The ‘Green’ Future of Furniture Is a Sofa Stuffed With Seaweed

In 1919, an entrepreneur named Nils Halvorsen Norheim arrange an automatic manufacturing facility for making flatbreads close to Barkåker in Norway, the primary of its sort 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 response to the corporate, polyurethane foam rubber, which is derived from petrochemicals and extensively 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 dangerous for the setting and nobody desires to make use of it, however there are not any different options,” Sandberg says. “I wish to provide [a more sustainable] various to what now we have at present, with no petrochemicals.”

With a background in enterprise improvement and finance, and with none engineering know-how, Sandberg by no means thought she would enter the advanced discipline of fabric know-how. However her grasp’s research on the Norwegian College of Science and Know-how’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 realized that petroleum is a product of degraded biomass over time, so you possibly can, in idea, 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 compelled 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 ample supply to take advantage of: seaweed.

Alongside Agoprene’s analysis chemist, Asanga De Alwis, Sandberg started working experiments in a tiny kitchen in Trondheim, combining various kinds of seaweed-based supplies in a selected order, pouring the following combination into molds, after which heating it to 50 levels Celcius—a course of she likens to baking a cake. In contrast to typical baking, nevertheless, the froth spends round 10 hours within the oven, relying on the thickness of the fabric. “Plenty of our concepts failed. We will need to have made round 800 foam samples,” she says.

There was additionally loads extra bootstrapping concerned. Armed with a reasonably modest funds 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 free of charge biomass samples. “I needed to go with out a wage for eight months, transfer again into my dad and mom’ 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 sooner or later, the ship would flip and all the pieces would work out.”