Puro is the first marketplace in the world to offer verified CO₂ removals. It’s a pioneering initiative to test if CO₂ removals can be made visible and tradable through an open, online platform.

Puro is derived from the latin purus, meaning to cleanse or purify. The definition, when extended to other languages can mean free of pollutants, free of flaws or imperfections, pure and clean.

In Finnish, Puro means a stream, which serves as a metaphor for role of the marketplace enabling a flow or exchange between buyers and sellers.

In Puro the certificates are issued based on actual measurable CO₂ removals from the atmosphere. Most other schemes are trading emission reductions, which is very important as well.

However, once possible reductions have been done, it’s essential to start removing at least the same amount of CO₂ than your organizations operations produce.

It is a way to get CO₂ away from the atmosphere and have it stored in a long term in a stable form.

A CORC is an independently verified document that confirms that 1 ton of CO₂ has been removed from the atmosphere by one of the removal methods certified by Puro. It is issued by the registry to the supplier, purchased by the buyer and retired once the buyer has reported its usage.

At the moment we have three CO₂ removal methods:

• Biochar – it is a very stable form of carbon that does not decompose even if it is used for soil improvement
• Carbonated building elements – it’s basically concrete but without any cement. The process sequesters more CO₂ than the production causes.
• Wooden building elements – wood that is used in the construction of buildings is away from circulation for a long time.

We used the following criteria:

• Has to be easy to measure
• Has to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere for a long time (at least 50 years)
• Has to be mature enough for scaling (out of the laboratory and no unsolved challenges that would prevent large scale deployment)

Methodology consists basically from three elements:

• A scientific report or a certificate that states the net emissions of produced product
• Production volume of said product
• Usage of the product (e.g. to ensure product is not burned)

The results of the auctions and feedback from participants are analysed. If the experiment is considered to be a success, continuation is bound to happen.

Fortum encourages new startups to be developed within the Innovation and Venturing incubation process. Puro is one of them and the costs of setting up the experiment are covered by Fortum. This is the fastest way to move forward.

Yes. If you know about a process that fulfills the criteria in the previous question and have independent evidence to back it up, please let us know.

The priority is obviously to minimize emissions first. In most cases there are multiple cost effective way you can do that. Once the easy ones have been done and you are facing increasing cost per reduced ton of CO₂, you should consider compensating with CO₂ Removal Certificates (CORCs).

We have an independent third party who verifies all claims for certificates. At the moment our partner is DNV GL.

The price of the CORC is determined entirely based on supply and demand. We will publish the average prices from each auction afterwards.

Before they can be utilized in sustainability reporting or for any other offsetting purpose, the certificates need to be immobilized so that their ownership cannot be changed anymore. Here the vocabulary is varied: Some talk about cancellation (as do our rules), some about retiring, but we prefer “Activation”.