Swiss startup opens plant that permanently stores CO2 in waste concrete

Neustark, a spin-off from Switzerland’s ETH Zurich university, has inaugurated its first commercial-scale carbon capture plant in the EU, located at a construction waste recycling facility on the outskirts of Berlin. 

The plant, built in partnership with building and recycling company Heim, has the capacity to permanently store over 1,000 tons of CO₂ per year by injecting the gas into granules of demolition concrete.

The CO₂, which is captured at nearby biogas plants and would otherwise have entered the atmosphere, binds with the concrete through a process called mineralisation. This chemical reaction turns the CO₂ into limestone, binding it to the concrete, and locking it away for thousands if not millions of years. This concrete is then reused to build new infrastructure.  

With over a billion tonnes produced each year, demolition concrete is the world’s single largest waste stream. Neustark wants to turn this waste into a carbon sink. The startup also sells carbon removal credits to companies like Microsoft and UBS to help them offset their emissions. 

The
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