This startup makes tiles out of air pollution!

22 Mar 2023 CW Team

Air pollution has been a growing concern for decades, especially for the construction industry which contributes to 23 per cent of the world’s air pollution. While many solutions have been proposed to capture pollutants, the question of what to do with the resulting carbon waste has largely gone unanswered. In this context, one startup has set its sights on the potential of carbon utilisation as a long-term vision.

Mumbai-based CarbonCraft offers a unique solution, tiles made of repurposed carbon, to bring down the construction industry’s pollution woes. Tejas Sidnal, Founder, CarbonCraft, sheds light on the company and its approach in a virtual conversation.

The inception

Excited and passionate aboutenvironment conservation and the concept of biomimicry, Sidnal states that there has never been a fixed time that could be pinpointed as the conception of CarbonCraft. A former architect by profession, he says, “The idea was simple; can we build carbon-negative materials? By 2016, I had realised that carbon-negative buildings cannot be constructed without carbon-negative materials.”

And so, the company operates on ‘one golden rule.’ “If you cannot make a carbon-negative product, it’s not worth it,” Sidnal emphasises.What started off as bricks and eventually façade offerings morphed into tiles. The company offers two options: plain tiles and patterned tiles. Both are carbonnegative, storing more carbon than emitting it.

Even the production is undertaken sustainably. Handcrafted from the get go at the company’s manufacturing facility in Morbi, the recovered carbon is initially processed to make it application oriented...

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