It’s not a full solution, but I’d love to see more use of compostable single-use plastics coupled with municipal biochar facilities.

It’s an excellent cycle that harnesses capitalism and materialism. People buy single use plastics, then throw them away. Municipal garbage (a utility company paid for by ratepayers), picks it up, and brings it to a biochar facility. The facility pyrolizes it, making syngas (which they burn for energy which is then purchased by consumers) and biochar, which is sold as a soil amendment and happens to be carbon-negative. Excess biochar can be buried.

It’s a typical capitalist create-consume economy except it’s carbon-negative (when paired with decarbonized transportation like electric trains and delivery vans, and hydrogen powered garbage trucks). The more you consume, the more carbon you actually suck out of the air.

There’s a few proposed loops like this which instead of fighting consumerism actually harness it to make carbon negative actions. Another one that I’m very interested in is making HVAC filters that also passively absorb carbon from the atmosphere. With electric heat pumps we already have an HVAC technology that is minimally emitting. Pair that with carbon negative filters and you’re golden.

Or concrete using injected co2. It’s a real thing that exists, it just doesn’t have price parity with traditional carbon-intensive concrete. Imagine if just by building a building you could be carbon negative.

Again, it’s not a total solution but I wish I could see more use cases like this instead of the “consume less” narrative. People are not going to consume less, that’s not how people work. The only way to get people to consume less is by raising prices (which is a necessary part of the solution of course).