When we tell a landowner that the branches they normally burn could earn them money, the second question is always the same. Not how much — that comes later. It is: what is this going to make me do?
It is a fair question, because the honest answer involves the words "carbon registry", and nothing good has ever followed those words for a person who owns a tractor. So here is the whole of it, in plain terms: what the standards genuinely require, what we ask of you, and — the part most people do not expect — how little of it lands on your side of the fence.
Why anyone cares where a branch came from
A carbon credit is a claim that a tonne of CO₂ was taken out of the air and will stay out. Before anyone certifies that claim, they want to know the biomass behind it was genuinely a residue — not a tree felled for the purpose, not material cleared from a protected hillside, and not something a second person has already sold as carbon somewhere else.
You cannot prove any of that from the biochar. Once the material is in the reactor it all looks the same. The proof has to be captured at the moment the residue leaves your land, or it does not exist at all. That is the entire reason feedstock traceability exists, and it is why every standard we build to — the European Biochar Certificate, Puro.earth, Isometric, and the EU's own CRCF regulation — asks the same handful of questions about origin.
The EU framework goes further than most people realise. For a plant like ours, where biochar is the main output, the CRCF methodology requires that the feedstock be waste or residue. Not preferred: required. Which is a strange kind of good news for a landowner, because the material nobody wanted is precisely the material the regulation is written around.
What we ask you for
Five things. Two of them you already have, two take a signature, and one is a conversation.
Fig. 1 — What each side actually does
| What the standards need | What you do | What we do |
|---|---|---|
| Where the material came from | Nothing | GPS on the collection vehicle logs the pickup point |
| How much arrived | Nothing | Weighbridge ticket — and it is your payment basis |
| What it is, and how wet | Describe it once | Measure and classify it at intake |
| That it is clean and untreated | Sign one line | Check it, and reject loads that are not |
| That the woodland is sustainably managed | FSC/PEFC certificate or your management plan | Everything else |
That is the list. There is no monthly return to file, no logbook to keep, no auditor arriving at your gate. The reason is deliberate: the compliance burden in these standards falls on the producer, not the supplier. It is our certificate at risk, so it is our paperwork.
The one thing we are strict about
Clean means clean. No painted, varnished, glued or preservative-treated wood — no demolition timber, no railway sleepers, no chipboard or MDF. Nothing with plastic, rubber, metal or general rubbish mixed into the pile.
This is not fussiness. Pyrolysis removes most of the mass of the material but almost none of its metals, so whatever contamination goes in comes out roughly twice as concentrated in the biochar. One load of treated wood can take an entire batch outside the contaminant limits and turn a certified carbon removal into a pile of char nobody can use. We would rather refuse a load at the roadside than discover the problem in a laboratory result three weeks later.
There is one case worth flagging honestly, because it catches people out: vineyard wood. A century of copper-based fungicide leaves copper in the vines, pyrolysis concentrates it, and the resulting biochar may exceed the limits for soil use. We test vine prunings before we make any claim about them. That is not us being difficult — it is us not selling you a soil amendment that should not go on soil.
What you are really signing
A collection agreement, and it is short. It says what material you have, where it is, what we will pay per tonne delivered, and how the collection will be scheduled around your work rather than ours. It says the material is yours to sell and that it is clean. And it says — plainly, because people should not discover this later — that the carbon removal happens in our facility, so the credit is ours to certify and sell. What you get is the payment, the fire-risk work done and documented, and biochar back for your own soils if you want it.
If you would rather keep the carbon in your own name, that is a different arrangement, and it exists: we can engineer a pyrolysis unit for your own operation, and then the removal stays with you. We would rather tell you that up front than have you find out you signed the wrong deal.
Common questions
Do I need FSC or PEFC certification to supply you?
For forest wood, we need either a certificate or your forest management plan — one or the other, not both. For agricultural prunings from your own land, neither: what matters is that the material is untreated and that we know which parcel it came from. If you are unsure what you have, tell us and we will look at it with you rather than send you away to find paperwork you may not need.
Why do you need to know exactly where the residue came from?
Because the carbon registries require it. A removal is only certifiable if the biomass behind it can be traced to a place — it proves the material is a genuine residue, that it did not come from clearing a forest, and that nobody else has already claimed it. In practice this costs you nothing: the GPS on our collection vehicles records the pickup point automatically.
What happens if a load turns out to be contaminated?
We reject it, and we would rather do that at the roadside than at the laboratory. Contaminants concentrate during pyrolysis — heavy metals in particular become roughly twice as concentrated in the biochar as in the feedstock — so one bad load can put an entire batch outside the standard. It is not a penalty; it is the reason the clean-material declaration exists.
