and relatively new way to clean up the planet s atmosphere, and it is being pioneered right here. climeworks is one of the companies hoping the answer to the great carbon clean up is in the thin air around us. these huge intake fans called collectors are sucking in the air from around them and they are taking out the c02, and because c02 is around us everywhere, you can place these, well, pretty much anywhere on the planet they can be cleaning up the environment. natalie casas leads the team here. she moved from carbon capture to direct air capture after seeing expensive projects scrapped because of their cost. so we have a 2 stage process. in the first stage, we blow air through. c02 sticks on the material, they are purified air so air without c02 or with very little c02 leaves the box.
when the filter is full, we close the door and start heating. we heat up the collector up to 100 degrees, c02 is released and we take it out. once the filters are cleaned, the carbon capture can start all over again. it s a pleasure for me to introduce you to our testing laboratory. we re the first camera crew allowed into climeworks labs, where they have been experimenting with thousands of materials to try to find the most effective at absorbing c02, and at which temperatures. because nobody s interested to remove a bit of c02, we are all interested in removing large amounts of c02, millions of tons, so we have to rely on materials that can be produced in the large scale in a very short time. our focus is showing the world we can remove c02 from the atmosphere with a reasonable cost that can be improved in time. there s some cause for optimism too. this is one of the first
collectors and it takes out about 60 tons a year of c02 from the atmosphere. now, next year, the company say they can reach triple that efficiency 200 tons a year and that bodes well for 2050. by getting this capture plant to run on waste energy, its own carbon footprint is about 10 15% of what it s capable of removing over its lifetime. and climeworks biggest project to date, 0rca, has just kicked into life last month in iceland. it captures 4,000 tons of c02 each year. the company sells the permanent removal of co2 by weight. even individuals can buy in. but in reality, it s mainly companies wanting to go green with a better environmental record. at the time we decided to build 0rca, we did not have the certainty from the market because it simply was not existing.