Green entrepreneurs make products out of thin air

KUSA - You may have heard the fairy tale of the woman turning straw into gold. It may not be gold, but a Boulder company claims to be doing something quite similar.

9NEWS has been following the Clean Tech Open since March of this year. The competition takes the best ideas from hundreds of contestants and helps them develop the ideas into products people can use by offering business training and finding funding for the projects.

"It really drives innovativeness. It helps commercialize and accelerate these phenomenal ideas in green technology and clean technology," Co-Chairman of the Rocky Mountain Competition Dick Franklin said.

"The theme in all of this is not just commercial viability but also climate-benign, environmentally friendly and sustainable business models. That is what wins this competition," Franklin said.

New Sky Energy, co-founded by Mike Ashford and Deane Little, is based out of Boulder and recently won the Rocky Mountain regional title in the Clean Tech Open. The two have developed a way to take carbon dioxide out of the air and turn it into a natural resource. Little said it can then be turned into a number of commercial products.

"Our company captures carbon dioxide using a simple chemical pathway that is completely safe and sustainable and allows us to make carbon negative materials," Little said.

The carbon negative material is then combined with other products to be made into building materials. The pair brought in a carbon negative brick that contains 2 pounds of carbon dioxide, but bricks are not the only product.

"If you look around any American living room, it's full of objects that are made of carbon; the carpets are made of carbon polymer, the furniture's made of wood, even glass is made of carbonate base materials. Virtually anything in our built environment is either made of carbon or could be made of carbon," Little explained.

"I knew it was possible to capture CO2 out of the air and turn it into baking soda like this. But the conventional chemical pathways that would be available to you to do that all produce a lot of toxic material or waste water. I gave it some thought and came up with a process which is completely safe and sustainable; we picked a different chemical pathway, it's waste in, products out."

New Sky Energy also recently partnered with the School of Mines in Golden.

"We're working with a couple of electrochemistry professors, they're expert engineers in this particular field," Little explained.

Since the competition started, Clean Tech Open alumni have raised more than $130 million in private capital, 80 percent of the winners have stayed economically viable and 500 new jobs have been created.

To learn more about New Sky Energy, you can check out their website at www.newskyenergy.com.