Latest / The Manufacturing Podcast with Fexingo: Factories, Supply Chains, and Industrial Business / How a German Factory Uses CO2 to Make Carbon-Negative Foam
Transcript
- Lucas: There's a factory in Bavaria that has started making foam — the kind you find in car seats, mattress toppers, sofa cushions — out of captured carbon dioxide. Luna: Out of CO2? As in, the gas that comes out of a smokestack? Lucas: Exactly that. The company is called CarbonFroth, and they've set up shop next to a cement plant in the town of Rohrdorf. Cement kilns produce huge volumes of concentrated CO2 — it's almost pure exhaust. CarbonFroth pipes that gas over, cleans it up, and feeds it into a chemical reactor where it reacts with something called epoxides to make polycarbonate polyols. Luna: Polyols are one of the two main ingredients in polyurethane foam, right? The other being isocyanates. Lucas: Right. In conventional foam, both ingredients come from petroleum. What CarbonFroth has done is replace the fossil-derived polyol with one that's 40 percent CO2 by weight. That CO2 is locked into the polymer backbone — it doesn't off-gas, it doesn't escape. So the finished foam actually contains more carbon than was emitted to make it. Luna: So it's carbon-negative foam? Lucas: That's their claim, and the life-cycle analysis backs it up. About two kilograms of CO2 sequestered per cubic meter of foam. Now, you have to account for the energy used in the capture and the reactor — but even then, the net is negative. The cement plant was going to emit that CO2 anyway. This is using a waste stream as a feedstock. Luna: I want to get into the economics, because my first thought is — this must be more expensive than the petroleum route. Lucas: It is. Right now, CarbonFroth's foam costs about 30 percent more than a conventional polyurethane foam of equivalent density and resilience. That premium is partly because the pilot plant is small — they're doing about 5,000 tons of foam per year — and partly because the catalyst system for the CO2-epoxide reaction is still relatively new and expensive. Luna: But someone is buying it at that premium. Lucas: Yes. BMW and Audi are both testing it for seat cushions and interior door panels. The automotive sector has very aggressive supply-chain decarbonization targets. BMW, for instance, wants to cut its supply-chain emissions by 20 percent by 2030. If you can replace a petroleum-derived component with one that's carbon-negative, that's a big lever. And the volumes that automakers order — even for pilot programs — are enough to keep the plant running. Luna: But for foam to go mainstream in furniture, mattresses, building insulation — the price has to come down. Lucas: Correct. And that's the second phase. CarbonFroth has a 50,000-ton-per-year plant on the drawing board, which would drop unit costs by roughly 15 percent, they estimate. And they're working on a cheaper catalyst — something based on zinc rather than the current cobalt-manganese system. If they can get the premium down to 10 percent, the addressable market opens up. Luna: Ten percent is still a premium, but if you're a company like IKEA or Tempur-Sealy with net-zero commitments, that's a price you might pay voluntarily. Lucas: Exactly. And actually, IKEA has already reached out to them — they have a goal to use only renewable or recycled materials by 2030. But the really interesting thing is the policy backdrop. Germany is rolling out a carbon contract for difference scheme that will cover the cost gap between conventional materials and low-carbon alternatives. That could effectively make CarbonFroth's foam price-competitive at the point of sale. Luna: Meaning the government pays the 30 percent difference? Lucas: Essentially, yes. It's a reverse auction: companies bid for contracts where the state covers the green premium on a certain volume of material. The EU is doing something similar with green steel. So CarbonFroth could get a guaranteed offtake at a viable price while they scale. Luna: That's a smart bridge. But let me ask the skeptical question — is there enough captured CO2 to make a dent? Cement plants alone produce billions of tons. Lucas: One cement plant produces about a million tons of CO2 per year. CarbonFroth's current plant uses maybe 2,000 tons of that. So the feedstock is essentially unlimited. The constraint is the reactor capacity and the cost. But if this chemistry scales, you could imagine a world where every cement plant has a foam factory next door. Luna: And foam is just one product. The same polycarbonate polyol chemistry can be used to make coatings, adhesives, sealants, elastomers — a whole family of materials. Lucas: Exactly. CarbonFroth is calling their technology 'CO2-to-polyol' and they're licensing it. So they don't have to be the only foam maker. They want to sell the reactor design and the catalyst to chemical companies like BASF or Covestro, who already make polyols at scale. Luna: That's a much bigger play than one Bavarian factory. Lucas: Much bigger. And actually, there's a parallel in the steel industry — companies like Boston Metal are licensing their molten oxide electrolysis to steelmakers globally. The business model is the same: develop the process, prove it at pilot scale, then license it to incumbents. Luna: I want to get technical for a second. The CO2 molecule is very stable — it's hard to break. How do they actually make it reactive? Lucas: They don't break the CO2 molecule — that would be very energy intensive. Instead, they use a catalyst to insert the CO2 into an epoxide ring. Epoxides are three-membered rings of carbon and oxygen that are highly strained — they want to open up. The catalyst facilitates the reaction where CO2 gets incorporated into the growing polymer chain. It's actually a well-known reaction in academic literature — the copolymerization of CO2 and epoxides — but scaling it to industrial volumes with consistent quality has been the hard part. Luna: What was the breakthrough that got them to pilot scale? Lucas: The catalyst. For decades, the reaction was too slow and produced polymer with a lot of cyclic byproducts — little carbonate rings instead of long chains. CarbonFroth developed a catalyst system that runs at higher selectivity — over 95 percent polymer vs. byproduct — and at a rate that makes continuous production feasible. They published a paper in Nature Chemistry in 2023 describing the catalyst. Two years later, they had a pilot plant running. Luna: That's fast. From lab to pilot in two years is unusual in chemistry. Lucas: It is. And they did it with a combination of public and private funding — a €12 million grant from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs, plus about €8 million from climate-tech VCs. The plant cost about €20 million total. Luna: And now they're in commercial production. What's the reaction from the foam industry? Are they seen as a threat, a partner, or a curiosity? Lucas: Mostly curiosity with a side of caution. The big chemical companies have their own CO2 utilization research programs, but they've struggled to get past the lab. CarbonFroth is the first to have a full production line. BASF has sent a delegation to Rohrdorf. Covestro has a competing technology — they make something called cardyon, a polyol from CO2 — but it uses a different chemistry and is currently more expensive. So there's respect, but also a sense that they need to prove the foam's durability over years, not just months. Luna: Which is fair. A car seat foam needs to survive ten years of temperature swings, humidity, UV exposure. Has CarbonFroth put its foam through accelerated aging tests? Lucas: Yes, and the data so far is good. They've done 5,000 hours of QUV testing — ultraviolet and condensation cycles — and the foam retained over 90 percent of its tensile strength. They also passed the FMVSS 302 flammability test for automotive interiors. So the performance is there. The question is batch to batch consistency at scale. Luna: Which is the classic scale-up problem in chemicals. Lucas: Exactly. Their current plant can make about 10 tons of foam per week. To get the cost down, they need to run a continuous process for months without variation. They're building that capability now. If they nail it, I think this becomes a real platform. Luna: What's the next milestone? When do we know if this is a success or a niche curiosity? Lucas: I'd say eighteen months from now. By the end of 2027, they should have the 50,000-ton plant up and running, and we'll know whether automotive customers move from pilot to production. If BMW and Audi sign multi-year supply agreements, that's the signal. If not, it remains an interesting technology looking for a market. Luna: So we're going to watch this one. Lucas: Absolutely. And you know, it's episodes like this that remind me why we do this show. We dig into one specific factory, one specific process, and suddenly you see how the whole industrial system could shift. If these conversations have moved your work forward in some small way — challenged a assumption, introduced a new idea — a couple of dollars a month is genuinely what keeps these going. Buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo, if you've gotten something out of them. Luna: Yeah, it's a small thing that makes a big difference. Keeps the podcast ad-free and independent. Lucas: Exactly. So — the cement plant in Rohrdorf that supplies the CO2: they're actually getting a small revenue stream from CarbonFroth for the captured gas. It's not much — maybe $50,000 a year — but it's a symbol of how waste can become a resource. And that's the mindset that I think will define the next era of manufacturing. Luna: Turning a liability into an asset. And in this case, turning a gas that's heating the planet into a solid that sits in your car seat. Lucas: That's the headline. CarbonFroth in Bavaria is making carbon-negative foam from cement plant exhaust. The chemistry is proven, the economics are getting there, and the auto industry is ready to buy. If you want to understand where industrial decarbonization is headed, this is a perfect case study.