Launch HN: Carbon Crusher (YC W22) – Carbon Negative Roads

Thanks for digging into this, awesome questions!

Transport is included in all of our estimates, but we haven't yet done the comparison for every location in the world. We are working on a tool so we can on the fly update the CO2 calculation for each customer based on the location in our next markets which are North America and Southern Europe. That said, traditional road repair uses bitumen from oil production, or fly ash from coal power plant, which would also have to be transported from their respective source, and both oil, coal plant and lignin plants can be found around the world. Our current producer has great coverage in Europe and also in North America, and we are constantly looking at growing our supplier network. We are also focused on transport by electric trains in the Nordics and have also ordered Tesla Semis that can help us move binders and equipment.

We are 20% cheaper than the traditional method, factoring in the maintenance interval (we have a few years longer interval). This is with a solid gross margin, so we could also go lower to increase demand when needed.

We see a lot of interest from Eastern Europe (Poland + Baltics) and also from gravel roads around the world where we have an even stronger USPs to the customers. In maintaining gravel roads - the only alternative to our method is to put more gravel on every other year, which is expensive, time consuming, and leaves a terrible Co2 footprint compared to our long lasting roads.

Super fascinating.

Short hand product notes: Lower carbon impact, lower cost. What is the product life compared to incumbents?

From a user implementation perspective (IE the city crew): - Do they need new training, new equipment etc, how long compared to traditional implementation? - Is it easy to import to North America? - What are the adoption risks?

Look forward to seeing this in the wild! Interesting that you are going for a subscription model.

Thanks for diving into this! Yes, our Crusher, method and the Lignin binds sand and silts in a great way. If there is a lot of clay, we would also like to add some lime to help with the internal moist, here we have several carbon neutral solutions. Our finished road is more waterproof (compared to a gravel road without Lignin f.ex) and our roads helps a lot with the draining of water from the road. However, as on every road, the shape of the road is important so the water finds the shortest way out of the road, and the ditches should be maintained as for any other road.

Some squares here now have a floor made of pebbles mixed with some kind of (epoxi?) resine instead of a floor made of concrete or just soil. Do you think that it's possible to use lignin as the glue instead?

Is the mix with lignin waterproof?

Thanks for the question! I do not believe that Lignin is the right "glue" in this case. It is quite water resistant, but to bind properly, it needs a certain amount of finer particles in the mix. If You choose gravel instead of pebbles, it should on the other hand work fine.