The world's largest direct air capture and storage plant pulls CO2 out of Icelandic air with geothermal power and sends it underground to turn into stone. After a slow start, its upgraded machines are finally hitting their design rate.
Instead of chemical filters and giant fans, Heirloom bakes limestone, lets the resulting lime soak up CO2 from the air on stacked trays, and repeats the cycle. Its first plant opened in Tracy, California, in 2023.
Small, low-power air quality monitors that now sit in every block of Bihar, on Mumbai construction sites and at mines in South Africa, turning the lowest layer of the atmosphere into live data.
About 44.01
Oman's mountains expose rock from the Earth's mantle that naturally reacts with CO2. 44.01 injects carbonated water into it and has shown most of the CO2 turns to stone within weeks. A cement plant pilot in the UAE was formally commissioned this month.
Carbfix dissolves CO2 in water like a soda machine, pumps it into volcanic basalt and lets chemistry do the rest. More than 120,000 tonnes of CO2 have been locked into Icelandic rock this way.
Founded by two friends from Munich, InPlanet spreads crushed basalt on Brazilian farms, where heat and heavy rain speed up weathering. It issued the world's first independently verified rock weathering credits and now finances projects like infrastructure.
A white, paint-like coating that reflects more than 95% of sunlight and sends heat out through the sky. Born in a City University of Hong Kong lab, it has been used on more than 500 projects in about 30 countries, from Hong Kong towers to grain silos and shipping containers.
A two-person company fills weather balloons with sulphur dioxide, lets them burst in the stratosphere and sells the result as "Cooling Credits". It is the most controversial product in this series: tiny in physical scale, but a direct test of who gets to decide whether humans dim the sun.
Small pumps lift seawater from under the winter ice and spread it on top, where it freezes fast. The goal is thicker, brighter ice that survives longer into summer and keeps reflecting sunlight. It is one of the most watched, and most criticised, sunlight reflection experiments in the world.
Telling satellites to de-orbit themselves only works if they still function. For the ones that fail, someone has to go up and fetch them. Astroscale flew ELSA-d to prove a servicer could find and grab a satellite in orbit, and its UK subsidiary is now building ELSA-M to remove a real, retired OneWeb satellite.
A small spacecraft that rides a rocket, then carries customers' satellites to separate orbital slots, tests new hardware in space and, at the end of its life, empties its tanks and drifts down to burn up. D-Orbit has now flown 26 commercial ION missions.
Most space debris is tracked from the ground, by radars and telescopes limited by weather, daylight and geography. Bengaluru start-up Digantara launched SCOT, a satellite that watches other objects from orbit, and now sells collision warnings to governments. It is also moving fast into missile tracking.
