If you walk into a supermarket in Switzerland sometime early next year and buy a bottle of Valser–a brand of sparkling water owned by Coca-Cola–the fizz inside might have come from CO2 sucked from the atmosphere. Coca-Cola HBC Switzerland, the bottling plant that makes the drinks, just partnered with Climeworks , one of the world’s pioneers of direct air capture of carbon dioxide, as a new supplier. At its plants, Climeworks uses stacked shipping containers filled with technology that pulls air inside and through filters that capture CO2 like an ultra-powerful tree. Once a filter is full, the collector is heated, releasing the gas in a pure form that can be injected deep underground for storage–one way to help begin to address the fact that the amount of carbon dioxide in the air is higher than it has been at any point in the last 400,000 years–or used by manufacturers. The company’s first partnership was with a nearby greenhouse that used the CO2 to help plants grow faster, and the beverage industry was the natural next step. “The beverage industry is among the only existing markets currently using CO2,” says Christoph Gebald, cofounder and director of the startup. Other […]
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