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The company transforms carbon-capturing plant matter into stable biomass and produces three products: the biomass itself, excess energy and carbon credits that it sells through voluntary carbon markets. These credits can be purchased by polluting companies to raise the cap on their emissions, putting a price tag on eco-unfriendly corporate behaviour. Start-ups like Carbo Culture are growing increasingly important. As Moon pointed out, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has said that the ecological transformation has been so slow that countries and organisations must now start physically removing carbon from the atmosphere in order to stay on the 1.5°C pathway. “We all can feel the heat and we want a liveable planet in 2050, so that’s why we need carbon removal,” she commented. How to make markets more competitive Remaining in line with global warming targets will require a worldwide reduction in emissions by 50 per cent within the next 10 years. By 2050, emissions will need to be cut by 90 per cent. The commitment is enormous – and the cost will be too. According to a recent McKinsey study, facilitating a transition to a more sustainable means of living and conducting business will require €3.5 trillion of investment in low carbon assets every year for the next 28 years. “That is approximately 12 times the GDP of Finland, or around the same as the GDP of my home country, Germany,” remarked Timmer. Dr Michael Hummel is a professor of biopolymer chemistry and engineering at Aalto University and part of a team of researchers working on the development of sustainable textiles and textile recycling. The project started in 2009, driven by the Finnish forestry industry. In response to widespread digitalisation and a downturn in paper sales, the industry sought other uses for its wood. One idea was turning wood into sustainable textile fibres. Eventually, the researchers also discovered they could use not only fresh wood material, but also waste paper, cardboard and textile fabrics. “This was very important because developing a process that is more sustainable is great, but it’s still a linear flow. That’s not enough anymore. We have to look further ahead and we have to close the circle. So, eventually, what we want to produce should not be thrown away as landfill, but act as a raw material once again,” observed Hummel. Unsurprisingly, conducting this research required a large investment of time and capital. Hummel and fellow team members have been working on the project for 13 years, scaling the technology up in stages towards a point where it will be ready for commercial implementation. “You have to have a very high output in order to actually start making a profit. And you cannot jump from the lab straight to that. You need certain steps and each of these steps needs investment – considerable investment,” he noted. “We are talking about a first step of €10 million, then €50 million and then, once you get to
vents at this year’s conference were held in several locations spanning the academic world, from Poland to Colombia, led by Nova School of Business & Economics in Portugal. One such event was a panel discussion on the topic of Technology through start-ups for a more sustainable business , organised by Aalto University School of Business in Finland. Panel moderator Patrick Timmer, a McKinsey consultant and CEMS master’s in management graduate from Aalto University, introduced the discussion by highlighting three key points. Firstly, businesses are not cutting their emissions quickly enough to remain on the 1.5°C pathway outlined in the Paris Agreement. This is a legally binding international treaty on climate change that was adopted by 196 parties at COP21 in Paris on 12 December 2015 and entered into force on 4 November 2016. Its goal is to limit global warming to well below two degrees celsius, preferably to 1.5°C, compared to pre-industrial levels. Secondly, the scale of investment in new technologies that is required to facilitate a transition to more sustainable business is massive. Thirdly, the amount of capital investment on the table, combined with the need for innovative new technologies, represents a golden opportunity for entrepreneurship. The advantage of speed There is broad recognition across various industries that the current means of operation will give diminishing returns as global warming accelerates. Many companies are moving in the right direction towards more sustainable products and practices, but they are doing so much too slowly, contended Timmer. Often, the size of well-established corporations limits their agility. On the other hand, start-ups are much smaller and can adapt to new circumstances quickly. Panellist Henrietta Moon is the CEO and co-founder of Carbo Culture, a firm that specialises in carbon capture technology. She is also a former member of the Aalto Entrepreneurship Society. She noted how “a big company has so much friction internally that they can’t decide anything within three weeks because it takes so many meetings, whereas a start-up can do that loop many times a day.” Moon met her company co-founder Chris Carstens, a carbon engineer, at Singularity University (part of the Singularity Education Group, a Santa Clara, US-based company that offers executive educational programmes) in 2013. The pair decided to set up Carbo Culture to address the ‘cross-functional problem’ of climate change, which Moon described as “an over-arching theme” that impacts other global issues such as health, water scarcity and poverty.
36 | Ambition | DECEMBER 2022/JANUARY 2023
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