Meet this year’s inspiring Swiss ClimateLaunchpad Contestants

ENCHAR – The world’s first biochar marketplace

Enchar aims to become the world’s primary biochar market platform. The service platform offers a sales channel for biochar producers and a structured buying area for biochar buyers. It also provides CDR certificates for companies willing to offset their carbon footprint with negative emissions. As Enchar co-founder Charles Peurois asserts « a biochar marketplace is exactly what is currently missing and will help the biochar industry accelerate its growth ».

Through their service Enchar taps into the market potential of one of the fastest growing negative carbon mission technologies. Biochar is among the fastest, most scalable and economical ways to sequester large amounts of CO2 whilst building more productive and resilient ecosystems. In fact by 2050, biochar could account for 30% of the necessary negative carbon emissions we need as a society, or nearly 3 Gt of C02eq (Ithaka Institute, Cornell University, IPCC)

The three co-founders, Dr Christian Wurzer, Jenny Peurois and Charles Peurois hold extensive combined knowledge in biochar characterisation, adsorption technologies and the development of digital products. The team is confident, that given their diverse skill set they are the right team to combat climate change by developing a state of the art digital marketplace for the ecologically and sustainably highly promising biochar industry. The core vision and passion that drives the co-founders at Enchar is « to empower the biochar industry, so that it reaches it potential of over a ton of gigaton of CO2 sequestrated in the long run while helping the farming industry fight climate change » (Charles Peurois, Co-founder). By working on their project with the support of the ClimateLaunchpad accelerator, the Enchar team envisions to get the best of their idea and accelerate their development by creating visibility for their startup and get feedback from industry experts.

Learn more about Enchar here

MYCROBEZ – fully compostable mycelial foam materials

Mycrobez is currently developing a circular material made from mycelial composites as a sustainable alternative to harmful fossil-based foams in the construction and packaging industries.

The startup aims to make a multiplicative contribution against environmental pollution by using mylecial composites for three applications comprising insulation foams for construction, foams for packaging and soil-renatularizing fertilizer for agriculture. Through this threefold approach, it will support the construction, packaging and agriculture industries in their progress towards a more circular economy.

Mycelium composites offer an ideal replacement material for fossil-based foams and Mycrobez aims to be the first company to automate and scale the production process to achieve price competitivenes and comparable production performance to styrofoam while offering a sustainable application of upcycles residual materials. The startup is currently developing the first fully automated production plant after advancing on the first process prototype.

The three young founders, Moritz Schiller, Mosas Pilscheur and Jonas Staub came up with the idea of Mycrobez during their high school years. While working on mycelium composites on a daily basis for the last year, the young team has been able to witness their idea taking off like a rocket and have already won several prizes, awards and leading partners.

The young and passionate entrepreneurs envision their project as « the next big thing » and will tell you upfront that their motivation is very straighforward : «we simply want to contribute to the protection of the environment with our vision of a profitable circular economy» (Moritz Schiller, co-founder Mycrobez). By entering ClimateLaunchpad they anticipate to connect with a large network of experts that will further allow them to refine their venture and bring forward their vision.

Learn more about Mycrobez here