.jpg)
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 a substitute of constructing meals, Celine Sandberg is manufacturing foam.
Sandberg is the founder and CEO of Agoprene, a Scandinavian startup creating sustainable furnishings foam. In keeping with the corporate, polyurethane foam rubber, which is derived from petrochemicals and broadly utilized in sofas, chairs, and different gentle furnishings, accounts for a whopping 105 million metric tons of CO2 emissions yearly. “Within the furnishings business, everybody is aware of that foam is unhealthy for the surroundings and nobody needs to make use of it, however there are not any different options,” Sandberg says. “I need to provide [a more sustainable] different to what we’ve at present, with no petrochemicals.”
With a background in enterprise growth and finance, and with none engineering know-how, Sandberg by no means thought she would enter the complicated subject of fabric expertise. However her grasp’s research on the Norwegian College of Science and Expertise’s College of Entrepreneurship opened doorways for her, fairly actually. “I needed to arrange my very own firm as a part of my diploma and I wanted some enter, so I began knocking on professors’ doorways and asking them what they had been engaged on,” she remembers. “I discovered that petroleum is a product of degraded biomass over time, so you possibly can, in principle, use biomass to switch petroleum.”
Impressed, she spent the subsequent few months researching the potential of biomass and the broader world of biotechnology. “Then the Covid-19 lockdown occurred, and I used to be pressured to supply biomass from Norway as I couldn’t attain suppliers elsewhere in Europe,” she says. Within the nation with the second longest shoreline on the earth, she discovered an plentiful supply to take advantage of: seaweed.
Alongside Agoprene’s analysis chemist, Asanga De Alwis, Sandberg started operating experiments in a tiny kitchen in Trondheim, combining various kinds of seaweed-based supplies in a particular order, pouring the following combination into molds, after which heating it to 50 levels Celcius—a course of she likens to baking a cake. Not like typical baking, nevertheless, the froth spends round 10 hours within the oven, relying on the thickness of the fabric. “Quite a lot of our concepts failed. We should have made round 800 foam samples,” she says.
There was additionally lots extra bootstrapping concerned. Armed with a reasonably modest finances of 1 million Norwegian kroner (round £73,000, or $90,000) from the Analysis Council of Norway, Sandberg began sourcing second-hand tools and ringing up suppliers to ask totally free biomass samples. “I needed to go and not using a wage for eight months, transfer again into my mother and father’ home, and even ask them to pay my cellphone invoice each month as I didn’t have any cash,” she says. “Nevertheless, I used to be so sure that someday, the ship would flip and all the things would work out.”