Innovative building material business Adaptavate has secured £500,000 Government funding to develop new processes to take CO2 from air and polluting industries and lock it into the biomaterials of the future.
Adaptavate secured the funding through Innovate UK, the UK’s Innovation agency to help it to further develop techniques to take CO2 from the atmosphere and other CO2 emitting processes, such as lime and cement. The project focusses on locking this into construction products, such as its award-winning Breathaboard technology.
In parallel the project is asking the question; can the waste of these materials be used as soil nutrients for use in agriculture, to grow more crops and bio-materials, completing a circular economy approach to construction bio-materials? Ground up construction waste will be compared to the digestate from Anaerobic Digestion (AD) of the same material. The AD process also generates synthetic gas, predominantly Methane. Here a second and third nutrient loop can be exploited as the Methane created can be burnt to create electricity to run the factory, creating CO2 , which can sequestered in the curing of new material. This is totally in line with Adaptavate’s purpose: to positively disrupt the material flows in the construction sector.
The project builds on the strong relationships that Adaptavate has built with the University of Bath and Bio composite Development Centre in York.
Professor Pete Walker, of the University of Bath and Director of BRE Centre of Innovative Construction Materials, said:“I am really excited to work with Adaptavate as it builds on our track record of working with this innovative leading SME, realising the potential impact of a previous BBSRC (Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council) funded project carried out in collaboration with the company. There is great potential is the development of genuinely low carbon, possibly even carbon neutral building materials for the mainstream industry – this is a real potential game-changing solution and we are excited to be a key part of it.”