07/05/2022
Sika sponsors Circular Horizon, an association of over 40 students from various fields spread across Universities in Switzerland. The objective of Circular Horizon is to work on carbon removal technologies to sustainably remove CO2 out of the atmosphere and the oceans. The team competes for the XPRIZE Carbon Removal, initiated by the Musk Foundation, by designing, building, and validating a carbon dioxide removal and sequestration technology to reach a processing capacity of 1000 t/CO2 per year.
Innovative Carbon Dioxide Removal Technologies
The objective of Circular Horizon is to work on carbon removal technologies to sustainably remove CO2 out of the atmosphere and the oceans. The team competes for the XPRIZE Carbon Removal, initiated by the Musk Foundation, by designing, building, and validating a carbon dioxide removal and sequestration technology to reach a processing capacity of 1000 t/CO2 per year.
The proposed technology focuses on upcycling waste to a product and on contributing to the circular economy approach. Plants have been optimizing the process of capturing CO2 out of the air for millions of years. In nature this CO2 is again being released during the biological decay of the plant. By transforming biomass waste into biochar, they can tap into this cycle and store the otherwise re-released CO2 in farmland, which increases soil quality as a positive side effect.
The technology leads to scalable negative carbon emissions and can be processed in specially designed modular plants which are available worldwide and may capture 1,000 t CO2. R&D partners of the initiative are the Technical University of Zurich (ETH), the Technical University of Lausanne (EPFL) and the University of Sankt Gallen (HSG).
XPRIZE Carbon Removal is aimed at fighting climate change and rebalancing Earth’s carbon cycle. Funded by Elon Musk and the Musk Foundation, this USD 100M competition is the largest incentive prize in history, an extraordinary milestone.
Sika prioritizes initiatives and collaboration projects which impact the development towards a circular economy in its industry, ranging from alignment with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 11, 12, and 13, to the partnering with downstream customers, universities and startups to co-design and implement products. Collaboration projects are essential because the deployment of deep circularity interventions relies on access to cost-effective sustainable energy and renewable/recyclable feedstock with appropriate specifications.