Launch HN: Carbon Crusher (YC W22) – Carbon Negative Roads

[haakonzen]

Hi HN community, we are Haakon, Hans Arne and Kris, co-founders of Carbon Crusher (https://www.carboncrusher.io). We are developing and scaling a technology and process that refurbishes roads in a carbon negative way.

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 “the tree glue folks”….

To scale our impact faster, we are working on changing from one off tender projects where we do the full refurbishment service for our customers, public or private road owners, towards a crushing as a service model with longer term contracts, licensing of tech to contractors and less people and hardware involved from our side.

On the product expansion side, we are currently most excited about developing software using satellite imagery that can monitor road health and identify repair needs for road owners effectively and give instant quotes and Co2 savings potential, we call it “SkyRoads”. Further, we are working on new complementary road tech that can enhance and add to the carbon potential from our solution. This includes sustainable top layers and capturing and dissemination of energy captured by the roads.

We want to re-invent the way we think about the 44 million miles of roads covering our planet, directly emitting over 400 million tonnes CO2 every year in building and maintenance, indirectly more through heat reflection. Our goal would be to 5x the carbon reduction potential of our current solution, using roads as a platform for a host of technologies on carbon reduction. On an annual basis, that could be 2 Gt each year. It’s a very conservative industry with limited innovation, especially on the climate side, and we believe someone needs to make those stretched targets.

All this inspires us; to make our planet’s roads, which is often overlooked in climate discussion, a part of the solution. It will require hardware, biotech and software innovation, and that excites us. If we succeed, our direct and indirect carbon impact will contribute in a meaningful way to our shared climate challenges.

We are super excited to launch this and be part of the YC community. Hopefully this post gave you some new interest in sustainable road tech. Please do reach out with any questions and we'll try our best to answer! You are also more than welcome to reach us also by email any time on [e-mail]. Thanks!

[bradfa]

This is neat! For your "SkyRoads" idea, as an alternative to satellite imagery (which I imagine is quite expensive for high resolution), have you considered partnering with the municipalities who are your customers to outfit their snowplows or garbage trucks with sensors to evaluate the road surface conditions? Since snowplows and garbage trucks have to regularly transit pretty much every public road in many parts of the world, it could be a great way to collect data over time. Plus, if you can make an app for hardware these vehicles already carry (or which can easily and cheaply be added to the vehicles) this might also appeal to your municipal customers even if they don't buy your road resurfacing product/service/etc.

[nonameiguess]

I noticed after purchase my new car warns me of uneven road surfaces looming ahead. As far as I know, it does this by crowd-sourcing from other vehicle owners that have opted into allowing their vehicles to collect this information and send it back to the automaker, which then distributes it to all the other cars. Given this could potentially use every vehicle on the road for data collection instead of just plows and garbage trucks, I'd say the better approach would be for governments to compel automakers to share the road condition data they collect, not necessarily with other automakers, but at least with the governments that have to maintain the roads.

[cwkoss]

Very cool project!

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

[hansarne]

Thank You! You are right! The video shows the first step, which is the crushing. Lignin mixing is step 2. The road can be used by cars immideatly after compacting, as with other methods. However, if You want asphalt on top, it is necessary to let it dry for 2-3 weeks to let the water-solved Lignin harden and dry. In the video it was already a lot of small particles in the ground. We can make rocks smaller, but not bigger:-) The sizes of the gravel bits are evenly distributed, but with some fines on the top(due to Newton). We are using 2,5 meters crushers. That makes it possible to not stop the traffic while working.

[vlovich123]

Do your estimates include the carbon cost of of the lingen transportation network needed to bring the lingen from where it's generated to where the road repair is being performed? What does that aspect of the cost look like and how does it compare with existing resource networks for traditional road repair?

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.

[hansarne]

Thanks for digging into this, awesome questions!

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.

[tomarr]

Hello

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?

[hansarne]

Thanks for diving into this! Yes, our Crusher, method and the Lignin binds sand and silts in a great way. If there is a lot of clay, we would also like to add some lime to help with the internal moist, here we have several carbon neutral solutions. Our finished road is more waterproof (compared to a gravel road without Lignin f.ex) and our roads helps a lot with the draining of water from the road. However, as on every road, the shape of the road is important so the water finds the shortest way out of the road, and the ditches should be maintained as for any other road.

[snewman]

I love to see creative approaches like this! A couple of naive questions:

1. 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, ...)

[haakonzen]

1. Great question! Different academic experts claim lignin would be very stable in roads and stay there for a long time, and that when some degradation eventually happens, it will sequester downwards and become part of the soil. Deepdive: We have made roads 14 years ago which are still stable and in good quality today, indicating there hasn't been much degradation of the lignin to speak of. Adding here also a quote from an academic paper: “... the end-product of lignin decomposition in nature contains partially decomposed, fragmented lignin (humus) that enters the soil cycle, and remains in this layer for many years. Release of H2O and CO2 as decomposition products in this layer is extremely limited. Soil bacteria, microfauna, and even physical processes may play important roles in the final breakdown of humus. This is a slow process and some lignin degradation products have soil residence times of centuries (Ziekus, 1981).” - So, while we don't have the complete answer to speed of degradation yet (workin on it!), it seems it would stay beneath the ground far more than long enough to help our planet.

[haakonzen]

2. With the Crushers we have today, we can reduce 25.000 tonnes this year, but we could in theory make 10x more Crushers for next year taking us to 250.000 tonnes next year. The demand is definetely there, scaling the sales & operation is the thing we work hard on. That's also why we are working on launching our crushing as a service model which will ease both operations and logistics globally. Refining and building hardware is not a limiting factor per se.

[ghostbust555]

How are you saying this is carbon negative? Don't get me wrong the process is impressive and very cool, but the marketing around it just feels scammy.

-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?

[snewman]

OP says the lignin is "a waste product from the paper industry" and "majority of lignin is burnt". So it sounds like: currently, grow tree (pulling carbon from the atmosphere), process for paper industry, burn the resulting lignin, carbon returns to atmosphere. With this process: grow tree, process for paper industry, embed lignin in road material. If the lignin remains in the road more-or-less permanently (I asked about this in a separate comment), that sounds like legit removal; the carbon started out in the air and ends up in the road.

[shafyy]

I agree. Stop using empty marketing words like "carbon negative". Your product seems good enough that you don't need to resort to this.

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.

[throwawaylinux]

> -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)

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?

[hinkley]

> -5kg of carbon per m2

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.

[lvs]

This was my first reaction as well. I think the subtext is that the byproduct is currently being burned as a fuel source, which is common for things like sawdust in mills. So there's one aspect of this calculation that could be waaay off. If the mills that would have burned this byproduct in a boiler are selling it instead, they'll need another energy source for their boilers! If that energy source is a fossil fuel instead of a wood byproduct, then this "upcycling" has inadvertently become carbon positive (or perhaps neutral at best). And it will be a lot easier to retrofit an industrial boiler for natural gas than to convert it to electric. Even if it were electric, most of the world does not remotely have as clean a grid as Norway's. So it would be some decades before any carbon advantage emerges.

[RosanaAnaDana]

How do you propose to deal with fungi/ bacteria which have no issue digesting lignin?

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?

[dr_dshiv]

290 million years ago, Agaricomycetes fungi evolved the ability to breakdown lignin. That is the only time any species evolved this ability.

And most rot is actually around the lignin. Amazing material.

[WaitWaitWha]

Your success will depend on some claims you are making. I really hope you are just brief here, and have it amply written up elsewhere with real data. It always a major let-down when I meet with the inventors/idea folks and I find out there is a lot of hand-waving about claims, facts, and data.

Good luck!

[kroil]

Thanks for the comment and totally agree! We've worked through our calculations with one of the leading lignin producers globally and other experts. We either have or are working on third party validation for all of our data to make sure we also can provide high quality carbon credits.

[pabs3]

What does the paper industry do with lignin now?

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?

[boringg]

Super fascinating.

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.

[hansarne]

Yes indeed, thanks for the great short hand product notes! Lower carbon impact + lower cost + 0-25% more durable

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:)

[Dan42]

How well does this handle several freeze-thaw cycles per year?

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.

[hansarne]

Thank you for this Question! In Norway, where we have stabilized more than 2,5 mill sqm of road, this is the problem we solve the most. Our Lignin is very strong, and more dynamic than our competitors binders, which means it doesn't crack in freeze-thaw cycles like other binders can. And as we crush rocks and get an even mass to mix the lignin into, we get a very good road to handle such cycles. And the pothole-problems almost don't exist.

[gus_massa]

Some squares here now have a floor made of pebbles mixed with some kind of (epoxi?) resine instead of a floor made of concrete or just soil. Do you think that it's possible to use lignin as the glue instead?

Is the mix with lignin waterproof?

[hansarne]

Thanks for the question! I do not believe that Lignin is the right "glue" in this case. It is quite water resistant, but to bind properly, it needs a certain amount of finer particles in the mix. If You choose gravel instead of pebbles, it should on the other hand work fine.

[snarkypixel]

Congrats on the launch. As a side note, I love this landing page

[kroil]

Thanks, excited that you like it!

[kitd]

Many congrats on the launch.

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?

[geo_dude]

Very cool stuff. How far are you along with "SkyRoads"? Monitoring roads with the spatial resolution you would need sounds quite expensive. Though if it is for quotes on a per-request biases or once a year it might be more suitable.

[haakonzen]

Thanks a lot! We are in closed beta mode right now. Yes you are on point here. As premium surveillance feature will add this to the cost per m2 / mile road, the monthly price will depend on the number of pictures for our customer and it will cost extra for e.g. hyperspectral satellite images. For per-request quotes we are trying to find a suitable way to make it work so we can cover the cost. All thoughts / inputs appreciated :)

[marcuslima]

Awesome, impactful concept, this can be huge! Now comes the challenge of scaling

[kroil]

Thanks! We are hard at work at our hyper scale mode these days and looking for team members that can help us on the road to carbon negativeness.

[boplicity]

This sounds like an incredible project -- and very much needed. Road building is such a huge source of emissions.

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?

[hansarne]

Thanks! We are very excited turning roads into a part of the climate solution. Road construction and refurbishment is a very conservative industry and unfortunately they often want to stick to the way they've done things before. But we're working on disrupting this leveraging YC, cool green climate tech and documentation from our long track record!

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.

[morituri]

One of the stats is your website says "27m sq. ft. roads stabilized". What does 27m mean here? Is it 27 million? I first read it as 27 meters square feet, which is confusing.

Keep crushing it!

[andbberger]

You're going to get a lot of flak (and deservedly so) for the copy 'carbon negative roads'. Sure your process is less carbon intensive than traditional methods of making roads, but repaving roads directly enables a significant source of carbon emission, which dwarfs the carbon emissions of constructing the road itself. The optics aren't good.

Figure out how to mix red dye in with your binder and pave a bike lane.

[throw82473751]

> We’re three climate vikings

You had me here! <3

[hansarne]

Yes! We are the nice vikings, crushing carbon every day! :-)

[cowvin]

I love this idea. I really hope your technology is more widely adopted.

[haakonzen]

Thanks a lot! So do we :)

[alfl]

This is really cool, congrats and good luck!

[haakonzen]

Thanks a lot for that! :)

[fillskills]

Tangential question: Has there been a discussion already on why HN participants cant invest in such YC startups?

[learndeeply]

There's no restrictions on investing in YC startups if you participate on HN.

[wiz21c]

> We are Re-inventing roads to solve global problems. At Carbon Crusher, we are committed to help solve climate change, making a positive impact on our planet.

> Our proprietary built Crusher

Why is "proprietary" important ?

[hansarne]

Good question! First I think Haakon thinks it sounds A LOT cooler. Second, we have been R&D our asses off developing the actual Crusher hardware. The current Crusher we have developed over the last years is specifically designed for crushing in harsh environments and tailored for binding ligning into the roads. It is produced, tested over years and works perfectly for our purpose now. It is part of our IP and helps us make carbon negative roads that are more durable and cost less for our road owning customers. Can´t wait to share details about our next gen crusher thats coming later this years that will crush the current one especially on the software/sensor side

[danamit]

It's a keyword that attract investors.