How You Can Help : Philippine Biochar Association

The Philippine Biochar Association is a member of the International Biochar Initiative and is promoting the production and use of biochar for rice farming and as a soil amendment.

THE CARBON NEGATIVE STICKER PROGRAM

When you drive your car, your engine’s fuel combustion produces carbon dioxide (CO2) that ends up trapping solar heat within the earth’s atmosphere, contributing to climate change. You produce 1 kilogram of CO2 for every 10 kilometers you drive.Now you can offset the carbon produced by your vehicle and other everyday things with the Carbon Negative Sticker Program. When you buy your Carbon Negative Sticker, your P500 helps provide farmers biochar so that they can improve their farm soils for improved yields, lower farm costs, and better income.

How does this lessen carbon emission?

The process of making biochar (pyrolysis), which utilizes agri waste instead of the standard practice of burning it (or even turning it to compost or letting it rot), significantly lessens CO2 emission.

How big a help is this? 1 kilogram of biochar when burned in O2 will become 3.67 kilograms of CO2. Each Carbon Negative Sticker represents 1 ton (1,000 kilograms) of CO2 sequestered. Each sticker, then, more than compensates for the CO2 generated by our everyday activities — the equivalent of 10,000 kilometers of driving, in fact.Therefore, you not only make up for you and your car’s carbon emission by stopping the emission from standard farming practices, but you effectively remove CO2 from the atmosphere by enabling the use of biochar. In doing so, you are also helping the livelihood of farmers thanks to the benefits they stand to gain from biochar.

Furthermore, biochar also takes out other CO2 equivalent greenhouse gases from the atmosphere — not just carbon dioxide! PBiA’s program puts biochar into rice farms. Modest additions of biochar to rice farm soil were found to reduce nitrogen oxide emissions by up to 80% while completely suppressing methane emissions. Because biochar stays in the soil a long time, it essentially takes away these CO2 equivalent greenhouses gases from the atmosphere for a long time as well! So be carbon negative! Each sticker you get makes up for your emission and whole lot more!

How to make the project sustainable?

PBiA shall raise funds for the Biochar Project through the Carbon Negative Sticker Program. This program shall offer concerned individuals and companies a way to sequester the carbon produced by their vehicles and operations. Engine combustion of fuel produces carbon dioxide that ends up trapping solar heat at the rate of 1 kilometer of travel equivalent to 100 grams of carbon gas generation.Using the 3.67 factor for carbon to CO2 conversion, PBiA can issue 4 stickers for every Master Certificate issued by the Local Networks each representing 1 ton of captured CO2 from the atmosphere.

PBiA shall secure a donation of P1,500.00 for every Carbon Negative Sticker. This donation amount is enough to cover the production of biochar, the plowing into farmland, the monitoring, validation and registration system, the issuance of the Carbon Negative sticker.

The donation for every sticker shall be distributed as follows: a) 58% to the local network, b) 18% to be retained by PBiA to produce and issue the stickers, promote Biochar and greenhouse mitigation awareness as well as to manage the nationwide program c) 24% to be allocated to finance donation sourcing activities, bulk discounts etc.

PBiA stickers have security markers and only PBiA is the authorized donation solicitor against the stickers. Serial numbers of stickers issued and corresponding sub-certificates and master certificates shall be posted in the official PBiA website. Any person will be able to check the website to check if his sticker has a corresponding certificate to ensure its genuineness.