Reconstruction after a forest fire is not cheap. Recent Los Angeles forest fires, for example, have been hired to $ 164 billion in the losses of goods and capital. But the restoration of the forest is not, with a few thousand acres which run a few million dollars, Grant Canary, co-founder and CEO of Reforestation of maststold Techcrunch.
“If you own land and it will take 60 to 80 years for these trees to grow, any money manager will be, put your money literally in something else.”
The biggest reforestation cost is to face the dead and burned trees. Often they are cut, stacked and burned on site. “This is the cheapest way to do so,” said Canary.
Canary said that Mast has designed a way to pay for reforestation today, without the landowners needing to wait for decades to harvest wood or collect carbon credits. Instead of burning what remains, the mast will collect and bury the trees to prevent decomposition – and sell the resulting carbon credits.
Mast recently raised $ 25 million to develop the new company, said the company exclusively in Techcrunch. The Tour was led by Pulse Fund and the share capital with the participation of Seven Seven Six. The startup’s first project will be in an area in Montana affected by the fire of poverty, which swept in 2021.
Burial of biomass also avoids sending more soot in the air, but without the appropriate preparation of the site, it could still release methane and carbon dioxide.
In most floors, wood is disintegrated while microbes nibble on cellulose, releasing methane and carbon dioxide.
The mast has a different approach. The startup will bury the trees in an area rich in clay, which limits the flow of air and water, stifling microbial activity. The holes are up to 30 feet deep and extend to three acres. After launching the dead trees inside, the mast will cap the hole using clay and other natural materials, similar to the way the discharges are built.
Once finished, the mast will lace the burial place with monitors to make sure that the wood does not break down. It also provides a foundation, the Northwest Permanence Foundation, to monitor and maintain the site for the next century, which is the minimum duration of the resulting carbon credits. If something is wrong, the foundation can make repairs to prevent disintegration.
Since carbon will remain locked up in the trees, the mast can sell up to 30,000 metric tonnes of carbon credits, the product of which will reject 900 acres.
Canary founded Mast a decade ago as Dronened, which, like the suggested name, used drones to reinsess the areas marked by forest fires.
It quickly realized that a low cost way of spreading the seeds was only part of the problem; The company should find a source for seeds, and really, reforestation efforts are more successful with sowing cultivated in nurseries, not the seeds dispersed by drones. Thus, DroneSeed acquired two other companies, Silvaseed and Cal Forestries, and changed its name into reforestation of the mast.
On the other hand, the startup builds its biomass burial activities from zero.
He acquires data and the development of technology to determine where the landscapes marked by fire should take place in biomass. The objective, said Canary, is to use the data platform alongside carbon credits to accelerate reforestation on sites marked by forest fires across the western United States
“It would take three to five years to do a reforestation project,” he said. “We can do it in six to 12 months.”
