Mission Zero wears its aim in its name – the company is on a mission, working towards zero emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But it’s the method that is revolutionary: Mission Zero focuses on pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere, and turning into some of the stuff we all need and love!
As part of our summer break, the impact.info team invites you to (re)discover one of our episodes.
You can also find our article on the topic right here .
Enjoy listening!
Vanessa C. Stone
impact.info journalist
Published on 11 August 2026
Photo credit — Mission Zero
Transcript Audio in English· AI-generated transcript
0:00 Carbon is amazing, it's really, really good. 0:03 The problem is where we get it from. 0:06 Impact.info, doing things differently. 0:09 Hello and welcome to Impact.info, where we meet the professionals working towards a sustainable 0:15 future. 0:16 Our guest today has huge environmental ambitions and is already well on the way to delivering 0:21 them. 0:22 Hi, my name is Nick Chadwick. 0:24 I'm the CEO and co-founder of Mission Zero Technologies. 0:28 Hello, Nick. 0:29 Thanks for being here. 0:30 Thanks for having me. 0:31 Now, perhaps first of all, you can explain the name. 0:34 So Mission Zero, what's the mission? 0:37 What's the zero? 0:38 Yeah, as you rightly referenced, we have big ambitions at Mission Zero. 0:42 Our mission is to fundamentally readdress our relationship with carbon and that is getting 0:47 to a place where there are net zero emissions. 0:50 We are on a mission and we're dogmatically going to be trying to solve one of the largest 0:53 problems that humanity faces at this moment in time. 0:56 Excellent. 0:57 Now, I know you talk quite poetically about rewriting our carbon tragedy into a love story. 1:05 And so presumably the carbon tragedy there is the current rate of emissions. 1:09 Yeah, exactly. 1:10 At the core of why we started Mission Zero was this idea, actually, that if you look 1:14 at the world around you and you see the benefits or the increases that we experience decade 1:19 by decade in the human condition, a lot of that is enabled by carbon. 1:23 It's the clothes you wear. 1:24 It's the houses you live in. 1:26 It's the flights you take on holiday. 1:28 It's the pharmaceuticals that make you well. 1:31 All of these are carbon-based products. 1:33 Carbon is amazing. 1:34 It's really, really good. 1:35 The problem is where we get it from, and that is fundamentally unsustainable. 1:39 Getting it from fossil fuels, we need to find ways to source new scalable sources of carbon 1:44 into our economies, into our supply chains, into industry, and therefore change the dynamic 1:49 of the fact that by making the world better around us, we're also creating huge environmental 1:54 harm. 1:55 Yeah, of course. 1:56 So this good carbon that you're talking about is not carbon dioxide. 1:59 Well, it is carbon dioxide. 2:00 It's in the air that you breathe right now. 2:02 It's a gas. 2:03 It's what we consider to be an emission. 2:05 And the goal of Mission Zero is to create a technology and scale a technology called 2:09 direct air capture. 2:10 And this is the process of capturing CO2 directly from the air that you're breathing right now, 2:15 separate it, concentrate it, and provide that as a high quality source for a range 2:19 of different use cases. 2:20 And that could be building materials, it could be fuels, you could store it geologically, 2:24 you could make fizzy drinks from it, a whole range of things you can do with CO2. 2:28 We've actually known how to turn CO2 into all the major products that the world needs 2:31 for a really long time. 2:33 It's actually the supply chain of CO2, which is the issue, which feels a bit silly given 2:36 there's so much of it in the atmosphere all around us slowly baking us to death, right? 2:40 So if you can change that, you can de-fossilize, decarbonize all those supply chains and those 2:45 products and fundamentally invert our relationship with carbon to one that is positive. 2:49 Not neutral, actually positive. 2:51 Well, we would call it net negative, actually. 2:53 So I guess positive is that it's a good thing. 2:55 But the way that we phrase it is if something is emitting carbon into the atmosphere, it's 2:58 a carbon positive process, right? 3:00 So it's adding CO2 to the atmosphere. 3:03 Net neutral or net zero is something where on balance across everything, there's zero 3:07 carbon emitted. 3:08 So a lot of the products we make are carbon negative. 3:10 So they're actually in the process of making them remove CO2 from the atmosphere. 3:14 So that's the value of this. 3:16 You can make building materials, which are perfectly good to make roads and pavements, 3:20 but also happen just to be made from CO2 from the atmosphere. 3:22 And therefore, they are locking CO2 away for a really long time. 3:25 And they're negative. 3:26 How does that work? 3:27 As you say, carbon dioxide is a gas. 3:30 So how does that turn into building materials? 3:32 It takes a bit of a journey. 3:33 And part of that is our technology, our bit, basically two steps. 3:37 So the first step is we capture the CO2 in the air using a liquid. 3:41 So the CO2 is stored in a liquid the same way it's stored in a fizzy drink. 3:44 You know, when you open a can of a fizzy drink, you have the CO2 bubbling out. 3:48 We store CO2 in a liquid the same way that's stored in that can. 3:52 And then once we capture the carbon, we then pass it through an electrochemical technology 3:55 called electro dialysis. 3:57 I guarantee you that you've consumed a product made from electro dialysis within the last 4:01 two weeks, whether it's something that's dairy, whether it's wine, whether it's soy sauce. 4:06 It's a technology that's in the background of our everyday lives. 4:08 And all we do is we just change what liquids go into it. 4:11 And that allows us to basically defizz the CO2 back out. 4:15 And that's where that CO2 comes from, that gas. 4:17 And then in terms of how it gets to being a building material, once we've created that 4:20 concentrated high quality CO2, we can then feed that to people that buy CO2 already to 4:25 make products. 4:27 And one use case is, say, recycling waste materials and mineralizing it and reacting 4:32 it with CO2 to create rock, basically. 4:35 I regularly go around showing people my pot of carbon-negative rocks. 4:39 Yeah. 4:40 So it sounds fabulous, but is it scalable enough considering how urgent things are? 4:47 I know if I can just quote Johan Rockström of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact 4:52 Research. 4:53 I know he said that 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide must be captured every year just to 4:59 limit global heating to 1.7 degrees Celsius. 5:02 10 billion tons, is that not an enormous amount? 5:06 It's a large amount of carbon, right? 5:08 And for context, in 2050, the world's total emissions of CO2 will be 51 billion tons or 5:14 gigatons of CO2. 5:15 And a direct air capture is one method for taking CO2 from the atmosphere and storing 5:19 it. 5:20 So it's probably not going to be responsible for that total 10, but it's definitely playing 5:23 a major several billion ton role in the world in 2050 if we are going to have a planet that 5:29 we can kind of comfortably live on without extreme weather events or droughts or crop 5:34 failures, et cetera, et cetera. 5:35 It is a big goal, right? 5:37 And the context here is like, our largest systems range between 50 to 250 tons per year 5:41 versus a billion tons. 5:44 It's a large gap to make. 5:45 The largest system that's likely to come online over the next couple of years is 250 to 500,000 5:50 tons. 5:51 So we are increasing scale, but there's definitely a lot to be done to get towards that. 5:55 I think the really encouraging thing is when you actually look at the supply chains and 5:59 the technologies we produce every day already and use quite regularly, like a lot of these 6:03 can basically be repurposed to enable direct air capture. 6:06 I'll give you an example. 6:07 So we capture the CO2 from the air using a liquid, right? 6:11 We use a mechanical system to do that, and it's a cooling tower. 6:13 So you would have seen a cooling tower somewhere right on top of a building at our power plant. 6:18 The reality is the stable power generation wouldn't be possible without these huge scaled 6:22 mechanical infrastructure technologies, and we've been building them for roughly 100 years. 6:27 So actually we can leverage that supply chain, leverage that experience, leverage that knowledge 6:31 to scale up, getting towards that billion tons without us going, we need to invent something 6:35 completely new. 6:36 A lot of the supply chains we use at Mission Zero have already been around for a really 6:40 long time, and we're actually just bolting things together in new ways to realize that. 6:44 So it's a lofty goal, and our goal at Mission Zero is to find a way to do it. 6:47 Presumably you're not alone in the field? 6:50 No, direct air capture, so DAC or DAC. 6:54 There's a lot of people working on this right now. 6:56 So the way I'd characterize DAC as a field at the moment is not worn off, like we've 7:01 decided exactly how we're going to do it, and the cost is the cheapest it can be. 7:06 If you look at other engineered technologies that might be judged as analogous, solar cells 7:12 or batteries, these have had multiple decades of development time, they've come down their 7:17 cost and experience curve, and we've decided it's lithium ion batteries as one chemistry, 7:23 polycrystalline silicon as for solar cells, and we're not really arguing over what is 7:27 the best way of doing it, we're just scaling it and it's cheap. 7:30 And so direct air capture is actually the beginning of that journey that, say, solar 7:34 was in 30 to 50 years ago, where we were actually trying to define what we thought was the best 7:39 approach for doing it, and then as those kind of scaling up bigger, we find out which ones 7:43 work best and which ones don't, and we'll get to a point where it becomes really scaled 7:47 and becomes really cheap and really ubiquitous, and I think you only have to look at large 7:50 solar installations in places like China, India, the US, etc., to see the scale that 7:54 these technologies can be deployed at, to get an inclination actually for the possibility 7:58 for direct air capture. 7:59 There's a lot of people working on it, I'd say at the moment there's roughly about 200 8:03 direct air capture companies at different levels of maturity, so we are one amongst 8:07 many. 8:08 And you do have commercial projects up and running already, don't you? 8:11 Yeah, so I'd say we are one of the few in the world who actually have solar systems, 8:16 who have operated them, delivered them with customers. 8:19 So we have three systems, we have a project with the University of Sheffield in the UK, 8:23 enabling synthetic aviation fuel research, so this is making jet fuel effectively from 8:28 the carbon in the atmosphere around us, a couple of other chemicals, and then you can 8:31 basically make a carbon neutral fuel, it's circular. 8:35 We have a project funded by the UK government, which is operational now as well, which is 8:39 producing carbon-active building materials, and these are aggregates which have been used 8:43 for many years to make roads, pavements, concrete blocks, a whole range of things, so we're 8:48 using a built environment to lock carbon away. 8:51 And then the last project that we recently delivered to a customer called Deep Sky in 8:54 Canada, they're a project developer for carbon dioxide removals, so these are carbon credits 8:59 or carbon removal credits, which state that per credit a tonne of CO2 has been removed 9:04 from the atmosphere, and that allows corporates or buyers to offset their own emissions from 9:09 their day-to-day operations, and we were able to achieve the first CO2 geologically sequestered 9:13 from direct air capture in North America. 9:16 Yeah, excellent. 9:18 Impact.info, doing things differently. 9:23 Look, I have one last question. 9:25 What would 16-year-old Nick Chadwick think of what you're doing now? 9:31 I think he'd probably be like, wow, didn't expect that. 9:34 You know, so much of starting a company, you just don't know what it's going to be like. 9:38 There's a lot of challenges, there's a lot of really edifying, amazing things, there's 9:42 a lot of ups and there's a lot of downs. 9:43 I think if you knew what it took maybe to succeed, you might get a little bit put off, 9:47 but I can't imagine doing anything other than this right now. 9:50 I get to work a job and work with people where I get to live my values every day. 9:55 I have two little kids, two little girls, and I know that I'm working towards a better 9:58 world for them, so, yeah. 10:01 That was Impact.info, doing things differently. 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