Interview with Antti Vihavainen, Co-Founder at B2B Carbon Removal Marketplace Puro.earth

Puro.earth is the world’s first voluntary carbon removal marketplace for businesses, aiming to accelerate carbon removal at a global scale.

Essentially, our marketplace enables companies striving to reach carbon Net Zero a means to buy verified carbon removal certificates from businesses that run a carbon net negative operation/process. At the moment, these include producing biochar, and carbonated and wooden building elements businesses (new methodologies are launching in due course).

Puro.earth addresses the fact that, in less than a year, there has been a threefold increase in the number of companies committing to Net Zero. Even though emission reductions are the most important action for businesses to take, carbon removal is increasingly a key pillar of their Net Zero strategies – and it’s well documented that to get to Net Zero by 2050 we urgently need to scale up carbon removal .

One of the key issues we face is that carbon removal will be a supply-constrained market – there aren’t sufficient verified carbon removal suppliers available to meet the demand from companies committing to Net Zero, and the ones that exist are struggling to secure funds to allow them to scale their operations significantly.

Puro.earth addresses this issue by verifying all suppliers who join its marketplace , relying on existing internationally accepted standards for accounting carbon footprint.

In essence, our marketplace is a proven way to solve the world’s CO2 emissions problem at scale.
 
 

 

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 
Puro.earth was created in recognition of the fact that there is too much CO2 in the atmosphere – yet there are carbon net-negative processes that capture and store more CO2 than they emit, providing a potential solution to this problem. However, a business model for trusted and legitimate carbon removal technologies was missing, so I decided it was time to address this.

Along with my Co-Founder Marianne Tikkanen, I started Puro.earth. A coalition of 22 innovative companies, including Fortum, a leading energy company in the Nordics, provided support for the early stages of the startup. This group of 22 pioneering companies defined the terms of our CO2 removal certificate and other rules for our marketplace.
 

What advice would you give to other aspiring entrepreneurs?

 
Sometimes, solving problems as an industry outsider and using first principles thinking can help you come up with groundbreaking approaches. Combine this with a lot of debate and discussion with people who are more familiar with the topic, maintaining an open and iterative state of mind and pushing forward. That was the creation process of Puro.earth in a nutshell.
 

What can we hope to see from Puro.earth in the future?

 
This year, Puro.earth initiated a first in its class Geological Carbon Capture and Storage (Geo-CCS) task force to create a new carbon removal methodology based on this high-potential climate solution. The methodology will be science-based and helps monetize the climate service created by rapidly developing solutions like DACCS (Direct Air Carbon Capture and Storage), BECCS (Bio Energy Carbon Capture and Storage) and Bio-CCS (Biomass with Carbon Capture and Storage). We hope to be able to launch this methodology on our marketplace soon, which will bring on board lots more carbon net negative suppliers.

We’re also preparing to announce some exciting partnerships with some very well-known companies in 2021, who share our vision for scaling up voluntary carbon removal markets and see carbon removal, in tandem with reducing emissions, as the key to reaching Net Zero.