In 1919, Entrepreneur Nils Halvorsen Norheim has set up the country’s first automated flatbread factory near Barkoker, Norway. A century later, Celine Sandberg peered into the oven in her small kitchen in Trondheim and found herself baking bread. But instead of making food, Celine Sandberg makes bubbles.
Sandberg is the founder and CEO of Agoprene, a Scandinavian startup developing sustainable furniture foams. According to the company, polyurethane foam rubber, which is derived from petrochemicals and is widely used in sofas, chairs, and other upholstery, emits a whopping 105 million tons of CO.2 Annual emissions. “Everyone in the furniture industry knows that foam is bad for the environment and no one wants to use it, but there is no other alternative,” says Sandberg. “I want to supply [a more sustainable] A petrochemical-free alternative to today’s products. ”
With a background in business development and finance and no engineering know-how, Sandberg never expected to enter the complex field of materials technology. But her master’s studies at the School of Entrepreneurship at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology literally opened doors for her. She needed to start her own company as part of her degree and needed some input, so she started knocking on the doors of her professors and asking them what they were working on. ” she recalls. She said, “I learned that biomass could theoretically be used in place of oil because oil is a product of biomass that has degraded over time.”
Inspired, she spent the next few months researching the potential of biomass and the wider world of biotechnology. “Then the COVID-19 lockdown happened and we were forced to source biomass from Norway as we were unable to contact suppliers in other parts of Europe,” she says. In this country with the second longest coastline in the world, she found a rich resource to exploit: seaweed.
In collaboration with Agoprene’s research chemist Asanga de Alwis, Sandberg began experimenting in a small kitchen in Trondheim, combining different types of seaweed-based ingredients in a specific order to achieve the desired results. The mixture was poured into molds and heated to 50 degrees Celsius. She likens the process to baking a cake. However, unlike traditional baking, the form takes about 10 hours in the oven, depending on the thickness of the ingredients. “Many of our ideas failed. We must have created about 800 form samples,” she says.
There was also a lot more bootstrapping involved. Armed with a fairly modest budget of NOK 1 million (approximately £73,000, or $90,000) from the Norwegian Research Council, Mr. Sandberg sourced second-hand equipment and called suppliers to find free began asking for his samples of biomass. “I went without pay for eight months, moved back to my girlfriend’s parents’ house, and even had to pay her monthly phone bill because I didn’t have any money,” she says. “But I was confident that one day the ship would turn and everything would be okay.”
