A new class of durable carbon removal credit that comes with multiple co-benefits is making its way to market.

Mining companies have been exploring the potential of using waste materials to draw down atmospheric carbon dioxide for several years. Recent months have seen a burst of activity, including the release of a standard to guide the process, new deals and the completion of a successful pilot project.

The largest demonstration of the approach to date is currently wrapping up at the Mount Keith open pit nickel mine in Australia, which is run by mining giant BHP. Over roughly 18 months, a rover operated by removal startup Arca crisscrossed heaps of mine waste on the site. The rover churned the surface, exposing magnesium-rich minerals to the air and triggering a reaction that locks away CO2 in carbonate minerals that will remain stable for thousands of years.

The pilot achieved its primary goal by showing that the process could be successfully integrated into the operations of the mine, said Sean Lowrie, Arca’s head of external affairs. It also produced data that affirms the potential of mining waste to sequester CO2. Lowrie estimates that the churning caused the 40-acre site to absorb an additional 60 tons of CO2 per acre per year. The company is working on a technique, based on using microwaves to further break up the waste, which it hopes will increase that rate around a hundred-fold.

Gigaton opportunity

There are billions of tons of waste at mine sites in the U.S. alone, and several types are suitable for carbon removal. Globally, the sequestration potential of mine wastes is estimated to run to billions of tons annually — a huge number for a single drawdown mechanism given that net-zero pathways typically require tens of billions of tons of removal a year.

“Our technology is rooted in this notion that rocks have an almost unlimited capacity for durable carbon storage, at least relative to our rates of emission,” said Laura Lammers, founder and CEO of Travertine, a startup working on a removal application for mining waste.

It’s not only scale that has advocates of mining removal excited. Because mines typically have large footprints and process huge amounts of rock, there may often be limited additional environmental impact to adding infrastructure to the sites. Some removal processes can also address toxicity problems: A startup known as BAIE Minerals, for example, is developing a project in Newfoundland, Canada, that would process waste from a local asbestos mine. 

In other cases, companies are attempting to integrate carbon removal into existing industrial processes to create multiple revenue streams. Travertine’s process uses sulfate mine waste to produce a calcium-rich residue that can capture CO2. But carbon removal is not the company’s sole goal: it’s process also produces sulfuric acid, a widely used chemical. This fall, the company will open a demonstration plant in upstate New York with the capacity to capture 60 tons of CO2 annually. A commercial-scale plant is slated for 2028, said Lammers. 

Winsome, an Australian lithium miner, announced this January that it’s working with Arca and others to explore the potential of removal credits to bolster revenues from a mine in Renard, Canada, that it has acquired an option to operate. Another of Winsome’s partners is Aquarry, a startup that adds alkaline mine waste to pit lakes in old mines, accelerating the uptake of CO2 by the water. Isometric, a carbon removal registry that this year published what it says is the first protocol for durable CDR in the mining industry, is also involved.

Leading buyers

With the work still at pilot phase, removal credits from mining projects are not yet widely available. Lowrie said he anticipated announcing offtake agreements in the “near future.” But leading buyers haven already taken an interest. Frontier, a coalition of removal buyers that includes Google and H&M, has purchased credits from Travertine and Exterra, another partner on the Renard project. And Aquarry is part of the Milkywire Climate Transformation Fund, a vehicle for channeling corporate money into high-impact climate projects. Investors in the fund include Spotify and Ing. 

The Frontier purchases are designed to support development of the technology, so the prices the coalition paid per ton — $480 and $1370 to Exterra and Travertine, respectively — are not a good indication of what the cost will be when mining removal scales up. The startups did not share precise prices with Trellis, but Lammers said credit costs will “certainly be less than $200 per ton.”

Several obstacles will need to be cleared before that can happen. Cara Maesano is the author of a recent report from the non-profit RMI that surveyed opportunities for integrating carbon removal into industrial process, including mining. She said she’s upbeat about the prospects, but noted key areas of uncertainty, including limited data on sequestration rates of mine wastes outside of lab tests. Some approaches also require significant energy inputs, which may need to be reduced to keep costs manageable. 

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One day during the Covid winter of 2020, with his travel plans derailed, Karthik Ramanna sat down to read the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. 

Ramanna is an expert in financial accounting systems and corporate leadership at the University of Oxford. On this occasion, he’d been asked to step outside his field and comment on a piece of sustainability research. He expected to find himself on familiar ground: The front of the protocol, he recalled, declared in large type that it was an accounting standard. But it wasn’t accounting in the way he or his peers understood it.

“Imagine you pick up a book that says ‘The Astronomy of Mars’ and then you start looking at it and you think, ‘wait a minute, this is astrology, not astronomy’,” he told Trellis. “It was very, very jarring.”

That moment was the genesis for a research partnership that has produced an alternative to the existing system for emissions accounting. It’s an effort that has won praise from experts and been piloted in multiple countries. It’s also produced plenty of pushback, with critics asserting Ramanna and colleagues fail to appreciate the strengths of the existing system, which their disruptive behavior is now putting at risk.

‘We should work on this’

After reading the protocol and the research he’d been asked to assess, Ramanna joined a Zoom gathering to share his thoughts. He had no major problem with the research, he told those in attendance, but the system that underlay it did not qualify as accounting.

Sitting in the virtual audience was Robert Kaplan, an academic credited with some of the most significant accounting innovations of the past half-century and a former colleague from Ramanna’s time at Harvard. 

“He sends me a note and he says, ‘I couldn’t agree more with you and we should work on this,’” Ramanna said. “Now, Bob Kaplan has worked on some pretty important problems. For him to say that, I was like, oh, maybe I’m onto something here.”

At the heart of Ramanna and Kaplan’s idea, which first appeared in an academic paper in August 2021, is a solution to what the pair have described as the “fatal flaw” of reporting under the GHG Protocol: Scope 3. To a traditional accountant, the idea of a company having to quantify an activity taken by other organizations in a value chain, as the Scope 3 rules require, is nonsensical. Instead, companies should be asked to quantify only emissions associated with what they produce — their Scope 1 emissions, in other words.

E-liabilities

Consider the supply chain behind a steel car part, beginning with a mine that produces iron ore. The mining company is responsible for measuring emissions from its operations. In Ramanna and Kaplan’s system, when it sells the ore to a steel producer, it also transfers an appropriate fraction of those emissions — known, by analogy to financial accounting, as liabilities. 

The steel producer then measures its own emissions from the processing of the ore into steel and adds them to the emissions it inherited from the mining company. When it sells a batch of steel to the next company in the chain, the producer allocates a fraction of the total to each shipment. The process continues down the chain, with each company measuring, adding and allocating emissions. When the auto company purchases the car part, alongside the invoice comes a statement of the emissions liabilities.

One benefit of this “E-liabilities” approach — “E” for “environmental” — is that each company focuses on the emissions it controls. In the existing Scope 3 system, every company in the value chain needs to at least estimate the emissions of every other company. Under E-liability, the measurement happens once, at source, and is passed on.

Academic proposals to overhaul accounting systems don’t necessarily make a splash, but Ramanna credits Kaplan with a gift for framing problems in a way that decision-makers find useful. The pair’s provocative language didn’t hurt, either: Their paper was titled “How to Fix ESG Reporting” and a follow-up, published later the same year in the Harvard Business Review (HBR), was described as “the first rigorous approach to ESG reporting”. 

In the business community, this approach struck a chord: Kaplan and Ramanna won the 2021 HBR McKinsey Award, which goes to the review’s best article of the year. Companies began to offer to test the system. In subsequent HBR articles, Ramanna and colleagues report on E-liabilities pilots carried out in conventional spheres (cement and tires), as well as more unusual ones (security services in Afghanistan). 

Hitting the brakes

Reaction within the sustainability community has been more circumspect — particularly from those who spent years establishing the GHG Protocol as the foundation for how companies report on emissions. 

Perhaps the most notable critique came from Janet Ranganathan, a managing director at the World Resources Institute and a lead author of the GHG Protocol. Her 2024 commentary on E-liabilities opens with a warning, in bold, that “E-liability is not a replacement for the GHG Protocol.” 

Like other critics, Ranganathan noted that double-counting in Scope 3 is a feature, not a bug: Companies that take responsibility for value-chain emissions are incentivized to collaborate with suppliers and customers on decarbonization solutions. “While it is important to remain open to new ideas,” she concluded, “we shouldn’t be too quick to throw the baby out with the bathwater.”

Others have questioned the practicality of Ramanna and Kaplan’s ideas. “The e-liability system is brittle, as each company depends on every other company operating upstream of it in a value chain to also estimate emissions and engage with the E-liability registry,” wrote Michael Gillenwater, co-founder of the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute and an advisor to the GHG Protocol.

Objections like that from establishment figures have likely slowed attempts to evaluate E-liabilities, but the idea continues to pick up adherents. Other academics have weighed in with supportive commentary, ranging from proposals for incorporating use of carbon removals to suggestions that E-liabilities could drive investments in supply-chain decarbonization. And pilots are ongoing: Ramanna’s most recent HBR article, from February of this year, describes a test by BMW that outlined how large companies can help smaller suppliers to develop emissions measurement capabilities.

Ramanna and colleagues have also extended their proposal. After opponents pointed out that individual consumers at the end of value chains cannot in practice be held responsible for emissions embedded in products they purchase, Ramanna and Kaplan responded by specifying when and how companies selling to consumers should disclose downstream emissions. 

Pull factor

One question now is whether the E-liabilities approach will spread piecemeal, colonizing parts of value chains until it emerges as a de facto standard, or move more quickly by winning top-down support from a government willing to mandate the approach. A third outcome, of course, is that the challenges associated with the idea will cause the pilots to dry up and the approach to fizzle.

Ramanna told Trellis that he doesn’t anticipate a government imposing the system wholesale in the next couple of years, but the political and economic realignments being driven by President Trump and other forces favor his system. “One of the strongest pull factors we have today, geopolitically, is economic nationalism,” he said.

One example is the E.U.’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). European companies in high-emission sectors, including steel and cement, will next year have to start paying tariffs on the carbon generated by the production of the goods they import. The system will incentivize suppliers outside Europe to compete to reduce the emissions associated with their products — exactly the kind of competitive force that E-liabilities is designed to harness.

“Carbon border accounting, if done right, can be a powerful tool against climate change,” Ramanna wrote last year. “It can raise the rules of the game so that companies and countries compete on low-emissions goods and services, just as they currently compete on factors such as costs, quality, and timeliness.”

With Trump intent on protecting select domestic industries and punishing imports, the moment might be right for a U.S. version of CBAM. Last month, a bipartisan pair of representatives introduced a bill to replace the federal gas tax with a carbon border tax. A related bill was introduced in the Senate a month earlier.

“I’m not saying this is all hunky-dory and it’ll happen tomorrow,” said Ramanna. “But there are enough tailwinds to engage with this process in the United States and around the world as a win-win. It’s a win on trade, it’s a win on climate, it’s a win on economic competitiveness.”

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The opinions expressed here by Trellis expert contributors are their own, not those of Trellis.

There’s a sentiment I keep hearing over and over these days: “It can be hard to make sense of what’s happening around us.”

This notion isn’t new — we’re always looking for ways to interact with an unpredictable world. To help sustainability professionals navigate volatility and turbulence, my colleagues and I at Forum for the Future, a sustainability nonprofit, use what are called applied futures to help create concrete, practical ways forward. 

Applied futures 101 

The central premise of applied futures is that the future doesn’t simply happen to us. It’s based on the decisions and actions we take today. By understanding how the world is changing, we can work out what needs to happen to create the future we want.

One of the most common tools we use at Forum for the Future is trajectories. These are pathways we see emerging at any moment in time in the operating context for an organization. The trajectories we use the most were created in 2023 by drawing on insights from our Futures Centre and interviews with business leaders, activists and entrepreneurs. Each trajectory was underpinned by a particular mindset or approach of what could happen.

Profit supreme

This is a mindset that resists or opts out of change, with a focus on maximizing shareholder value and profits. In many ways Profit Supreme has intensified and become more widespread in recent years. The anti-ESG rhetoric of two years ago has evolved into lawsuits and investor motions. In some parts of the world, the energy transition has been deliberately halted in order to squeeze short-term profits from oil and gas.

Response: If Profit Supreme is dominant, contextualize everything through the business case lens. Dip into the vast bank of data points that demonstrate the business case, such as data showing that products featuring sustainable attributes increase revenues by up to 25 percent over other products. Use the framing of resilience and value creation.

Shallow gestures 

This trajectory is characterized by incremental measures that fail to deliver change at scale and pace. As with Profit Supreme, Shallow Gestures has also become more widespread across multiple geographies. This is in part due to the crowding out of sustainability issues by a whole host of short-term pressures, from economic uncertainty, supply chain disruption and legislative uncertainty. For many organizations, bandwidth and resources are diverted away from sustainability (which is to miss the point that sustainability can help deal with these pressures). In some cases, this diversion is simply a function of a real commitment to transformation not actually being there in the first place. 

Response: Identify actions that don’t fundamentally impact the underlying business model, but shift it by, for example, adopting targets around sustainable products that can be delivered to market with the same, slightly-tweaked business model.

Tech optimism

This trajectory, in which technology is viewed as a solution to all problems, but an over-reliance on it neglects the need for shifts in social norms, acceptance and behavior change, continues to flourish.

In the U.K., for example, scientists are experimenting with outdoor geoengineering as part of a £50m ($67 million) government-funded program. If successful, it has the potential to temporarily reduce the Earth’s surface temperatures.

In the UAE, cloud seeding is being used to increase the amount of rain produced by clouds and help mitigate droughts. 

And in Brazil, the city of Pindamonhangaba has deployed a wide-reaching network of smart sensors that automatically trigger alerts when detecting rising water levels or dangerous temperature spikes. The sensors have already helped save countless lives as well as over a million reais ($174,000) in disaster-related costs. 

Response: Start with the innovation of a new digital tool, for example, that happens to be less carbon intensive. Or explore how AI could help make operations more energy efficient.

Courage to transform

Where businesses adopt a transformative mindset, working in partnership with governments, civil society, investors, experimenting with new models and practices, delivering lasting change. Despite a well-funded and sophisticated counter narrative, Courage to Transform is still visible, too. 

A recent PwC report found that 37 percent of companies are increasing their sustainability ambitions, compared to only 16 percent decelerating their efforts. Despite pessimistic news stories, the report suggests there’s hope, with 80 percent of companies on track to meet their climate goals.

There’s also encouraging transformation happening in multilateral settings, with Malaysia supporting Brazil’s BRICS chairmanship priorities, China investing 6.8 trillion yuan ($940 billion) in clean energy last year and Brazil chairing the G20 in 2024 and hosting COP30 in 2025.

Response: Identify opportunities to move faster. This could be through innovation, new collaborations and accessing new forms of capital through sustainable finance solutions.

All trajectories are in play — so what?

The four trajectories can help companies identify the dominant path that is defining their operating context and the dominant mindset driving it. In turn, this can inform what approach and what language companies can use to keep moving ahead.

Wherever you are, there are five shifts you can make, no matter the trajectory:

Shift the narrative. From complex jargon to simple, relatable words that remind people why sustainability matters. Focus on nature, health benefits, community well being.

Shift the words. From “either/or” to “and.” Polarization creates fragmentation and makes it hard to unify movements. Where massive divides exist, either across political lines, generational lines or within communities, it’s hard to see how solutions will scale unless we stop saying net zero is an either/or. It’s a pathway to a thriving and prosperous future — and great for business.  

Shift the solutions. It’s easy to criticize solutions, particularly when they may not be making progress at the pace we envision. But incremental steps towards a goal can spur change so don’t be afraid to start small. 

Shift the place. Instead of touting abstract solutions, provide ones that can be applied in cities and that can work at a local level. This is where sustainability gets real. 

Shift the engagement. From collaborating with people we already know and who share our point of view to engaging with those who perhaps don’t. It’s time to force ourselves out of our echo chambers. 

All of this translates into four questions. Are you:

Using language that people understand? 

Engaging with new people? 

Offering large and incremental solutions?

Being generous with assumptions, time and humanity? 

If the answer to each of these questions isn’t yes, then maybe it’s time to rethink your strategy and your execution. 

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Lululemon plans to source nearly one-fifth of its fiber mix from material recycled from used clothing and scraps by 2035. The athleisure giant announced a decade-long agreement June 11 to purchase content from the Australian startup Samsara Eco, which specializes in AI-powered enzymatic recycling.

It’s the type of vote of confidence that young textile recycling companies hope for as they navigate the commercialization “valley of death” that has slayed so many, such as Renewcell.

The news comes as Samsara Eco brings a new factory online and moves its headquarters from Sydney to Jerrabomberra in the next few months.

“Scaling circular materials requires bold partnerships and a shared commitment to rethinking how our industry operates,” said Ted Dagnese, Lululemon’s chief supply chain officer, in a statement.

The agreement serves Lululemon’s 2030 goal to use only “preferred materials” that are either recycled or meet sustainable and ethical sourcing standards. Between 2020 and 2023, that has grown from 27 percent to 47 percent of overall fibers. In 2025, the brand is betting that it can reach 75 percent preferred materials, including 75 percent recycled polyester.

Last year, Lululemon and Samsara Eco developed the first garment, a peach shirt, from recycled nylon 6,6.

Lululemon’s ‘preferred’ materials pursuits

Lululemon is engaged in multiple efforts to mass produce non-virgin synthetics. That includes participating in a $100 million series A round of funding for Samsara Eco one year ago.

Lululemon has backed other startups, too, including plant-based nylon venture Geno in 2021, and ZymoChem, a synthetic biology firm making biobased materials for nylon 6,6. The company has also used chemicals from LanzaTech, created from captured carbon dioxide emissions, to produce yarn.

Its diversified approach to circularity includes a popular branded resale channel enabled by Tersus Solutions’ reverse logistics operation in Colorado.

Source: Samsara Eco

Lululemon’s challenges

Sustainability activists have criticized Lululemon for doubling its climate emissions between 2019 to 2023, during which period its revenues nearly tripled.

Lululemon also uses virgin synthetics in 67 percent of its materials, according to the Changing Markets Foundation. Whether virgin or synthetic, such textiles leach toxic chemicals into people’s bloodstreams, according to research published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. As more research on the health impacts of plastic fabrics unfolds, fashion brands such as Lululemon will face new supply chain risks.

Synthetic fibers are also a major culprit when it comes to microplastics pollution, although Lululemon participates in The Microfibre Consortium, an industry effort to mitigate the problem.

To its credit, the Vancouver-based company did score a C grade, up from a C-minus a year earlier, on Stand.earth’s most recent Fossil Fuel Fashion scorecard. The nonprofit gave the company credit for investing in next-generation and recycled fibers.

Meanwhile, the executives tasked with achieving Lululemon’s science-based, validated net zero targets for 2050 have recently changed. Former Nike executive Noel Kinder joined as senior vice president of sustainability earlier this month, about a week after longtime leader Esther Speck left.

How Samsara Eco works

Founded in 2021, Samsara Eco customizes enzymes to break down mixed polymers into monomer building blocks within 20 minutes. The processes to recycle polyester and nylon are similar, and the startup can manage blends. “We can deal with polyester cotton,” CEO Paul Riley told Trellis in December. “We don’t have an issue with the mixed nature of those garments; we can separate those quite comfortably.”

The company advertises a liquid process using low heat and pressure, resulting in a low energy footprint. It has three layers of intellectual property for the enzymes, the process and the machine learning.

Across the fabric lifecycle, Samsara Eco’s output has a substantially lower climate footprint than virgin material, and it delivers “true circularity,” Riley said. The end product is meant to be indistinguishable from and “cost-comparable” to traditional materials.

Samsara Eco is planning a commercial plant to recycle nylon 6,6 by 2028. It’s also working with Israel-based nylon maker Nilit to spin its recycled polymer pellets into yarn in Southeast Asia.

The company has set “a ridiculously ambitious target” to process 1.5 million tons of plastics each year by 2030, Riley noted. “But when you look at the numbers,” he said, “that’s .37 percent of the world’s annual plastics production. It is tiny. So so we need to get there, and we need to get bigger than that if we’re going to resolve the problems that are out there across plastics and across carbon.”

Offtake agreements with other brands are in the works, according to Samsara Eco. Meanwhile, rival biorecycling startup Carbios announced offtake agreements of its own, with L’Oréal and L’Occitane en Provence — but for recycled polyester packaging rather than textiles.

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Amazon plans to use recycled water to cool more than 120 U.S. data centers by 2030, a move that the technology company said will save more than 530 million gallons of freshwater annually. 

In 2022, the company declared a goal to become water positive for its web services operation by the end of the decade — meaning that it aspires to return more water to communities than it uses. As of year-end 2024, Amazon was at 53 percent of this goal, compared with 41 percent the previous year.

Amazon already uses recycled water in about two dozen locations globally, including 20 U.S. facilities. (The company doesn’t reveal how many data centers it has globally.) The investments will be concentrated initially in California, Georgia, Mississippi and Virginia, where local regulations and infrastructure make this possible. 

As of 2023, 37 states had regulations covering reclaimed water for irrigation and industrial uses. 

“Recycled water is not just available everywhere,” said Beau Schilz, water principal for Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud computing organization. “But, obviously, we’d love to use it wherever we can.”

Uncommon approach to keeping data centers cool

Amazon’s plan to use more recycled water, announced June 9, is enabled by its increasing adoption of evaporative cooling systems. 

Amazon data centers that use this equipment rely on outside air for 95 percent of the year to keep computer servers, networking gear and other equipment from overheating. When the temperature rises, the cooling system intervenes, pulling hot air through water-soaked pads where it evaporates. The cooled air is then piped into the server halls.

“Traditional cooling tech uses large volumes of water with no reuse,” said Will Sarni, practice lead for nature and water with consulting firm Earth Finance. “It appears that Amazon Web Services is leading the way with water reuse. Overall, companies are exploring approaches and technologies to move away from using traditional sources of water, such as municipal water supplies, due to water scarcity and increasing competition for water in places like the American Southwest.”

The amount of water needed to cool a data center depends on the equipment being used, but even a small facility that draws 1 megawatt of electricity to run computing services can use up to 5.6 million gallons annually. That’s equivalent to the daily drinking water consumption of 300,000 people. And many of the facilities planned by Amazon, Microsoft and Google as part of their artificial intelligence build-ups are far larger than that. 

Time and infrastructure

The other critical variable in Amazon’s recycled water expansion plan: finding utilities that already offer recycled water for industrial applications or that are willing to work with Amazon to build that infrastructure. Using recycled water will require new permits. 

“We need to make sure that everyone understands how the design uses water and makes sure it’s safe,” Schilz said. 

For Amazon’s expansion plan to work, it must evaluate recycled water as an option early in the process of choosing a new data center site. Among the considerations:

• Population growth trends for the region
• Required treatment plan investments
• Existing piping infrastructure
• What new permits will be needed to satisfy safety requirements
• Whether other industrial water users could benefit, given that Amazon may need the recycled water a couple months each year

“Water is one of many inputs in planning,” Shilz said. “If we want to go somewhere where the utility might not have adequate supply, we will build that into our plans.”

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