The start-up Living Carbon has come up with a project that is arousing great interest and curiosity: transgenic poplars. The latter have an increased growth rate of 53% which, thanks to the natural increase in biomass, allows GMO poplars to capture up to 27% more carbon dioxide in less time than traditional poplars.

The Living Carbon project plans to plant the first 60,000 transgenic poplar seeds in a few plots of land in Georgia and Pennsylvania.

The GMO poplars are in their first test run, but their genetic structure enriched with genes from algae and squash, leads Maddie Hall, managing director and founder of Living Carbon, to be confident that through efficient planting, repeated year after year, the new ‘CO2 safes’ could capture 1.66% of global greenhouse gas emissions (about 600 mln t) over their lifetime by 2030.

The initiative immediately gained consensus and interest, from institutions and above all from small, medium and large companies, in a wide variety of sectors, interested in offsetting and reducing the CO2 generated by their own production. Among the companies most interested, also in terms of financing the initiative, is the adhesion and support of a big company like Toyota.

Sources: gse.it