Bamboo

HackMIT Project Link: https://spectacle.hackmit.org/project/173

Demo video: https://youtu.be/gmk8nwtwqiE

Bamboo is a trading platform for carbon credits where capture firms can be paired with companies and individuals seeking to reduce their carbon footprint. Users will be able to execute market and limit trades (as in the stock market) and may enter one-time deals or long-term contracts. The backend engine of the app automatically pairs buyers and sellers for optimal transactions in a functionality which mirrors the operations of stock markets. This includes functionality to match buyers and sellers even when their desired quantities do not match up exactly.

We leveraged the Carbon Interface API to help buyers estimate their carbon footprint based on lifestyle habits that contribute the most to carbon emissions. To help users make informed transactions, we implemented a grading scheme that will judge carbon removal offerings based on their price, permanence, additionality, and underlying technology (e.g. how mature and commercializable it is).

Carbon capture (CC) is a rapidly growing industry and has the potential to become among the major players in solving the climate crisis. As it stands, most CC firms currently enter contracts through their own commercialization teams, which in the long-term is an inefficient practice (for example, before the stock markets were centralized and trades were made over the phone). Many CC firms are beginning to become commercial, and thus could benefit from having a centralized marketplace for entering into these contracts.

From the buyer-side, many companies are trying to reduce their carbon footprint, either for their own social good mission, PR, or increased environmental regulations. Many of these companies will not be able to fulfill these goals by their own practices, and so a convenient way for them to do so would be to pay for carbon capture services (and some companies are already starting to do this).

As it stands, there are not many current solutions for this problem. Carbon capture is still a very small, though rapidly growing industry. Since carbon capture is projected to have rapid growth into a major industry over the next decade, marketplace solutions for optimizing this industry will assuredly exist and be very profitable. At this time, we believe it is more so a race of which company can get the first viable product out, which we think can be us. There are, however, two main competitors we have found.

Nori (nori.com) is a website that allows the purchase of carbon removals in the form of carbon mineralization. However, this is a short-term solution (carbon capture of this type lasts about 10 years).

puro.earth (puro.earth) is a marketplace for carbon removal based in Europe. One issue here is that they have created centralized standards that we think are not flexible enough for a dynamic, growing industry.