Tito Jankowski and his team at AirMiners and beyond have created a carbon-negative bracelet called Negative with direct air captured CO2 from ClimeWorks and Carbon Upcycling Technologies. It's being funded and is for sale through Kickstarter.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Carbon Removal Newsroom. I’m Ross Kenyon, the lead strategist with the Nori Carbon Removal Marketplace. Today I have with me Tito Jankowski, founder of Airminers and steward of the very excellent Airminers Slack community. Thanks for being here, Tito.
Tito Jankowski: Yeah, great to be here. I love that nice smooth voice you have.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, thank you. I’ve been practicing over a hundred of these things with reversing climate change. I better have a smooth radio voice or even approximating one by now. By the way, you were just telling me that the Airminer Slack community is the largest community of carbon removal aficionados in the world. Is that what you said?
Tito Jankowski: That’s right. We’ve got, I think there’s 390 people on the Slack community from scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, all over the world. It’s really, yeah, it’s really exciting to sign on and see what, you know, see what’s happening and connect with people over, you know, direct message and just, I mean, there’s so much of this stuff that happens that doesn’t make it to a press release or it’s like, you know, it’s a month before it makes it to a press release. So it’s just, it’s so cool to be, you know, to be able to share to a tight community and to hear what’s going on too.
Ross Kenyon: Absolutely. And we’re very grateful for your leadership and planting your flag in the ground and people to gather around you and your community. It’s been a fun one. We like participating over there. But that isn’t why you’re here, Tito. We have larger fish, which are in need of frying, one could say. And you just launched a Kickstarter campaign, which caught our eye. And we said, we have to have Tito on. We want to tell people about this campaign. What is it? What are you trying to do?
Tito Jankowski: Yeah, we’re introducing Negative. It’s a bracelet made of captured carbon dioxide. And what we’re trying to do is to put climate solutions in people’s hands. It’s something that I think is a really important addition to the climate conversation is stuff that you can grab onto, stuff that you can hold onto, stuff that you can look at and poke at. And so we were working with some of the leading companies in the field to take their materials and make, we made this bracelet called Negative.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I really like that. One of the criticisms or friendly pieces of feedback that we have to deal with at Nori is we received a note early on that no one wants to buy a barcode, which isn’t strictly true. Some people want the carbon removal just to have taken place and they’re happy with it. We’re happy that they are content with that. But there’s something that’s really, really awesome about consumer-facing product that they can wear or incorporate into their life in some sort of way that’s visible, tangible, tactile, whereas something more like a carbon removal certificate, which is what we’re offering, doesn’t have that same benefit.
And we have to create media assets and other ways of telling stories that compensate for that. But that’s why I love something like what you’re doing where you’re actually making something that’s purely aesthetic.
Tito Jankowski: Yeah, totally. Definitely, I’m glad that comes through. My emergent training was as a biomedical engineer, biohacker. And one of the things that similarly biotechnology struggles with is it’s hard to see DNA. It’s hard to hold on to it. And so a lot of those early lessons I think are here. I think there’s a lot of people standing at the door pounding. Right. Like, let me in. Like, let’s let’s get into the room where the solutions are. Let’s figure out how to solve this thing. But the door isn’t human scale. I mean, a trillion tonnes of excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
That’s a million million tonnes. How do we give somebody something like how do we grab onto it? How do we hold onto a little bit of that and let us then open that door to climate solutions?
Ross Kenyon: It’s a pretty good metaphor. I like that one. I haven’t heard it used either. So you got to run to the copyright office, stand your name on it. That belongs to you, Tito. The door without the handle. Well, where does the captured carbon dioxide come from? How are you acquiring it to turn it into jewelry?
Tito Jankowski: We’re working with two great companies, two leading air miners, Carbon Upcycling Technologies and Climeworks. Climeworks has technology to pull carbon from the air and bury it underground in Iceland. They have this really cool new facility. In partnership with CarbFix, where they take atmospheric carbon and then they pump it underground where it fuses with the rock. And similarly, Carbon Upcycling Technologies has this new technology. They’re part of the CarbFix. They’re one of the finalists, and they’re able to take carbon dioxide and turn it into solid form by combining it with other materials.
And so it just really looked like this unique intersection of the ability to, again, put your hands on carbon in a very permanent way, whether it’s that it’s fusing with stone or it’s fusing with other materials that we can make products out of. And so that’s where the concept for the bracelet came out of that. Originally, we had created a planter about a year ago, which is like a small cement cup using materials from Carbon Engineering, which is another direct air capture company. And so just, you know, again, back to that previous thought of how do we make this?
How do we make this tangible? How do we make it something that you can either literally wrap your arms around or you can hold on to? And I think that to me, what I love about what’s happening in the air miners community is, you know, the default is these are these are people working to grab onto molecules of carbon dioxide, capture them, store them or do something useful with them. And I think it really it’s yeah, it’s a really exciting convergence of different technologies and people.
Ross Kenyon: Absolutely. And we love that community and direct air capture. It in turn captured our imagination quite early. Kristoff and Paul both first got really into direct air capture. And we’re watching that space very closely for developments. And there is very exciting stuff happening. And I hope it continues at pace. In fact, I hope it even goes faster because we’re watching it. We want it to really take off. And hopefully this is one small part of the puzzle that helps it to take off faster. And Tito, if someone wanted to help accelerate direct air capture and carbon removal and they wanted to support your Kickstarter, how much is it for them to do so?
Tito Jankowski: Yeah, so we have the negative bracelet up on Kickstarter. It went up this morning at 6 a. m. I woke up and took my eye mask off and had a conversation with Kickstarter headquarters. But if you go to negative.co slash Kickstarter, we have the campaign. It’s a link to the Kickstarter campaign. We have some early bird bracelets for $65 and some other tiers there. The real idea that we wanted to introduce was this concept of making things carbon negative. So more than carbon neutral is What if everything that you bought, everything that you owned was some degree of carbon negative?
And the bracelets speak to that. There’s 2x carbon negative, there’s 5x carbon negative, and there’s 10x carbon negative. You know, it’s... It’s an exciting idea to start to add to the conversation is this kind of what if. And so we’re really looking for people that are vanguards and thinking about that. How might that work? How might society or buying things or how might our lives be different if we could have things that were carbon negative? More of what we did was carbon negative.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it’s animating to me. I think that’d be a wonderful world. It’d be a very differently appearing world if it were that way. So I hope you’re right and I hope this scales. In fact, I have a direct quote from Nori’s Head of Product. I shared the Kickstarter with the Nori team and here’s a quote. They should make rings next. I just lost my wedding ring and would buy a ring made out of this stuff in a heartbeat. So what say you, Tito? When’s that coming?
Tito Jankowski: I say, yes, when we started this, we wanted to make a diamond out of captured carbon from the air. This is the first step towards that. I recently got married and definitely the first candidate for the ring was like, I wonder if we could make something out of this stuff. Ultimately, it didn’t work out, but that’s kind of where I think some of the genesis for the bracelet was like, wow, it would be really cool to just have this material, have this idea, have this symbol with me. I think it’s a really powerful, powerful symbol.
Ross Kenyon: Absolutely. Well, what should people expect from you and our miners in the future? What do you think is going to come next?
Tito Jankowski: Well, we’re looking to really establish this idea of negative, of making more of our lives based on making carbon negative decisions. I think the name of the company comes back, it’s negative. It’s normally a word that you would say, oh, that’s bad. But in the carbon world, it’s something that’s a pretty high bar to be attained, actually. So I’m excited to see how the rest of the campaign goes. I’m excited to see what the reactions of different people are and to see these bracelets on people’s wrists all around the world.
We’ve got already sales in many different countries around the world.
Ross Kenyon: That’s great. And I hope you’re wildly successful at it. Yeah, the name game, negative. I’ve heard so many competing terms too. And sometimes people are quite persnickety about which terms they prefer. And I’ve even had conversations where people would correct my preferred terms and try to get me to use theirs. So calling it negative doesn’t throw me off. I wonder how many people it actually does throw off. This is probably a customer research thing. I wonder about your average consumer, but perhaps that’s not where you’re starting. I assume that given the amount of supply that you have, you’re sort of looking for people who are already somewhat in the know.
Tito Jankowski: Yeah, we really, you know, our team really likes names for sure. I mean, if you think about, you know, air miners that came from thinking about carbon removal and carbon sequestration and kind of, you know, a lot of these words that how do you how do you get something that embodies a more something exciting, something, something valuable, something different. I think, you know, air miners, the community speaks to that and negative speaks to speaks the idea of making more of our lives carbon negative in a way that we can hold on to.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s fair enough. Yeah, I think a lot of direct air capture companies and people around that space have cool names. Yeah, like Global Thermostat. Oh, yeah. Air Miners. Air Miners is super visual and I approve. Anyways, I’m sure we could diverge quite substantially here and just talk about branding and names. But I’m sure the people listening here, they want to know where they can go to participate in this. So Tito, why don’t you give them the link and tell them what to do?
Tito Jankowski: Yeah, sure. So the easiest way to get there is to go to go negative.co slash Kickstarter. But you can also just go to Kickstarter and search for negative. Just one word. And it’ll pop up in the search as the top creator. The logo is just a little negative dash. And yeah, otherwise, go negative.co slash Kickstarter.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, and as of recording this, and it’s October 1st when we were recording it, it was already almost halfway subscribed, so I’ll try and get this thing published as fast as possible.
Unknown speaker: Wow.
Ross Kenyon: If you, yeah, I think it was at like 4,000 or something, I was just looking at it. If it goes above 10,000, will you still be taking orders?
Tito Jankowski: Yeah, definitely. That would be most welcome. We have three different types of bracelets and it would be great to see more of them in people’s hands around the world. It’s really about starting this conversation around what do we do with carbon? We either store it, we either capture it or make valuable things out of it. And let’s get thousands and tens of thousands and millions of people a part of that conversation.
Ross Kenyon: Fantastic. Dude, I was just looking at the Kickstarter and it just ticked up to $5,300 as I was watching it. So in the time that we’ve been speaking already, people are finding this thing. So I think you’re going to hit your goal, but it’s open all of this month, October, and then it closes November 1st.
Tito Jankowski: That’s right. We wanted to stay up late on Halloween. It closes at midnight on Halloween. So join us.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, get your spooky carbon removal on. That’s great. Well, Tito, thanks so much for being here and doing a carbon removal newsroom with us.
Tito Jankowski: It was great to be here. It was great to hear your voice in person in a way. And I hope the other people that are listening get the chance to be a part of this as well.
Ross Kenyon: One of my favorite things with the podcast is letting people who have listened to the show break the fourth wall and then become a member of the show. That’s always a great pleasure of mine. So thank you, Tito. And I’ll put the link in the show notes for people who want to go to Kickstarter. And if you like the show, So please tell your friends, give us a great rating and review on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher. If you’re using some sort of podcast app that we don’t even know about that has a rating or review function, please give us a great one.
It helps get the show out to more people, helps us get the word out about carbon removal. If you’re listening, I assume you probably care about that too. So let’s make it happen. And thank you so much for your help and assistance.
