Climate Council advises: Establish a policy for the permanent removal of CO2

Clear the air

The Scientific Climate Council (WKR) produces an advisory report on the need to remove CO2. The WKR states in the report “Clear the air? Advice on principles and policy for steering CO2 removal from the atmosphere” that the government should, among other things, focus policy on permanent CO2 removal.

A selection of the recommendations:

• Introduce a CO2 removal policy in conjunction with European policy
• Compensate fossil greenhouse gas emissions and greenhouse gas emissions with a long residence time in the atmosphere only with permanent CO2 removal.
• Start a Dutch government-led procurement program for permanent CO2 removal, to gain experience with various methods of CO2 removal in the Netherlands before 2035.
• Ensure that emitters now contribute to the future costs of limiting and reducing temperature excess by designing and implementing ways to do so.

Read the advisory report via the WKR website.

One of the ways, the oldest method that has been used for billions of years, is mineralization, as it is called in the report. This is what the WKR says about it:

CO2 can be mineralized or converted into carbonate minerals, the main component of rocks. Mineralization includes various methods. For example, certain rocks such as basalt and olivine have the property that they mineralize CO2 during weathering and thus extract CO2 from the atmosphere. This process of mineralization is very slow in nature, but can be accelerated considerably by grinding and spreading the rocks, for example on land or in water. In this context the term accelerated weathering is also used.

Simple but effective

greenSand started importing olivine-rich rocks in 2008 and turns them into usable sand and stone products. The idea is simple, 100% natural and does not require any major technological inventions:

Where possible, use olivine rocks that remove CO2 instead of other rocks that would otherwise be used.

For example on walking and cycling paths. Use it as decorative gravel in gardens, use it instead of river gravel on green roofs.

When using greenSand olivine-rich rock, we ensure that in addition to the usual CO2 emissions associated with the construction of each path (such as mining and transport), we now also permanently remove CO2 from the atmosphere. When CO2 is absorbed from the atmosphere, you get negative CO2 emissions.

Support our mission or read more about the effects of olivine here .