While launching a sustainable furniture startup during the pandemic, serial entrepreneur Josh Dorfman watched as the price of wood skyrocketed. It got harder to find high-quality lumber, and he started wondering what alternative materials might be possible to use.

At the same time, he connected with two former SpaceX engineers who were interested in wood alternatives for another reason: They saw an opportunity to rework construction materials to speed up carbon capture at a large scale. Trees suck up CO2 as they grow, but fast-growing grasses, they realized, can capture even more—and can be made into structural panels that are used to build homes.

“We can skip the tree altogether,” says Huade Tan, who previously helped develop spacecraft at SpaceX. Dorfman, Tan, and fellow SpaceX engineer Nathan Silvernail cofounded Plantd, a North Carolina-based building materials startup, to bring the new products to market.

The company, which just raised $10 million in a Series A funding round, uses a tall form of perennial grass that can grow 20 to 30 feet in a single year, absorbing as much as 30 tons of carbon. “Our vision is to take carbon out of the atmosphere as fast as possible and lock it away,” Dorfman says.

While a pine tree grown in a managed plantation might be harvested after 15 years, the grass can be harvested as many as three times in a season, and keeps growing back. Because it can be grown more easily, it can also help avoid supply chain shortages.

Keep reading on fastcompany.com

• 
•