The Norwegian start-up making roads carbon negative

As it stands, the company is able to remove around a ton of carbon per every 60 feet of road it regenerates. Impressive, eh?

Within Carbon Crusher’s home land of Norway, excess lignin is regularly burned for energy which releases carbon directly into the atmosphere. Co-founders Kristoffer Roiler, Haakon Brunell, and Hans Arne Flato are aiming to put a dent in these emissions, whilst pushing a ‘cheaper, more durable way of rehabilitating roads.’

On that last point, Carbon Crusher has been developed and tested over the last decade, and the roads it has restored in that time have shown practical improvements too. ‘[Bitumen] gets very stiff when we get frost. It cracks up and then you have the same problem next year,’ says Flato.

The key enhancement with lignin is that it is more flexible, meaning that cracks are far less likely to appear over time with seasonal changes.

You’d be right in pointing out that roadworks usually equals extra traffic (and therefore, more pollution), however, by repairing existing roads the maintenance period is infinitely faster.

‘The world doesn’t necessarily need new roads, it needs better roads,’ says Brunell.

Carbon Crusher is now beginning to scale up its operations to break into the European market. See what I did there?

Aside from its flagship machine – which it hopes to autonomously operate using hydrogen fuel in the near future – the company is also working on software that can track damaged roads via satellites.

That way, it can provide rapid turnarounds for patchwork jobs across the continent and gradually begin to grow its influence. As we ramp up our global decarbonisation efforts, perhaps Carbon Crusher can help us stay on the road to recovery.