Activated carbon is a vital material in the modern world. It's used to purify our water, clean our air, and remediate our polluted soils. Without it, the modern world would cease to have access to these basic human rights.
There's a big issue, however, and very few people know about it.
The way that activated carbon is currently made is extremely harmful for the environment, despite the beneficial uses of the end product.
Typically, raw materials like coconut shells are first carbonized (i.e. heated to high temperatures in the absence of oxygen) in big open pits. The smoke from this process is terrible for humans and the environment, as it contains large amounts of particulates, carbon monoxide, and other nasties.
After this, the charcoal like product is shipped to big centralized factories where it is reacted with steam at very high temperatures (1000C), which requires lots of additional fossil fuels (about 18 tonnes of CO2 is emitted per tonne of activated carbon produced this way).
We felt this wasn't good enough, so this inspired us to start Charcoa, which has revolutionary new technology that allows us to cut out fossil fuel usage completely from the production process.
We can make activated carbon at much lower temperatures and from renewable raw materials. This allows us to actually sequester CO2 in the process!
We're very excited about our product, and we hope you will be too!