In 1919, an entrepreneur named Nils Halvorsen Norheim arrange an automatic manufacturing unit for making flatbreads close to Barkåker in Norway, the primary of its type within the nation. A century on, his great-great-granddaughter discovered herself peering into an oven in a tiny kitchen in Trondheim, performing some baking of her personal—however as a substitute of constructing meals, Celine Sandberg is manufacturing foam.

Sandberg is the founder and CEO of Agoprene, a Scandinavian startup creating sustainable furnishings foam. According to the corporate, polyurethane foam rubber, which is derived from petrochemicals and extensively utilized in sofas, chairs, and different mushy furnishings, accounts for a whopping 105 million metric tons of CO₂ emissions yearly. “In the furniture industry, everyone knows that foam is bad for the environment and no one wants to use it, but there are no other alternatives,” Sandberg says. “I want to supply [a more sustainable] alternative to what we have today, with no petrochemicals.”

With a background in enterprise improvement and finance, and with none engineering know-how, Sandberg by no means thought she would enter the complicated area of fabric know-how. But her grasp’s research on the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s School of Entrepreneurship opened doorways for her, fairly actually. “I had to set up my own company as part of my degree and I needed some input, so I started knocking on professors’ doors and asking them what they were working on,” she remembers. “I learned that petroleum is a product of degraded biomass over time, so you can, in theory, use biomass to replace petroleum.”

Inspired, she spent the following few months researching the potential of biomass and the broader world of biotechnology. “Then the Covid-19 lockdown happened, and I was forced to source biomass from Norway as I couldn’t reach suppliers elsewhere in Europe,” she says. In the nation with the second longest shoreline on the planet, she discovered an plentiful supply to take advantage of: seaweed.

Alongside Agoprene’s analysis chemist, Asanga De Alwis, Sandberg started working experiments in a tiny kitchen in Trondheim, combining various kinds of seaweed-based supplies in a particular order, pouring the following combination into molds, after which heating it to 50 levels Celcius—a course of she likens to baking a cake. Unlike typical baking, nonetheless, the froth spends round 10 hours within the oven, relying on the thickness of the fabric. “A lot of our ideas failed. We must have made around 800 foam samples,” she says.

There was additionally lots extra bootstrapping concerned. Armed with a reasonably modest price range of 1 million Norwegian kroner (round £73,000, or $90,000) from the Research Council of Norway, Sandberg began sourcing second-hand gear and ringing up suppliers to ask totally free biomass samples. “I had to go without a salary for eight months, move back into my parents’ house, and even ask them to pay my phone bill every month as I didn’t have any money,” she says. “However, I was so certain that one day, the ship would turn and everything would work out.”