There are few ways for individuals to participate in carbon removal. Typically, carbon removal is something that someone else does that you pay for.
But what if there was a way for you to practice carbon removal in your own backyard with biochar?
Connor Lascelles and Lottie Hawkins are the Cofounders of Earthly Biochar, a company that manufactures consumer-accessible biochar kilns.
On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Connor and Lottie join Ross and cohost Jada Dormaier, Supply Account Manager at Nori, to explain what differentiates biochar from charcoal and other soil amendments and how it benefits the soil.
Connor and Lottie describe the process of making your own biochar in an Earthly kiln, discussing where to go for feedstock, and how neighborhoods and municipalities might develop community biochar programs.
Listen in for insight on what questions to ask before you purchase biochar and learn how to try your hand at carbon removal with an Earthly kiln.
Resources
Ross’ Crow Story on Reversing Climate Change Happy Hour
Annalee Levin on Reversing Climate Change S2EP52
Top Lid Up Draft Biochar Machine on YouTube
Charles Dowding’s Charcoal Video
Josiah Hunt at Pacific Biochar
Exeter Biochar Retort Industrial Kiln
Also on this show
Biochar, or: using fire to cool the earth, with Albert Bates, June 2019
PlantVillage is working to scale biochar in Africa, with Dr. David Hughes, May 2023
This CDR marketplace bought a biochar company. Now what?! With Josiah Hunt and Sophie Westover, November 2025
More from the show
Ad-free episodes and other benefits come with a paid subscription.
Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.
Carbon Removal Memes is still going.
The books that come up on this show are collected on my Bookshop shelf.
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Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change. Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon, I’m one of the co-founders of Nori and the creative editor there. Today I have with me guests who we’ve been trying to coordinate with for a long time — it just has not happened. We’ve had experiments on our end that have taken forever. Burying the lede a little bit here, but with me, Jada Dormaier here from Supply at Nori. Hey, Jada.
Jada Dormaier: Hi, Ross, it’s good to be here with you guys.
Ross Kenyon: I’m happy to have you. You were such a huge help, because we got this kiln from our guests for making biochar — and how many attempts did it take? And this is nothing against the kiln. I think this is mostly my failure, but yeah.
Jada Dormaier: The kiln is very cool. We failed three times, and then you were having a bird issue, Ross, the last time that we were going to try again. And so I took the kiln home and made biochar by myself, and I was successful. So it’s been definitely a process, but very fun.
Ross Kenyon: Having a bird issue is a great excuse for delaying a podcast. If you want the story, I can link back to it — I told Siobhan this story about having crow fledglings in my yard, so all the adult crows were attacking us and dive-bombing us when we would go about our business. So I had to cancel one of the last biochar makings because of it. But thanks for picking up the slack there and saving me, Jada.
Jada Dormaier: Yeah, no worries. I have to say, I love fire. So being a little bit of a pyro made it even more fun.
Ross Kenyon: That’s cool. I’m glad it was able to do that for you. Well, we should introduce our guests here, who are sitting patiently there, from Earthly Biochar in the UK, the founders of it: Connor Lascelles and Lottie Hawkins. Hello, you both.
Connor Lascelles: Hello.
Ross Kenyon: How did this get going? I know there’s a lot of biochar people and they’re often quite passionate about it. How did you look at this field and say, this is where I want to make my mark, this is what I want to do?
Connor Lascelles: Yeah, it’s quite interesting origins, really. So I’ve always thought I’ve had an ability to solve problems and come up with ideas. So I thought, oh, maybe I should be an entrepreneur. And then when I turned 17, I learned about climate change and I thought, okay, how can I combine the two? The most pressing problem of our time, in my opinion. So I thought, I can’t go and start another business, non-climate-related. I have to do it now, the time is urgent. So I decided to study product design.
During my final year of my product design degree, I had to pick a problem and solve that problem with a product solution. And I went to my university’s society open day, where you can go and join clubs, and I got talking to someone who ran a permaculture society, and he was actually studying biochar. And when he found out that I was a product designer, he asked me to build him a biochar kiln so that he didn’t have to keep buying it, so that he could make it at home for his tests. And then when I went home and I Googled what biochar was, I learned that it was carbon negative, and then I learned that not only that, it has all these other co-benefits in agriculture and other industries.
So I thought, wow, this is quite exciting. So I Googled “biochar kiln for sale UK” and nothing came up. So I went to my tutor and — I think this was totally blue sky, there was no product that you could buy where you just load up your feedstock and make biochar in an easy way. So I went to my tutor and I said, oh, there’s this thing about biochar, don’t really know much about it, I’m not sure about it, what do you think? And she’s like, yep, do it, no one’s done anything like that before. So I ended up risking my degree on this project, and it was the best risk I’ve ever taken, and ended up doing really well in my degree and getting voted the project you wish you would have had.
So what I realized was that if you wanted to make biochar you had to build your own kiln, and a lot of people don’t have the tools or the skills necessary to do that. So just like, if you want to have a pizza oven, you either have to build your pizza oven or you buy a pizza oven — but there was nothing to buy for biochar. So I thought, how can I make biochar more accessible for those wanting to make it? So that was the problem that we set out to solve.
Ross Kenyon: Where’d you come into this mix, Lottie?
Lottie Hawkins: Well, I was the person that was listening to Connor talk all about it over dinner for about two years. And at the time I was looking for a start-up [unclear]. And I remember when he was finishing his final year project and exhibiting it in London, and we got some interest — people actually wanted to buy it, although at the time it was just a prototype on a stand. And I think we both similarly had the same kind of values and visions of the future. I’d worked for myself for a while, advised other start-ups. I’ve always worked in kind of eco and sustainable industries. I did a molecular biology degree. So it felt like the timing was right. We applied for an accelerator programme, and when we got that, that’s when both me and Connor were like, okay, yeah, this is a business now, we’ve got something that we can run with.
Ross Kenyon: Awesome. [unclear] I’ve had this kiln for — I think we were one of the first buyers of the kiln. And when even was that? I can’t even remember. Surely it’s greater than a year.
Connor Lascelles: Yeah, close to two years, maybe.
Ross Kenyon: Oh no. This is the longest-running — the lead time on this show is definitely the longest of any. [unclear] I’m hoping — if there are technical difficulties and the audio gets lost and we have to do it again, I think that’s another three months to schedule. Cool?
Connor Lascelles: Yeah. No, I remember, Ross — I don’t know who contacted each other first, but I remember being aware of Nori and then I was meaning to contact you. And then I think you messaged us on Instagram, and I remember being in a pub with Lottie having dinner and I was like, oh, look — Nori, they’ve just sent us a message, they’re interested in our kiln thing. That’s how it went.
Ross Kenyon: I think Annalee Levin has one of these originally, right? So yes, that’s right, and she’s now over there working on [unclear]. I need to have her back on to update when she’s ready. I caught up with her recently, though.
Connor Lascelles: Yeah, we went to visit her three or four months ago, actually. So she has the kiln as well. She wants like multiple kilns working at all times, generating heat for outdoor drinking, and then that goes back into the garden.
Lottie Hawkins: And yeah, she was looking at it from a perspective of using the waste heat. So as you’re making biochar you’ve got around 500 degrees Celsius of heat for about just over an hour. And, you know, we sell cooking — we have a cooking grate that’s on the top, so you can just put your pots and pans on it, or you can just stick a wok right in the middle and cook your stir-fry. But yeah, she was looking at trying to brew beer with it and use some of that waste heat to actually provide the heat in the brewing system. So we haven’t checked in on her the last couple of months, but hopefully she’s making some small batches with our kiln.
Ross Kenyon: That’s very cool. That could be one of our next experiments, to look at combining multiple complex hobbies in a row.
Jada Dormaier: I think we’re both too tired for that. Good luck. I’ll celebrate you from afar.
Ross Kenyon: Why don’t we back up a little bit? Imagine someone doesn’t know what biochar is. How do you explain it? Why is it important? Why does it belong on a podcast called Reversing Climate Change?
Connor Lascelles: So biochar is kind of a type of charcoal made at a higher temperature than your usual lump barbecue charcoal. So your barbecue charcoal is made at about 400 degrees Celsius, because you want some of that smokiness still left in there to impart the flavour on your food. But biochar is made between 600 and 800, and sometimes even higher than that. And what that does is it unclogs the pores that are present in the structure. So if you cut a tree and you look at it under a microscope, you’ll see all these little holes, and those holes are responsible for bringing water up and down in the tree. And when you carbonize that, you are actually opening up that porous structure.
The reason why it’s carbon negative — let’s take forestry for an example. If a tree is used in a sawmill, around half of that tree ends up as waste, and that waste is usually burned for energy, to kiln dry, and that’s the carbon cycle: the tree took it out, we then burn that tree for energy and then that goes back into the atmosphere again. But what biochar is, is we’re heating in the absence of oxygen, so it’s not a full combustion process, it’s kind of like a half combustion. So what we do is you take an organic matter, you apply heat and air, and then at a certain time you restrict the air, and what that does is it prevents roughly 50 percent of the carbon, the original carbon content of that wood, from releasing as CO2.
And then that remaining carbon — because it’s made at a higher temperature, it forms a crystalline structure which is almost impossible for microbes to break down in the soil. So it’s effectively removed from the carbon cycle, and the only way to get that carbon back into the atmosphere again is to burn it. And to avoid that happening, we use it as a soil amendment, so blending it into your compost. And when you do that, it adds value in another way. So because of its porous structure, it holds onto nutrients and water really effectively. So the research says that you can save about 20 to 40 percent of your water and fertilizer requirements by mixing biochar into your soil at a rate of 10% by volume — so one part biochar, 10 parts soil.
And on top of reducing the water and fertilizer requirements, it’s actually increasing the yield and boosting the plant’s health. There are many different mechanisms by which it does that, and maybe Lottie can delve into those. But one of the main ones is that these pores become habitats for the beneficial microbes in your soil, and they go and hide in these pores and they escape from their predators and they get bigger and they get stronger. And the more microbes you have, the more nutrients go to your plants. So this, in combination with a couple of other mechanisms in the soil, is probably why biochar has shown to increase productivity.
Lottie Hawkins: Biochar, in my opinion, is one of the most immediate forms and accessible forms of carbon capture and storage, which is definitely what belongs on this podcast. And I think that a really good way for people to visualize it is essentially — how biochar is made, it’s a form of pyrolysis, and all we’re doing is taking the carbon that plants and biomass have sequestered from the atmosphere and just putting a stop on that carbon, like stopping it decaying. So by turning it into biochar it becomes a durable form of carbon that you can hold. So biochar is 90 percent carbon, it’s black, it’s a small particle size, and by adding it to soils like an amendment you can improve the soil quality and the yields of your kind of growing operations. But there are other markets that biochar can go into as well, and it’s recognized internationally. It’s been in the IPCC reports and it’s in the [unclear] net zero strategy as a method to capture carbon at scale. So it’s pretty cool.
Ross Kenyon: So if I dug up biochar that I had put in my soil, would it not be — it would never be decomposed?
Lottie Hawkins: Correct. So once biochar goes into the soil, it’s an inert form of carbon. So you have different types of carbon in soil — [unclear] when we talk about that we’re talking about labile carbon, it can travel through the carbon cycle. But biochar isn’t that; it’s not going to break down, the bugs can’t even break it down. So if you do dig it up, it’ll still be there. And that actually leads to a really cool story about how biochar was discovered in the Amazon rainforest. And the oldest piece of biochar has been carbon dated to 4,000 years old. But because no one’s existed for that long, we can’t tell how much has degraded over that timescale. But we can confidently say, in the research, that biochar is stable on centennial scales. Over a thousand years, we’re pretty confident the same amount of carbon will be there if you dig it up.
Ross Kenyon: Very cool. So can you tell us the process of making it with your guys’ specific kiln? Show us.
Connor Lascelles: So when I was designing the kiln — luckily there’s a massive community of DIY biochar makers. So I was reviewing all of the ways that people were making biochar and trying to work out which ones worked, which ones were the safest, which ones were the least likely to go wrong. There’s one way of making biochar called a retort method, and this isn’t what we use in our kiln. But essentially you’ve got like an oil drum with one outlet for gas, and you’re heating that oil drum — you’ve filled it up with your wood scraps, wood chips or logs — and you’re heating that drum from beneath, and that is heating up the wood, and then the wood at a certain temperature starts to release smoke, and smoke is mostly methane and hydrogen, which is highly flammable.
And obviously methane, we know, is 25 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. So one of the key priorities for us when we designed this is, let’s not create more harm than good. We need to make sure that that methane is reacting with oxygen to form CO2. And like I said, people think, oh, how can burning something be carbon negative? Well, we’re releasing 50 percent of the carbon just to turn the remaining 50% into something which won’t biodegrade. So the method that we use is called a top-lit updraft, or TLUD. If you type in TLUD biochar into YouTube, you’ll find all these different oil drum stacking mechanisms.
But essentially, the way it works is we have a cylinder which we call the burn chamber, and at the bottom of that cylinder is a perforated plate — so holes that let air in. At the top of the cylinder, around the edge of the top, we have more holes and they let in more air. So what we do is we fill up the burn chamber all the way to just below those secondary air holes. And what we do then is we put the chimney on the thing — that provides a bit of an updraft — and we light that from the top. So usually with a fire you sort of start small and add to it, but this is completely the other way around, so we’re filling it all the way up and then lighting it from the top.
And what happens is that because the chimney is providing an updraft, air is being pulled in from the base, rises through the feedstock — mainly woodchip — it hits the fire at the top, that oxygen is used up, and methane and hydrogen is released. That methane and hydrogen, which is smoke, then mixes with air coming in through the secondary air holes. And there’s a thing called the fire triangle, where if you have enough air, fuel and heat, you have fire. So the air comes in through the secondary air holes, the fuel is the smoke, there’s enough heat, and then if we’ve got the right balance, you can then burn the smoke. So this looks like a bit of a gas hob. We have some photos on our Instagram where, when the smoke is being burned, it looks like a cooking ring of gas burning.
So what happens is, as the air is rising through to the fire, the fire moves downwards towards the air, and as it moves down it leaves a layer of charcoal behind. So in order for charcoal not to turn into ash, it needs to be heated in a low-oxygen environment. And because there’s only one route for the air — the air has to go through the bottom, through the feedstock, to the fire, and then as soon as it hits the fire it’s used up in the fire — everything above the fire is then low oxygen. And because hot air rises, it’s like having a hot air dryer blowing up out the top, which means that wind can’t counterbalance that and come in from the top and start exposing your charcoal to oxygen.
So as it’s progressing downwards you have this pyrolysis zone, this low oxygen zone which is moving down, and when that zone reaches — when your feedstock is turned into charcoal, biochar — then that’s when the flame changes colour, and at that point is when you need to stop the process. So the flame changes twice: from wood to charcoal, and from charcoal to ash. In the first stage, the fuel is methane and hydrogen, and that burns an orange flame. So when you see an orange flame, you think, okay, that’s the first bit going on. When you start to see that orange flame turn a bit blue, that means that your charcoal is now actually burning. Charcoal burns with carbon monoxide as a fuel, and that burns a lot hotter and it burns a blue flame, so that carbon monoxide is reacting with oxygen to form CO2 — and you don’t really want to be burning your charcoal.
So the way to tell when to finish the process is to look at the colour and the size of the flame. So once you’re confident that it’s mostly blue, and you’ve taken a look at the time and it’s roughly about just over an hour, it’s time to quench the fire. So we use water to put the fire out. One of the reasons is because it’s the safest way — it means that you don’t have to starve it from oxygen and then hopefully come back the next day and you don’t have a pile of ash. You hope that you’ve got your biochar sort of retained. But we don’t like that, because sometimes, you know, we don’t really want to sell a product that people are going to leave unattended.
So we use water to quench it, and there are secondary benefits too to using water. So when you use water, you create steam, and then that steam helps flush out those pores, and that increases the surface area, increases absorption a bit. So once you’ve got to the second stage and quenched it, you pour more water — maybe like one or two watering cans’ worth — you stop hearing the hissing, you let it cool down for 5 minutes, you get your heatproof gloves on, you take the chimney off, and then you lift out the burn chamber and then you tip that into a bucket or into a container where you’ve got all of your finished biochar.
And if you’re starting with wood chip, which is the best feedstock, the easiest one to use — let’s say a wood chip is about an inch, your biochar will be about half an inch, it collapses in size a bit. And then, depending on what you’re using it for — like trees, for example, have larger roots, so some people say that larger biochar should be used with larger roots. So if you’re using it for trees you don’t really need to crush it up. But if you’re using it for finer root plants, then we recommend getting a piece of wood, or a sledgehammer, or a spade, and just crushing it up, and what you’re doing is further expanding the surface area. And we always recommend just adding a little bit more water, even though it’s in this bucket, just in case — there’s no harm in adding more water. That’s basically the process.
And yeah, as you’re doing it, if you do it right — you’ve got dry feedstock and you’ve got the right size of feedstock, which ideally is woodchip — then you’re not having any smoke, and that makes it a lot more pleasant to be around. You’re not going to be annoying neighbours. And like I said, as you’re burning it, you’ve got about 500 degrees Celsius worth of heat. So we have videos on our Instagram where we put a wok on the top and we’re making a stir-fry. And, you know, the possibilities are endless for what you want to cook.
Ross Kenyon: Jada, does this help us understand where we went wrong?
Jada Dormaier: Yeah, some of these steps I think we messed up. Well, first, we live in Seattle, so it’s a really rainy area. So the wood chips that we were getting were wet every single time, and we thought that it was dry enough — we didn’t think it was that wet. So there was smoke. There were people walking by that were like, what are you doing? There was smoke. So that was our first mistake. When I did it, I actually just bought smoker chips, so that helped — they were all the same size and they were already dry. But your instructions say to stop if there’s smoke. So a couple of the times we were like, well, quit. And then one time we did think, well, maybe it’ll just stop smoking — which it did.
Connor Lascelles: No way, I’m impressed. [unclear] But that’s the best advice: put it out and start again.
Jada Dormaier: Yeah. So that time we went to the very end, but it was just ashes at the bottom. But I feel like the most stressful part was figuring out when the flame was the right colour.
Connor Lascelles: Since 2018, when we designed this, we’ve started to realize that woodchip — dry wood chip — is by far the best feedstock, and I wouldn’t use anything else. When I do my demos I want it to go right, you know, especially if it’s being filmed. I will go to a local tree surgeon and I will say, can I fill up a couple of bin bags of the wood chip? And they don’t charge me for it because they have to pay to get rid of it. I look for the driest piles, and usually do it in the summer. But if it still needs drying, I lay out some tarpaulins in my garden or driveway, and I’ll just let that wood dry as best it can — just sit in it, whatever, one day — and then once it is dry, I put it back in the bin bags and then store that as dry feedstock ready to use.
Obviously, if you have your own feedstock that you can generate — so if you’re pruning, you’re doing agroforestry, then you can manage your feedstock like that. If you build a little shelter for it, you can let it naturally dry over time. I think I sent you this guide — with all the kilns that we sell we send this guide out. [unclear] The flame: it’s really good to set a timer, because if you’re just stood there watching a flame — I don’t know about you, but I get a bit mesmerised, I don’t really notice the colour changing straight away. Whereas if you set a timer and you run for like 45 minutes, that’s when you want to start looking, and then around the hour mark you should see not just the colour changing but the size of the flames changed as well.
So once the wood is converted to biochar in that process — you’re going to have a bit of a rocket fuel going on and flamethrowers — after that it should actually reduce a little bit in size, and that’s when it changes colour as well. So just look out for that around about that hour mark. If you can — there’s this sort of permaculture no-dig, no-till gardening guru called Charles Dowding. I’ve always been a fan of his, and we met him at a gardening exhibition. We just got to talking and he ended up buying one of our kilns and wanted to support us. So we now have a video about half an hour long on his channel where I go through the whole process. So I should have sent you that before. But if anyone who’s listening — if you just go on to YouTube, type in Charles Dowding and then type in charcoal (he doesn’t call it biochar, in the title it says charcoal, so that’s how you’ll find it) — you’ll see, and everything will make a lot more sense.
Ross Kenyon: It sounds like our problem was almost certainly that of our feedstock choice. I don’t think it was a problem of design with the kiln. It sounds like user error and living in Seattle more than anything else. And also, we know that you’re buying wood chips that are intended for a smoker — probably not the best way to go about your business. Obviously turning waste into biochar value is the way to do it, but we just tried — I mean, we just gave up at that. We were like, we got to make some damn biochar. We will do anything necessary to walk away from this a success.
Connor Lascelles: Did you try cooking on it as you’re making anything?
Ross Kenyon: Look, there’s already too much riding on this to introduce a wok into the mix. I think that would have been more than anyone could have handled. The next time, now that we’re a little more confident and we know where we had made a mistake, I think next time I’ll try to introduce some cooking into the mix.
Connor Lascelles: Yeah, we realized that feedstock is the hardest thing to get right with this. We’ve done lots of trial and error, and honestly, if you can get hold of dry wood chip, then it’s gold. And if you don’t have a tree surgeon nearby — which would be surprising — your power companies will have to go and cut trees so that they don’t interfere with the power lines, and they will give you as much as you like. If you have a driveway, they will actually dump a whole truck for free on your drive.
We also got friendly with a company who sell biomass fuel, but rather than cutting down, you know, old-growth forests, pelletizing it and sending it over to be burned, they work with local landowners after storms. So if a big tree falls down in a storm, they collect that, dry it, and then chip it and then store it in a barn, and that is processed for combustion, so it’s at the right moisture content. And I’ve got, you know, 15 bin bags full of that in my garage, just ready for my demo. So yeah, feedstock is a big challenge, but we try to sort of help people get around that with our guide, with our videos and our education. And we’re about to start a Facebook group where people can start sharing tips, so hopefully we’ll all manage together.
Ross Kenyon: You could contact a utility or a city government and they would do something like this? It makes it sound like you live in Mary Poppins — you’re like a constable and — this is not like this would exist in Seattle. Jada, do you know? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. Maybe I’m just overly [unclear]. I feel like — it sounds like you live in the Shire. And maybe you do. Do you live in the Shire? Is it easier that way?
Connor Lascelles: Okay, actually I do — I’m from Wiltshire. Shire’s in the name, there you go.
When you’re choosing feedstock, obviously some people are looking at biochar from purely a plant perspective, so they don’t care about the smoke, they don’t care about the carbon, they just know it works in the soil. So they have different priorities, and, you know, obviously we recommend people care about those things, but we can’t control it. Whereas there are other people like us who are prioritizing carbon, and that is the reason why we got into this. So you can go to a sustainable firewood producer and get kindling — so this is the smallest bit — but the problem with that is that you can’t just pour it in like wood chip. You have to actually sort of lay it in, kind of layer it together and stack it together.
Because what you don’t want to do is — you want a homogeneous feedstock, you don’t want big air pockets, because the air needs to flow evenly at the same rate throughout the feedstock so that the fire can progress at an even rate. Because what happens, if you have too much air or a bigger gap here and not enough air here, is that where the air is, the fire will move a lot faster, so that part of the fire will reach the end before this one has had the chance to carbonize. So yeah, that’s another reason why wood chip is golden.
Jada Dormaier: Can you use other things? Like my dad has cows — could I use like manure or something like that?
Connor Lascelles: We have not experimented with that. We have had someone look at that from like a horse perspective, but it would have to be experimented with. So you’d have to understand, like, does the manure actually produce smoke, because you need enough to get the right balance of the fire triangle — you need enough fuel and obviously you need enough air. So does the manure allow the air to flow through unrestricted? And obviously the moisture content as well. Technically you can make biochar out of anything made of carbon. The system that we designed is extremely low-tech and it’s a little bit more sensitive, but it’s worth a try, experimenting. I think if I were you, I would mix the manure with wood chips so that the wood starts to combust and it might get the whole thing going and get it hot enough. And then you have to also have [unclear], but you might have a difference in the timing.
Lottie Hawkins: [unclear] Manure makes very good biochar in like big industrial kilns. So, something you could test out and let us know how it goes.
Jada Dormaier: It might smell as well. Like, I don’t know what else might. So yeah, curious. Maybe not in the city.
Lottie Hawkins: Yeah, it’s not an unpopular choice. I mean, I would say some people would argue that you’re better composting them and the nutrients retained, and of course, when you are making biochar from that, you are getting rid of those nutrients which plants could have access to. But there is some that actually remains after you’ve carbonized. For example, seaweed — you can actually desalinate seaweed and dry it, and then the biochar that you make from that has got lots more micronutrients than just wood biochar. So I wouldn’t rule it out, but I think it would be a case-by-case basis within the field of biochar.
Ross Kenyon: How many of the implements being made like your kiln are industrial scale? I’ve seen on Amazon and other places you can buy biochar, and I’m sure they’re not being made by people in their backyard with, like, consumer-grade products like the Earthly kiln. Is this common? Is there a lot of activity like what you’re doing out there? Are there more biochar kilns that are for backyard use? Or is most of biochar focused on larger scale operations at scale?
Connor Lascelles: Yeah, it is mostly focused on large-scale operations. As far as we know, there is no kiln like ours available anywhere — not even in the States, it’s not just a UK thing. But there are retorts, so there are other things producing biochar. There’s nothing for the price point that we have, there’s nothing which is made to be consumer-friendly. You can buy what’s called an Exeter retort within the UK, which is a much larger scaled version, and that’s about — it’s over 10,000 pounds and makes about 150 kg of biochar per burn. So obviously a much larger yield, but in terms of the domestic small-scale stuff, we were probably one of the firsts.
And we have actually had a website copy us, use our photos, edit the photos and steal a blog, and try and sell our kiln. I think it’s a Chinese company from the address, and luckily we managed to shut that down because they were using Shopify, and so were we — and Shopify allow you to shut other people down if they’re breaching, if they’re stealing your IP. So we know that they were dropshipping it — you’d order it from them and they’d source it from someone else. They were never going to make it themselves, I imagine, with the manufacturing capabilities out there, so we probably will expect people copying us. Like, we’re not out there to sort of shut everyone down. There’s scope in doing this, and people want this, and they recognize that people are going to want to buy this thing.
Ross Kenyon: If you’re worth being copied, that’s kind of good, right? Could be worse.
Lottie Hawkins: Yeah. We’ve sold kilns all around the world now — sold them to people in Canada, America, Australia, New Zealand. Yeah, I know, right? I pinch myself when I say that all out loud. But I think, to answer the question about kind of industrial scale versus domestic — I think the reason that industrial kind of took off is because a lot of the operations that started making biochar at scale actually needed to do something with all of their wood waste and biomass waste, and it’s an effective way of producing electricity as well. So it kind of solves two problems on an industrial scale, and of course it reduces the overall carbon footprint. So that’s kind of why that took off, and then adoption over here is just taking a bit longer.
But you guys in the States, you’re way ahead of us — the adoption of biochar in America has kind of been well documented, and you guys have got plants like 10 times the size of what we’ve got over in Europe. So yeah, it’s actually a cool industry to watch progress. Some companies to check out — I think if you want to interview someone else in biochar, there’s a guy called Josiah Hunt, he runs Pacific Biochar. I see him on Twitter all the time. If you’re listening out there — yeah, he’s doing a lot there.
And I think there are maybe about 10 biochar companies, but we’ve got to be careful, because there are certain criteria that you need to look for if you’re buying biochar. You’ve got to think, do these guys get into it from a carbon-first perspective, or did they just stumble on the fact that they could sell this waste product called biochar? You’ve got to ask them how they’re actually making it. Is there smoke being produced? Are they testing the emissions? What is the feedstock? Are they testing toxicity in the biochar at the end? There are some people out there that maybe don’t care that much about these things, so we’ve got to educate people around asking these questions to make sure they’re not doing more harm than good when buying biochar.
Ross Kenyon: There is a group — I’m not sure if it’s in the UK, and I’ve long meant to do a show on this but haven’t, just because I haven’t been able to participate yet — but it’s called Make Soil. And it’s an organization where if you have compostable materials, you can bring it to people who elect to have them dropped off at their property to be composted. And then that compost — I think the intention is that it will be redistributed to the contributors for them to use in their garden, and sort of do this at the neighbourhood scale. Have you considered doing something similar for biochar? Is that possible? That might be a fun thing to do.
Connor Lascelles: Yeah, there’s definitely a lot of scope for things like that. Because we’re still a young company, there’s only so much we can do, and we’re focused on impact. So we initially started with this biochar kiln, but now we’re looking at setting up the UK’s biochar production infrastructure, so on a large scale, because we realized that no one was really committed to doing that in the UK and we couldn’t just sit by and just sort of hope that someone else did it. So yeah, eventually we will start fleshing out all these ideas. And I know there are others — like the Compost Club do something similar — and so these models are definitely part of the future.
Lottie Hawkins: Also, it’s one of the things that we thought about recently, and like kind of mentioned earlier, we’re going to start doing — is have like a Biochar Kiln Owners Club, kind of like a [unclear] owners club. [unclear] Everyone shares tips on how they’re making their biochar, and videos and stuff, and what they’re cooking on it, and I think that’ll be really nice. It’d be creating magic, community, around doing your own kind of carbon capture in the back garden. So yeah, I think that could be step one, and step two can be then opening up and asking people to kind of drop off wood waste, and then in return they can pick up that bag of biochar, and make it this really nice community.
Connor Lascelles: Yeah, there is a model in Stockholm in Sweden where they have an industrial-sized kiln and people, local citizens, will just drop off their garden waste. They’ll use that to make biochar, they’ll then put the heat into a district heating system to heat nearby businesses and apartments, and then by giving your wood waste or your garden waste, you can actually receive biochar in return as a thank you. They won a grant by Bloomberg, and now 15 other cities have started to replicate this. It is starting to become part of the gardener’s toolkit and you will hear about it more and more over the next few years.
Ross Kenyon: So how is the company doing? You’ve said that you’ve sold all over the world — who’s buying? How are you guys doing today?
Lottie Hawkins: Well, I think it’s really fun, but in terms of like a business perspective, the last year has been amazing for us. We’ve won some government funding from over here to develop biochar products. And our first amount of money that we won was to actually finish off the biochar kiln and make a few design amendments. And we’re now developing a smaller biochar kiln, opening up the market a little more, making it more accessible for people who want to spend a little bit less money. So keep your eyes peeled for that. And we’ve also hired people — we’ve gone from two of us to five of us, so that’s scary but fun at the same time.
Ross Kenyon: Full-time people?
Lottie Hawkins: Connor’s full-time, I’m almost full-time, and then we’ve got three part-time members of staff, and then we have some freelance engineers that work with us as well. And we’re going to be moving into our first ever Earthly HQ next month. It’s on a vineyard, I’m stoked. And yeah, we’re just about halfway through our largest research project to date, and that is a biochar product that’s going into the construction industry. Super top secret — once we can tell more about it, we will. But yeah, the prospects are great. I mean, we’re selling more every month, and it’s the customer feedback that I guess is the most motivating thing. So yeah, it’s going really well. Thank you for asking.
Ross Kenyon: So the people that are buying the kilns are people who have been interested in biochar and didn’t really want to have to make their own kiln? And, you know, I imagine the problem to be — are people giving that back to you and confirming that?
Lottie Hawkins: So we’ve had people who have allotments, people who have just their own vegetable growing in their garden. We’ve had community gardens, we’ve had a flower farm. We do have quite a lot of people asking for larger kilns. We’re not developing larger kilns just because it’s a lot more complicated process, more to go wrong, and we would rather signpost to the Exeter retort, because they do that really well in the UK. And I think there are some other companies in the US who might cater for slightly larger biochar demand.
We have a mission as a company: to realize the potential of biochar in the UK. We’re doing this from a carbon-first perspective, and we’d like to demonstrate an example of multi-stakeholder capitalism, where we’re putting people, planet and profit and considering those in every business decision. So at the end of the year we’re going to have scores: how well did we do on people, how well did we do on planet and profit? And obviously we can’t have people and planet impact without profit. So just trying to demonstrate a new way of thinking with business, and trying to scale this underutilized climate solution at the same time.
Ross Kenyon: If someone listening wanted to buy a kiln and start making biochar on their own, how much is it right now? And are you shipping worldwide? Sounds like you probably are. How can they get involved?
Lottie Hawkins: You can head to our website, put it in your basket and check out. 600 pounds — I’m not sure what that is in dollars, but we do have pricing for you guys on the site appearing in dollars. When you go to our website, I think it’s basically the same now.
Ross Kenyon: I thought that, like, one pound was recently worth one dollar and one cent, and the tweet that went along with it was, it’s called soccer now. [unclear]
Lottie Hawkins: And then, yeah, we ship worldwide. So if the shipping doesn’t pop up, it should be [unclear]. We do ship worldwide, but just get in touch. We have like a little chat box on our website, you’ll get straight through to me and I’ll answer any of your questions.
Connor Lascelles: Yeah, we do sell internationally. Obviously you have to pay more for shipping than you would do if you live in the UK, and we do have plans to set up manufacturing in the US and Australia. But for the time being, if you did want to get hold of a biochar kiln, we do ship all over the world. And people find us somehow — we don’t really have a marketing budget, but we’ve got good search results on Google and Instagram, and people are somehow finding us and buying our kilns, which is great.
Ross Kenyon: One of the reasons I love this — even though I’ve been a failure to date at it, but I love the idea of it and we’ll keep trying — is a lot of carbon negative activity and carbon removal is at a scale beyond the means of the average person. It’s often done far away from where we live. The way that you can participate in it is basically being a no-till regenerative gardener in your yard. There’s not even that many more ways to do it — maybe planting some trees. But beyond that, it’s just something that someone else does that you pay for, or you work at a company that does it.
So I love the idea of having another way of interacting with carbon in a helpful way. I find it to be inspiring and fun, and also it brings a nice human scale to things. So much of the show has been about crafting and what you can do on your own, mostly because I find it’s an engaging way to do it. In fact, in producing this show, I could have done a biochar show without doing a kiln — would it have been as fun and hopefully as engaging as this? Probably not.
Connor Lascelles: One of the visions that I have for the future is, rather than you going down to the store and just buying some compost, every gardener might one day buy a biochar kiln, or buy some biochar. And then if we get that happening, it’s actually so scalable. There’s 18 million eco-conscious gardeners in the UK — if they’re all using biochar, that’s a huge amount of carbon capture, and it just doesn’t cost them a lot of money or time to get involved. And I think people forget the power of community. If you can empower everyone to use biochar in their back gardens, you can make a real difference, and it doesn’t just have to be about industry or big companies doing it.
So that’s kind of our driving motivation. And going back to the whole — we all love fire, some people are pyros — the fact that we can all get together around and look at this dancing flame, and cook some food off of it, boil a kettle, you know, make some tea, coffee, and warm your hands. It’s quite a community activity. And funnily enough, there was a design research agency that put out this piece where they envisaged people in the future doing their own biochar production, and they called themselves the [unclear], and they drew out this image of people having their eco homes and they have their biochar kiln in their home, which was providing their hot water and electricity. And they were going and coppicing and sustainably harvesting feedstock to then do their own carbon capture. And they envisioned this maybe 5 to 10 years ago, and this is really spooky when I found it, because I was like, wow, this is actually what we’re doing. So yeah — bury carbon in your back garden. It’s not trademarked.
Ross Kenyon: I think Jada is just here for the fire, it sounds like.
Jada Dormaier: I mean, I very much care about reversing climate change, but I am — you said so. But I also really like that. It does feel like you’re saying you can cook around the fire and it has a really [unclear] piece to it. And I really liked that too.
Lottie Hawkins: Especially in the UK, where we — pretty much almost globally — with the fuel crisis and the cost of living crisis, you know, this could be a way of — if you cook one meal a week on your kiln and your wood chip is free, as long as you’re utilizing that energy, that could help with that. So I think that could also be like an angle and more of a motivation for people nowadays. And I’m going to try and do more of my cooking outside, and I think cooking outside is a nicer experience, as long as you have cover and it’s not howling wind and rain.
Ross Kenyon: There’s an entire show. I’ve thought about making either a [unclear] joke or a chippy joke, and I’ve let both — like, I know so much about being English, aren’t I? Well-travelled. And I’m going to let that lie for now. Is there anything else we should talk about that you didn’t get a chance to — that you’d like to bring up? Or how do we drive people to your website?
Lottie Hawkins: I would love to hear from someone who is keen to help us expand into the US. If you’re listening and you like what we do — yeah, please get in touch. We’re always looking to partner and make connections over there, but it’s quite hard when you’re all the way on the other side of the Atlantic. So yeah, please do get in touch if you’re keen to learn more about us and consider working with us.
Connor Lascelles: Yeah, just a little bit more about the story of how we came to be. So this was my final year project, and one of my teachers was like, oh, you should probably make some biochar and do a grow test with it, you know, put some radish plants on your windowsill and just see if it does what you said it will do. That’s okay, fair enough. So I rang up some local plant nurseries and I was trying to get hold of some free compost, being a student. And on the fourth or fifth rejection, the guy on the phone, he was like, oh, what do you need it for? I said, I have biochar. And he was like, no, no, that’s interesting, want to come around and tell me more about it?
So I went and met him, and turns out he grew all the plants for the three local councils. He does a hundred thousand plants a year. And when I showed him everything he said, okay, I’ll run your grow test for you, but we’ll do 400 plants and we’ll do it across three different ornamental bedding species. So, in shock, I cycled home and made as much as I could. And what I did is I inoculated it. So this is a key part of why it’s called biochar — it’s the biology. So if you put biochar in your soil, it’s like a battery: it will start to charge itself by stealing nutrients and water from your plant. So sometimes if you use raw biochar, uncharged biochar, without charging it, you end up having a negative impact on plant growth. So we made a compost tea at the time and just soaked the biochar in that. What we do now is sort of more of a concentrated version of that, so you don’t have to make your own compost tea.
So yeah, I charged it up, took it to the plant nursery. We put loads of compost on the table, we mixed in 10% by volume, and I planted up 400 plants and left, and came back three weeks later expecting to have killed all these plants, introduced diseases and you name it. And he didn’t say anything. He said, come with me. And I just walked — like, I think he was about to tell me off. And it was clear why he didn’t say anything, because you could visibly see very clearly that the biochar groups were a lot bigger above ground. And then we took apart the roots — and you can see here in this image I’m holding up on the Zoom, that you also have on our website — the one on the right has got much larger, thicker, hairier roots, and that’s the biochar one.
At the time I didn’t know what that meant, but I knew it meant something good. And he was like, oh, I think you’ve sped up my plants by about a week. Can you get me a yearly supply of this stuff? And that was when we realized that — we said, oh, we couldn’t make it with our kiln, it’s too small, but we will try and buy it for you. But we realized that no one in the UK was actually set up to produce biochar prioritizing carbon and quality and price. So that’s how we pivoted away from the kiln — or in addition to the kiln — to now setting up the biochar production infrastructure in the UK. So that was another exciting part of our journey, which really, really helped, because we have photos, we had — you know, if we were to do that, that would have cost a lot of money, and we rely on people like that along our journey to help us.
Ross Kenyon: That’s really fascinating. I could see it being a good customer education tool, could bring you more customers too. But I could also see it making your efforts more diffuse — running a business doing one revenue stream successfully can often be pretty challenging. But it sounds like it’s overall working right now.
Lottie Hawkins: Seems to be. Yeah, it’s going really well. We’ve sold biochar — we sell biochar in [unclear] bags, and that comes with [unclear] part of that you need to charge up at home, and they also sell [unclear]. And yeah, watch this space, there’s going to be more cooking accessories coming out so you can do all fancy things. And then next year we should have a new range of kilns as well, so they’re going to be less beautiful. I love the one at the moment, it’s very beautiful, but we want one that’s a bit more kind of industrial, like [unclear] — building a range, the kind of cases for that audience, and they can’t spend as much money. So yeah, that’s coming on market soon.
Ross Kenyon: We didn’t even talk about — the way that, I believe it’s steel, right? — the way that it changes colours as you use fire on it. It’s quite lovely.
Connor Lascelles: Did you get the stainless steel one or the rusty corten one?
Ross Kenyon: I don’t think it’s stainless. I think it’s the other one, where there’s like rainbow colours that come off of it.
Connor Lascelles: Yeah, when you heat it, the rainbow — that colour will stabilize over time. So the first burn you get this sort of chroming effect, and you’re actually heat-treating the metal — that’s what chroming is. But then over time it sort of dulls to a bit more of a dark grey. And we chose stainless steel because it would hopefully last a long time. We also have another variation which is like weathering steel, or corten steel, which is a material that rusts — it doesn’t rust and disintegrate, it rusts and kind of uses that rust as a way to protect itself from further rusting. And if you go to the garden centres in the UK — I don’t know about in the US, but we have a lot of sculptures and ornaments that are made from this rusty aesthetic.
Ross Kenyon: So see how it was before. Yeah, I know what that was.
Connor Lascelles: Yeah, so that’s one variation. So if you did want that rusty aesthetic, that’s an option. But we actually find that many more people are buying stainless. But some people like that aesthetic.
Ross Kenyon: I see. Aesthetics over [unclear]. You’re going to keep it like that for the time being. Well, links are in the show notes if you would like to buy any of their products and support what they’re doing. It’s super fun. I’m inspired after doing this show to go back and give it another go, although I think it’s going to be wet for like six months from here on out. There’s the first day of fall, Jada — are we going to be damp for several months at this point?
Jada Dormaier: I think so. But yeah, we’ll have to try again in June or something. Yeah, that is not how it goes if you try making any money. [unclear] I’m very intrigued, I will — and this inspires me to get my own kiln at some point.
Connor Lascelles: Just to add — you don’t have to just use biochar in the soil. Carbon is a very versatile material. We include these leaflets in all of our products for that; it gives you some alternative uses for biochar. So if you have a compost caddy in your kitchen, so you’re putting your food scraps in it, every time you empty that it’s quite an unpleasant experience because it’s very stinky, it’s very wet. So what we do is that every time we add a layer of food waste, we sprinkle a bit of biochar on it, and then over time we’re layering up food waste and biochar. Then you open the lid and you can take a deep breath in, and all the methane has been absorbed by the biochar, so much more pleasant.
It’s releasing less greenhouse gas by using biochar, and then all of those nutrients and all those juices are actually being absorbed into the biochar, and then that goes towards charging it. So that’s one way to make the composting process — especially if you’re in a flat — a little bit more appealing. You can also use it in your cat litter, so there are some biochar cat litter products out there. In the same way of it’s using carbon filters for water and air, it can help absorb smells and toxins. You can put it in your fridge, so you can put it in your vegetable drawer and it’s absorbing some of that ethylene gas, which is slowing down the ripening of your food.
There are many, many different uses, and I’d encourage people, if they’re curious, to research about how the Japanese traditional culture used charcoal. They used it to regulate humidity under their floorboards, they used it to passively filter the air in the corner of their rooms by placing architectural carbonized branches, they used it to stir in their water to remove chlorine. There are many different other uses which are quite fascinating, and also go a long way of increasing the demand for carbon removal and storage.
Ross Kenyon: We almost made it through the entire show without you going full biochar person and having to tell me about all of these uses. We almost made it out.
Connor Lascelles: Yeah, well, when you scratch the surface — hey, Ross, you did make it out, there’s a list of 55 of them. So it’s all right.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. Well, links to all of those things are in the show notes. Thanks everyone for being here. That was a lot of fun, and I’m glad you were able to come on the show at long last. And if you like the show, please give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps us a lot to get this out to more people. Send this to a friend who might be interested, and thank you so much for listening.
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