Video: Turning carbon emissions into plastic

It used to be that opting for carbon-neutral products would cost consumers and manufacturers more. Mark Herrema, chief executive officer of Newlight Technologies and a speaker at the Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2014, says that’s no longer the case. His method of turning carbon dioxide into plastic is now cheaper than making plastic from oil – and that changes everything.

Here are some quotes from the clip. You can watch the full video at the top of this page.

On rethinking the potential of carbon

We have this massive amount of material going into the air. If all the things we make in the world come from carbon, and we’re emitting all this carbon, there’s got to be some connection there, right? So what if, instead of looking at carbon emissions as something bad, we saw it as a source of life?

On the pursuit of technology

If you look at nature, a lot of people say this idea of pulling carbon out of the air and turning it into stuff just seems so impossible. Well, look at giant redwoods: these trees are all made by pulling an invisible gas out of the air. That’s pretty incredible. Look at the oceans, and the beauty that you see is all made by pulling carbon out of water. That’s pretty darned cool. And if you go to the bottom of the ocean, you’ll see entire communities that are pulling methane out of the water and turning it into nutrients. Carbon sequestration is actually happening all around us.

On carbon-negative plastic

The more of those cases we make, the more we’re improving the world, and we’re not asking anybody to pay more for the product. Ultimately, that’s what’s powerful. If you reduce the cost, all of a sudden you have a paradigm where you don’t even have to ask someone to care about climate change. Our context is America, and there are a lot of people still debating this. Well, everybody agrees that if you can reduce costs and it’s a good product, and if you participate in carbon sequestration doing that, then we have a win-win situation.

On the future

We need to stop waiting for our governments to do it for us. As consumers, we can take this problem into our own hands. As innovators we can start to make products that sequester more carbon than they emit. We can turn this thing around by looking at carbon emissions as a resource, a resource that saves money and actually gives us a market-driven solution to this problem.

Read more on this subject: The tech breakthrough that will fight climate change 

Author: Mark Herrema, CEO of Newlight Technologies. He was a participant in the Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2014.

Image: Steam billowing from the cooling towers of Vattenfall’s Jaenschwalde brown coal power station is reflected in the water of a lake near Cottbus, eastern Germany December 2, 2009. REUTERS/Pawel Kopczynski