In 1919, an entrepreneur named Nils Halvorsen Norheim arrange an automatic manufacturing unit for making flatbreads close to Barkåker in Norway, the primary of its type within the nation. A century on, his great-great-granddaughter discovered herself peering into an oven in a tiny kitchen in Trondheim, doing a little baking of her personal—however as an alternative of creating meals, Celine Sandberg is production foam.
Sandberg is the founder and CEO of Agoprene, a Scandinavian startup growing sustainable furnishings foam. In step with the corporate, polyurethane foam rubber, which is derived from petrochemicals and broadly utilized in sofas, chairs, and different cushy furniture, accounts for a whopping 105 million metric lots of CO2 emissions annually. “Within the furnishings trade, we all know that foam is unhealthy for the surroundings and no person desires to make use of it, however there are not any different possible choices,” Sandberg says. “I wish to provide [a more sustainable] selection to what we’ve got lately, with out a petrochemicals.”
With a background in industry construction and finance, and with none engineering technology, Sandberg by no means idea she would input the advanced box of subject material generation. However her grasp’s research on the Norwegian College of Science and Era’s College of Entrepreneurship opened doorways for her, fairly actually. “I needed to arrange my very own corporate as a part of my stage and I wished some enter, so I began knocking on professors’ doorways and asking them what they have been operating on,” she recollects. “I discovered that petroleum is a manufactured from degraded biomass over the years, so you’ll, in concept, use biomass to exchange petroleum.”
Impressed, she spent the following couple of months researching the potential for biomass and the broader global of biotechnology. “Then the Covid-19 lockdown took place, and I used to be pressured to supply biomass from Norway as I couldn’t achieve providers somewhere else in Europe,” she says. Within the nation with the second one longest beach on this planet, she discovered an considerable supply to take advantage of: seaweed.
Along Agoprene’s analysis chemist, Asanga De Alwis, Sandberg started operating experiments in a tiny kitchen in Trondheim, combining several types of seaweed-based fabrics in a particular order, pouring the following combination into molds, after which heating it to 50 levels Celcius—a procedure she likens to baking a cake. In contrast to standard baking, alternatively, the froth spends round 10 hours within the oven, relying at the thickness of the fabric. “A large number of our concepts failed. We should have made round 800 foam samples,” she says.
There used to be additionally lots extra bootstrapping concerned. Armed with a relatively modest price range of one million Norwegian kroner (round £73,000, or $90,000) from the Analysis Council of Norway, Sandberg began sourcing second-hand apparatus and ringing up providers to invite at no cost biomass samples. “I needed to pass with out a wage for 8 months, transfer again into my oldsters’ area, or even ask them to pay my telephone invoice each and every month as I didn’t have any cash,” she says. “Then again, I used to be so sure that sooner or later, the send would flip and the whole lot would determine.”
