21 April | No Wasted Opportunities

On April 21, Carbon Gap and Deloitte launched a report examining the transformative potential of carbon removal in three industries where removal capacity matches or exceeds existing GHG output:

1. wastewater
2. concrete and demolition waste
3. mining waste

These sectors offer an opportunity to design regulatory frameworks that not only scale carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies, but build competitiveness and resilience and transition these sectors toward net-negative profiles.

We heard from project developers and policymakers in each industry with a discussion on main opportunities and barriers they face in building a business case for these decarbonisation strategies.

This report, produced by Carbon Gap in partnership with Deloitte North and South Europe, identifies a largely overlooked opportunity to embed CDR into three existing industrial sectors: wastewater management, concrete recycling, and mining waste management. By integrating CDR into processes that are already happening at scale, these sectors could shift from being emissions sources to becoming part of the climate solution.

The analysis finds that the CDR potential of all three sectors could meet or even exceed their current greenhouse gas emissions, with minimal impact on end-user prices. It sets out the technologies that can make this possible, the barriers that are holding them back, and the concrete policy steps the EU can take, within existing legislative frameworks, to unlock this potential at scale.