Elmar Vatter (33), Project Manager Marketing & Communications at Neustark and Thomas Drechsler (63), HEIM operations manager in front of the CO2 tank in Marzahn Photo: Charles Yunck
By Pia Fredebeul
It takes 50 trees a year to do this, but this system can do it in just an hour! The innovative CO2 storage systems from the Swiss company Neustark swallow up to 1,000 tons of CO2 in twelve months. The first plant in Germany has now been opened in Marzahn.
The company Neustark was founded in Bern in 2019 and has developed a solution for the permanent storage of CO2 in recycled mineral waste. The most important player: demolition concrete, the largest type of waste in the world with over a billion tons per year.
The innovative system is located on the premises of the recycling company HEIM in Marzahn Photo: Charles Yunck
How does this innovative technology work? “At the end of their life, buildings are demolished and the resulting demolition concrete is further broken and sieved,” says Elmar Vatter (33), Project Manager Marketing & Communications at Neustark. “With our method, the concrete granulate is enriched with CO2 from a biogas plant.”
This is what the finished carbonized demolition concrete looks like Photo: Charles Yunck
A mineralization process is triggered that converts the CO2 into rock and stores it for at least a thousand years.
The CO2-enriched concrete can then be used for road construction and the production of new recycled concrete. The Swiss company’s goal: to remove one million tons of CO2 from the atmosphere by 2030 – and thus help Germany and the world with their climate goals.