Nature Coatings Inc.

Nature Coatings makes black pigment out of industrial wood waste. Carbon black, the pigment in nearly every black textile, ink, paint, and plastic, is made by burning fossil fuel, and it carries polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are carcinogens, into the products it colors. Producing a ton of it releases roughly two and a third tons of CO2. Meanwhile the US generates about 50 million tons of wood waste a year, most of it burned or left to decay.

BioBlack takes the second problem and makes it the answer to the first: a drop-in pigment, free of PAHs, that runs carbon-negative on a lifecycle basis, because the carbon in the wood stays locked in the pigment instead of going up a stack. Nature Coatings changes what goes into a color the world was always going to use anyway.