News

Google just signed one of the largest waste-to-biochar carbon removal deals on record: 200,000 metric tons of CO₂ removal by 2030, powered by a company that uses AI to sort through your garbage. The partner is AMP, a Colorado-based robotics company whose AI-powered sortation systems can scan thousands of items per minute on conveyor belts of unsorted municipal waste. Compressed air jets then separate organics from recyclables and landfill-bound materials — all without requiring residents to sort their own trash. ...

A blockbuster Tuesday for carbon removal. The private sector doubled down, two governments put real money on the table, infrastructure got creative with biochar, and the first global rulebook for CDR credits started taking shape. Five stories, one throughline: the demand signal for permanent carbon removal is getting louder from every direction. Today on CaptainDrawdown#💰 Big Tech Carbon Credit Purchases Explode — Up 181% in One Year#The numbers are staggering. Big Tech purchased 68.4 million permanent carbon removal credits in 2025, up 181% from the previous year. Microsoft leads the pack, but Amazon, Google, and Meta are all scaling their commitments fast. ...

The voluntary carbon market has a credibility problem. Everyone knows it. The question is whether the rules being drafted right now can fix it — or at least prevent CDR from inheriting the same mess. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is finalizing updates to the technical standards that govern how greenhouse gas emissions and removals are reported and managed. The revised ISO 14001:2026 is planned for publication in April 2026, with a three-year transition period. For the first time, these standards will explicitly address how carbon removal is measured, verified, and credited. ...

While everyone watches the U.S. for CDR signals (lately, bad ones), Sweden just quietly committed another $34 million to negative emissions. No press conference. No heated political debate. Just two new funding calls posted to the Swedish Energy Agency’s website. Nordic CDR policy in a nutshell. Two Calls, Two Purposes#The funding comes through Industriklivet, Sweden’s government-backed industrial decarbonization program. It splits into two streams: Stream 1: Scaling and Commercialization — SEK 300M (~$32M) ...

The world paves roughly 25 million lane-kilometers of roads every year. What if that asphalt sequestered carbon instead of just sitting there? Verde Resources just signed a supply agreement with Biochar Solutions LLC (BSL) for up to 38,500 tons of engineered biochar annually, purpose-built for incorporation into Verde’s BioAsphalt™ road construction products. Roughly half of that capacity is expected to qualify for carbon removal credit generation. It sounds like science fiction. It’s not. They’ve already done it. ...

Governments talk about carbon removal a lot. Canada just started buying it. The Government of Canada has launched a new Request for Standing Offer to invest at least $7 million USD ($10 million CAD) in carbon dioxide removal credits. It’s the first national government in the world to create a dedicated CDR procurement program. That distinction matters more than the dollar amount. How It Works#Federal departments will be able to purchase CDR credits through a competitive procurement process — think government contracting, not voluntary offsets. Each CDR pathway gets its own competitive stream, evaluated on technical merit and price: ...

Sixty-eight point four million. That’s how many permanent carbon removal credits Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft purchased in 2025, according to data compiled by carbon credit management platform Ceezer for CNBC. That’s a 181% jump from 2024. And 2024 was already a 104% increase over 2023. The Numbers Tell the Story#The trajectory is hard to ignore: 2022: 14,200 credits (essentially a rounding error)2023: 11.92 million (the post-ChatGPT awakening)2024: 24.4 million (+104%)2025: 68.4 million (+181%)This isn’t linear growth. It’s exponential — and it maps almost perfectly onto the AI infrastructure buildout. The four companies are eyeing a combined ~$700 billion in AI spending this year, mostly on data centers that consume staggering amounts of energy and water. ...

A quieter Monday after yesterday’s capital-flow blockbusters — but today’s stories cut deeper on the “how” and “whether” of carbon removal. A German expert calls CDR a dangerous dream, the EU responds by issuing the first real certification methodologies, biology offers a radically different path to DAC, a visit to Mammoth exposes corporate accountability gaps, and biochar finds maybe its most creative feedstock yet: dirty diapers. Today on CaptainDrawdown#🌍 From Germany: “The Dangerous Dream of CO₂ Removal” — A Skeptic’s Case#Peter Droege, director of the Liechtenstein Institute for Strategic Development, argues in klimareporter.de that Germany’s publicly funded CDR research programs — “CDR terra” and “CDR mare” — are a dangerous distraction. His four critiques: CDR capacity can’t cover even Germany’s residual emissions, the CDR belief system enables fossil fuel delay, ocean-based methods risk ecosystem harm, and biosphere regeneration should take priority over tech fixes. ...

Some carbon removal stories are about gigawatt-scale DAC facilities and billion-dollar government contracts. This one is about dirty diapers. And it might be the most creative CDR approach I’ve covered yet. The Diaper Problem#Disposable diapers are the third-largest consumer item in US landfills. That’s staggering when you think about what’s ahead of them (food waste and paper products). Each conventional disposable diaper — made from a cocktail of sodium polyacrylate, polyethylene plastics, and wood pulp — can take up to 500 years to degrade. While it slowly decomposes, it releases methane, a greenhouse gas roughly 80 times more potent than CO₂ over 20 years. ...

Standing on volcanic basalt in Iceland, next to the massive fan arrays of Climeworks’ Mammoth plant, carbon removal stops being abstract. The 36,000-tonne-per-year facility is industrial, loud, and unmistakably real. It pulls CO₂ from the thin Icelandic air and injects it deep underground, where it mineralizes into rock within a couple of years. The team at Harmonic Financial Planning visited Mammoth earlier this year and came back with a nuanced take that CDR advocates should hear: the technology works, but the investment landscape around it is complicated — and the biggest risk isn’t the engineering. ...