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Tech startup aims to clean up the world's cargo fleets

The Guardian Weekly

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July 04, 2025

An industrial park in a London suburb might not be the most obvious place for a quiet revolution to be taking place.

- By Emma Bryce

Tech startup aims to clean up the world's cargo fleets

But there, a team of entrepreneurs is tinkering with a modest looking steel container that could hold a solution to one of the world’s dirtiest industries.

Inside it are thousands of cherry-sized pellets made from quicklime. At one end, a diesel generator pipes fumes through the lime, which soaks up the carbon, triggering a chemical reaction that transforms it into limestone.

With this invention, Seabound, the company behind it, hopes to capture carbon directly from the decks of cargo ships, and help clean up this strikingly polluting industry. More than 50,000 cargo ships are at sea at any moment, producing 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions - more than aviation.

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