The Alchemy of Ash

What does normalisation look like? Picture this:

India’s capital, Delhi, gets just 259 hours of a combination of clean air and comfortable temperatures in a year. That’s about 11 days in an entire year. And we’ve learnt to live with this reality.

In fact, India’s climate paradox is a strangely disarming one. We’re unintentionally injecting aerosols (pollution from coal emissions, fossil fuel burning, crop burning, etc.) into the atmosphere to block sunlight and cool the land. Even our current relatively cool temperatures are an illusion. (We’ve written about this paradox).

There are solvable problems, and then there are ones that need stronger solutions. Every harvest season, we burn agricultural waste. Stalks, husks, stubble — around 750 million tonnes of agri waste every year, making it one of the largest agricultural waste streams on the planet.

Farmers have a short window to clear their fields before the next planting. One in two Indians earns a living from the soil. So, burning the fields and planting again is a matter of survival.

But this open burning can be prevented. In fact, this presents a ripe opportunity for an agrarian-first India to harness its waste and turn it into carbon sinks.

That’s the promise of biochar. The Alchemy of Ash.

We built a simple, visually stunning microsite to make climate science accessible and informative. It’s an ELI5 (Explain Like I’m 5) on the problem, the science, and the work behind it.

If you like what you see, please give us a shout-out on socials. We need more climate believers, and this work helps us all do better.

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— Adithya, Alt Carbon