to deliver societal impact with financial stability.

A key revenue generator will be the licensing of industrial-scale CarbonGood systems which appeal to institutional consumers focused on ESG targets and reduction of carbon footprints. 

Given the growing demand for sustainable agriculture solutions and carbon emission control methods, we project a robust market for high-quality microgreens, biochar products, as well as for the carbon credits associated with the production of biochar, for both our small scale, open-source systems as well as our full scale models.

In addition to direct sales, we plan to foster strategic alliances with local stakeholders, such as technology integrators, academic institutions for R&D, and commercial entities to reach new markets and iterate our technologies in tandem with their evolution. Case in point, we have just signed a partnership agreement with Innovative & Sustainable Solutions (ISS), a company based in Morocco bringing decarbonization systems and strategies to Africa.

Our early-stage efforts have been validated through the acquisition of several grants and seed funding from socially responsible investors who share our vision, plus the success piloting our a home-scale version of CarbonGood with our lab partners in Mexico. These initial funds and implementations have allowed us to prove our concept, refine our technology, and prepare for scaling. Our fundraising is strategically timed to leverage milestones achieved, and we're actively engaging with multiple nodes in our international network interested in sustainability and positive social impact ventures.

Our product offerings are designed to be modular, making them adaptable for diverse settings—rural or urban, small-scale household use, or larger industrial applications. This versatility not only maximizes our product's utility across different markets but also enhances the scalability of our business model, as virtually every setting provides an opportunity for application.

Critical to our success is our emphasis on community development and involvement. By engaging communities in the production process and stimulating local economies, we're solidifying the foundation for long-term success and customer loyalty. This community-focused approach underpins our financial projections, as it is proven to result in higher product adoption rates and market penetration over time.