Tristan Copley-Smith and Duncan McDowall are the two award-winning filmmakers preparing to travel the world learning the stories of maverick entrepreneurs, visionaries and tech-savvy activists transforming climate change into a new technology frontier. Their documentary series, ‘Carbon Catchers’, will tell the “story of radical cultural phenomenon; a hybrid of activism, entrepreneurialism and cutting edge science.”
In one of their first episodes, they’ll learn and share the stories of three unusual, creative, and inspiring entrepreneurs currently living in the San Francisco Bay Area:
Olya Irzak, a Russian immigrant and ex-Google engineer, travels the world chasing deposits of methane, a greenhouse gas over twenty times as potent as CO2, leaking from old mines and bubbling from Arctic lakes. Olga’s company’s technology incinerates and stores copious tons of methane using sensors, floating machines and flame throwers. Based between two labs in San Francisco and Alaska, Olya orchestrates a distributed team of engineers and scientists.
Cody Finke, a San Francisco-based Ivy League graduate and mountain biking enthusiast, wants to store carbon in our walls. His team is rethinking cement, shifting it from an intensely climate-damaging material, to one that pulls carbon out of the air and locks it into our buildings and roads. Cody’s team scours the Amazon for mineral deposits needed for the innovative chemical reaction, and from their second lab in Idaho, solder a custom spec furnace, destined for San Francisco where Cody will mint their first large scale batch of carbon negative cement.
Aaron Fitzgerald, an Afro-American entrepreneur and martial artist, is transcending the poverty of his youth to found Mars Materials, a company crafting plastic alternatives from CO2. Aaron, whose previous two startups went bust, is in San Francisco to turn things around. As he struggles to build success, he also consults other entrepreneurs of color towards their own victories. With a recently solidified partnership with the National Renewable Energy lab in Colorado, things are looking up.
Tomorrow’s Air brings connections and partners in destinations around the world to the Carbon Catchers production team and supports carbon removal associated with each episode.
Learn more about Carbon Catchers and follow them on instagram @carboncatchers.
Have a carbon catcher you think Duncan and Tristan should know about, or think your destination would be a perfect partner? Drop us a note.