This big black box turns the CO2 emissions from a hot shower into soap

20 Jul This big black box turns the CO2 emissions from a hot shower into soap

Inside a Radisson hotel, hidden in a mechanical room, a black box roughly the size of two refrigerators is connected to the hot water heaters (which a hotel uses a lot). But they’re not to make the water hotter. The system helps capture CO2 whenever guests take a shower. The technology, from the Canadian company Clean02, reduces emissions from buildings by converting the CO2 from water heaters or furnaces into an ingredient that can be used to make soap or shampoo.

“Every time that hot water tank turns on, it emits carbon dioxide,” says Jaeson Cardiff, cofounder and CEO of Cleano2. “We divert a portion of that carbon dioxide into our equipment, and we convert it from carbon dioxide into potassium carbonate.” The chemical, also known as pearl ash or potash, can be used to make a variety of products.

The tech, called CarbinX, has been installed in 25 commercial buildings to date.  A new round of $2.75 million in seed funding, led by Regeneration.VC, will now help it scale up. It’s one approach to lowering emissions from heating, one of the largest sources of climate pollution on the planet. Cardiff started thinking about the problem in 2005 while working as a commercial plumber and heating technician.

“I noticed that there was a lot of discussion going on around the energy sector and the transportation sector, but there was very little discussion going on around the fact that you have all of these boilers and hot water tanks that are also emitting carbon emissions,” he says.

The CarbinX unit is filled with another compound, potassium hydroxide, which reacts with CO2 to create potash in a single step as flue gas flows inside. Every couple of weeks, the chemical can be collected and used in local industries. Initially, the company considered making a version that could be used in single-family homes, but the business model for collection wasn’t efficient enough. Commercial buildings already have regular visits from technicians, so the company works with them to take the additional step of harvesting the product.

Building owners who install the devices can save on heating costs because the technology captures waste heat, along with heat generated by the chemical reaction, and then reuses it as energy for the building. The company also shares a portion of the profits from the chemical production with building owners, and gets free maintenance. The $25,000 device has a payback period of between three and five years, the company says.

Clean02 first started making soap on a small scale to help commercial customers understand the product. “We were asking the question, How do you take a subject matter like carbon capture and make it tangible for everybody to get that?” Cardiff says. “The easiest way to do that is to make tangible goods where people can engage with the subject matter with products that they’re using everyday.” Although the team began making the soap to take to trade shows, sales started growing independently; the company now sells tens of thousands of bars of soap a month. As it scales up, it plans to also increase sales of the chemical to other customers who want to help lower the carbon footprint of their products.

Right now, the technology can only capture 20% of the emissions from an appliance. Still, that means that a single unit can capture six to eight metric tons of CO2 in a year, or roughly as much as 300 trees. A new model that will come out next year should be able to capture 50% of emissions (the company hopes to be able to fully capture emissions within five years). “We have a road map to get there with some tweaks to our design, using some other types of technology that are currently available, and basically just shrinking them down for the heating industry,” Cardiff says.

Eliminating emissions at a building can’t completely solve the problem of natural gas, since significant emissions also come from methane leaks in gas production. But, while some buildings are moving to heat pumps or other clean sources of heat, Cardiff says that it can be harder to retrofit older commercial buildings. “We need to start addressing emissions today,” he says. “So we see our technology more as a transitional technology that allows us to be able to start having that impact on emissions now while we figure out what the energy infrastructure is going to look like in the future.”

Source: Fast Company