The ‘Inexperienced’ Way forward for Furnishings Is a Couch Stuffed With Seaweed

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 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 broadly utilized in sofas, chairs, and different mushy 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 surroundings and nobody needs to make use of it, however there aren’t any different alternate options,” Sandberg says. “I need to provide [a more sustainable] different to what we’ve got 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 advanced discipline of fabric expertise. 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 discovered that petroleum is a product of degraded biomass over time, so you’ll be able to, in principle, use biomass to exchange petroleum.”

Impressed, she spent the following 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 this planet, she discovered an ample supply to use: seaweed.

Alongside Agoprene’s analysis chemist, Asanga De Alwis, Sandberg started working experiments in a tiny kitchen in Trondheim, combining several types 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. Not like standard baking, nonetheless, the froth spends round 10 hours within the oven, relying on the thickness of the fabric. “A variety 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 gear 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 mother and father’ home, and even ask them to pay my cellphone invoice each month as I didn’t have any cash,” she says. “Nonetheless, I used to be so sure that someday, the ship would flip and every thing would work out.”