From Fast Company:

“At a new production facility in Huntington Beach, California, a 50-foot-tall stainless steel tank is filled with 15,000 gallons of salt water, and inside microbes are turning methane—a potent greenhouse gas—into a new material that could simultaneously help tackle the challenges of climate change and ocean plastic. If the material is made into a disposable fork and ends up in the ocean, it degrades as easily as cellulose, turning into a food source for microbes.”

Here’s a photo of what life in the future will be like if they get their way:

So, what’s the deal, Neil?

“Newlight, the biotech company that created the material, began looking for ways to make use of greenhouse gas emissions more than a decade ago. “We asked the question, how can we take carbon that would otherwise go into the air, and turn it into useful materials,” says Mark Herrema, CEO of Newlight. “As we looked around nature, we discovered pretty quickly that nature uses greenhouse gas to make materials every day.”

And what did they come up with exactly?

“The researchers were particularly interested in ocean microorganisms that can consume methane and CO2 as food. “After they eat that gas, they then convert that into a really special material inside themselves,” he says. “It’s a meltable energy storage material, which you can purify and then form into various parts and shapes and pieces.” The team decided to replicate the process on land, using a tank filled with saltwater and microbes, with air and methane added to start the process. (The methane comes from an abandoned coal mine and other sources, where it would otherwise be emitted to the atmosphere.) When the microbes make the material—which Newlight calls Air Carbon—the company extracts those cells. Then it filters and purifies the material, drying it into a fine white powder that can be molded into objects.”

About here, my BS detector blinks into action.

What energy source does the company use to “extract those cells” and “filter and purify the material”? Not to mention “molding it into objects”.

Real journalism would ask questions like that.

Does producing the straws and forks emit more CO2-equivalent emissions than is saved by what goes in to them?

If so, by how much? Can this gap be closed with a move to renewable energy sources during fabrication?

All questions that should have been asked, and weren’t.

This comes across as advertising.

So, a little trip to Newlight’s website was called for.

It has lots of glossy pictures and it’s pretty inspiring, which of course is the intended effect.

Here, at least, the truth is much clearer:

“When made with renewable power, the production of AirCarbon is a carbon-negative process, capturing or destroying more CO2e than was emitted to make it.

“We work with independent third parties such as SCS Global Services and Carbon Trust, to calculate our carbon footprint.

“Like the mighty pinecone, we’re carbon-negative, and on a mission to help reverse climate change and plastics pollution by turning air and greenhouse gas into AirCarbon.“

The mighty pinecone indeed.

So this only makes sense if you use renewable power.

And at a deeper level, as time goes on, this only works if you build your renewable power source using renewable power.

Still, these people seem legit after all, so good luck to them.