Watch: The eco-trailblazer turning carbon to tiles in India

euronews (in English)

Tejas Sidnal, the creative force behind CarbonCraft, the sustainable company, is shaping the future of the construction sector.

Transcript

00:00 [MUSIC]

00:02 >> He's a passionate entrepreneur,

00:04 where he really wants to solve the problem.

00:08 >> Tejas is very dedicated,

00:11 and the product which we are working on is very unique.

00:15 Need of the hour, innovation nowadays is helping the environment.

00:21 >> It is a different idea.

00:23 It's out of the box.

00:25 It's exciting because it's something facing climate change,

00:29 38 percent of energy related carbon emissions

00:33 are due to the construction industry.

00:35 The entire industry is a huge emitter.

00:39 So it becomes important and paramount for architects to give

00:44 suggestions so that we can build a world which is future-proof,

00:49 and that's one of the reasons why I'm doing what I'm doing.

00:51 I'm Tejas Siddhanal, founder of Carbon Craft,

00:53 and we convert carbon emissions into beautiful looking tiles.

00:57 [MUSIC]

01:07 >> We all fantasize about how you would want to build,

01:10 how you can solve a problem.

01:11 But then when you come down to practicality and start to make

01:14 a product which is sellable in the world, it's extremely difficult.

01:19 You need to make a business case out of it.

01:20 I graduated back in 2011,

01:22 almost a decade ago.

01:23 My architecture college, while I was studying,

01:26 I got introduced to this concept of biomimicry,

01:28 which is taking inspiration from nature to design.

01:31 I was so excited about it that I wanted to study more about it,

01:36 and then I went for my master's,

01:37 which is Emerging Technologies and Design in London.

01:40 I studied that and then I wanted to practice more of it.

01:43 I went to China, I worked over there.

01:46 I asked myself, as an architect,

01:48 do I want to build the way we build right now?

01:51 [MUSIC]

01:54 Which means, do I want to pollute while I'm building?

01:58 That's when I realized,

02:00 can we really learn from nature?

02:01 Can we emulate the way they build?

02:04 Is that even possible?

02:05 Can we build carbon negative homes?

02:08 With that intention, Carbon Craft was born,

02:11 and the quest around starting to make carbon negative materials.

02:16 [MUSIC]

02:22 We work with solid carbon.

02:24 It's also called soot,

02:25 which is what becomes eventually once it's burnt and put out into the air.

02:30 What we use is the recovered carbon black.

02:34 So we take this recovered carbon black from various factories,

02:39 which is tire recycling factories,

02:41 which otherwise would have been burnt.

02:44 Because it has a high calorific value,

02:47 we process this carbon and then we use it as one of the back-end raw materials that we need.

02:52 [MUSIC]

02:55 We mix it with various proportions,

02:57 make our own formulation,

02:58 and we make these absolutely gorgeous looking tiles that can be then placed in residential homes.

03:04 [MUSIC]

03:07 I got to know Tejas from his unique idea about absorbing carbon from the environment,

03:13 and making a tile of it,

03:15 which reduces pollution and help the environment breathe clean air.

03:21 [MUSIC]

03:23 They have asked us for support for manufacturing.

03:27 As we have our infrastructure ready and we are into this,

03:32 we thought of pivoting ourselves also.

03:34 The product on which they are working now is accumulating the carbon from

03:39 the environment and making a product out of it,

03:43 which is 100 percent natural.

03:45 [MUSIC]

03:54 After four years, we launched the product,

03:57 and right now it's commercially available.

03:59 Basically, it's a four-stage proprietary process,

04:02 collect, process, build, and cure.

04:04 First, we collect the carbon and various other raw material as a waste.

04:10 Then second stage, we process it to utilize a construction product.

04:14 Then third process is we built it.

04:17 We are moving to sustainable mechanization.

04:19 Fourth process is curing,

04:21 where we store carbon into the tile.

04:24 [MUSIC]

04:27 At the moment, we can make about 100,000 square feet of tiles in one year.

04:32 We can double or triple this entire quantity in two or three months based on our demand.

04:39 We've got enough feedback at this point in time to be able to make

04:45 a product which is far more superior from what is there in the market,

04:49 and build a much larger company which is environmentally conscious,

04:55 socially inclusive, and sustainable.

04:58 [MUSIC]

05:08 If you're able to create value for a customer,

05:11 you'll be able to sell the product.

05:14 We have to save work in whatever way we can,

05:16 and I literally mean save.

05:19 It's being looked at in denial,

05:22 and we need to come out of that mode and start looking at it,

05:25 that it is an emergency situation.

05:27 It is on fire, and we have to act accordingly to it.

05:31 If you don't act now, it won't be left for the next generation to be able to do anything.

05:36 A very interesting way of looking at the world that we live in,

05:40 can we make circular economy-based products where it's not having an end of life?

05:48 It's the challenge we're looking to solve.

05:50 [MUSIC]

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