What prompted you to start Earthly Biochar [1] four years ago?

My degree left me frustrated at the state of the environment and the slow pace of change in response to climate change. I couldn't find a position that felt right, so I set up my own agency supporting not-for-profits. Sometime later, I attended a permaculture meeting at Bournemouth University with my co-founder Connor Lascelles. This is where we first heard about the potential biochar has for helping improve soil health and limit climate change. After months of research and developing a prototype biochar kiln, we launched Earthly Biochar as a business.

Can you explain what biochar is and how it can aid the journey to net-zero in the UK?

Earthly Biochar is the UK's leading supplier of biochar, a soil improver and method of carbon capture anyone can use, meaning it has the potential to turn every garden and house plant into a carbon sink. When 1 tonne of biochar is made, it prevents 2.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere. We have created the UK's first smokeless biochar kiln so people can make their own biochar at home in their gardens, our next steps are to scale-up production and make the kilns more accessible.

You must be so proud to have won two Young Innovators Awards, how have they helped your company?

I am incredibly proud to have won, I'm proud of everything Earthly achieves, but winning these two Young Innovator Awards are definitely a highlight. Winning the first one meant Earthly had the seal of approval from Innovate UK and that launched us into the press. Our sales tripled, profit margins improved, and we hired two new team members. Then winning the Young Innovator's Next Steps Award has given us a £50,000 grant to develop Earthly Biochar as a carbon negative solution.

How do you see Earthly Biochar's role in promoting Biochar to the masses?

I see Earthly Biochar's role as an educational one first and foremost, we want to spread the news of biochar far and wide. It's so incredibly versatile and can be used in so many ways which are useful to us, all while safely capturing carbon. The more people that know about and use biochar, the more we can mitigate our impact on the environment by reducing carbon emissions. From Earthly's perspective, our aim is to not only get people buying premade biochar, but to also make it themselves in their gardens using our kilns. This way, any garden burning is smoke-free and carbon negative, and people can use the leftover biochar to improve their soil health and get their plants flourishing.

What would be top of your list for the next 5 years, scaling, innovation or education?

This is a really tough one to answer as we need to do all three simultaneously! So, I'm going to stick with that and say all of them as that's what we're actively doing right now and will definitely be continuing to do over the next five years. We're always looking at how the business can grow and investigating ways biochar can be used beyond the garden. I'm also studying a PhD to research biochar even further, with the goal of producing a documentary film to help spread awareness for the technology.