Reconstruction after a fire is not cheap. Recent fires of Los Angeles, for example, took place until $ 164 billion to property and capital damage. But forest restoration is not even a few thousand acres running a few million dollars, Grant Canary, co -founder and CEO of Tissue reforestationsaid to TechCrunch.
“If you are the landowner and it is going to take 60 to 80 years for the trees to grow, any money manager will be like, put your money literally in anything else.”
The highest cost of reforestation is the treatment of dead, burnt trees. Often, they are cut, accumulated and burned in the hotel area. “This is the cheapest way to do it,” Canary said.
Canary said Mast has devised a way to pay for reforestation today, without land owners who need to wait decades either to harvest timber or to claim carbon credits. Instead of burning what is left, Mast will collect and bury the trees to prevent disintegration – and sell the resulting carbon credits.
Mast recently increased $ 25 million to develop the new business, the company told TechCrunch exclusively. The round was driven by the Pulse Fund and Social Capital, with the participation of seven seven six. The first starting project will be in an area in Montana affected by the Flats Flats fire, which swept in 2021.
Biomaza burial also avoids sending more conditions to the air, but without proper preparation of the space, it could still release carbon dioxide and dioxide.
In most soils, wood breaks down as germs hit in cellulose, releasing methane and carbon dioxide.
The tissue has a different approach. The start will insert the trees into an area rich with clay, which limits the flow of air and water, drowning microbial activity. The holes are up to 30 feet deep and extend to three acres. After throwing the dead trees in, the tissue will cover the hole using clay and other natural materials, similar to the manner of manufacture of landfill.
Once complete, Mast will lace the burial place with screens to ensure that the wood does not decompose. It also endorses an institution, the Northwest Plying Foundation, to watch and maintain the area for the next century, which is the minimum duration of carbon appropriations that occur. If something is bad, the institution can make repairs to prevent decay.
Because carbon will remain locked in the trees, the tissue can sell up to 30,000 metric tons of carbon credit, whose revenue will recover 900 acres.
Canary founded Mast a decade ago as droneseed, which, as the name proposed, used drones to repeat the areas that have run by fire.
He soon realized that a low -cost way of spreading seeds was only part of the problem. The company should find a source for seeds, and in fact, reforestation efforts are more successful with plants grown in nurseries, not aircraft scattered seeds. Thus, DroneSeed acquired two other businesses, Silvaseed and Cal Forest Nurseries, and changed its name to Mast reforestation.
On the contrary, the start builds the burial of biomass from the ground.
It is data and develops technology to determine where the landscapes will take place should be buried biomass. The goal, Canary said, is to use the data platform alongside Carbon Credit sales to accelerate reforestation in fire sites across the West US
“It will take three to five years to do a recovery project,” he said. “We can do this in six to 12 months.”
