On the 20th of November 2020, the National Green Tribunal issued a final order that most of India's manufacturing sector never heard about. It concerned charcoal. Specifically, coconut shell charcoal — the black, dense, high-carbon material that serves as the essential raw material for India's activated carbon industry, and increasingly for its steel sector.

The order was simple in its language and devastating in its effect: all charcoal manufacturing units operating in Tamil Nadu and other southern states were directed to shift to above-ground continuous process technology. They were told not to operate until they did. The design of the new process had to be approved by either IIT Madras or Anna University.

The compliant supply began to shrink. Licenses stopped being renewed, and the legal supplier base has thinned year on year since.

How it Worked Before

For centuries — and certainly for the past several decades in Tamil Nadu — coconut shell charcoal was made the same way: in earthen pits.

The pits were dug below ground level, typically around three metres in diameter and four-and-a-half metres deep, lined with brick. Coconut shells — procured from copra oil mills across Kangeyam Taluk in Tiruppur District — were loaded in batches and ignited. The process was straightforward: partial combustion, or pyrolysis, in a low-oxygen environment. Each cycle took approximately 72 hours.

But the process had a fundamental pollution problem — two of them, actually.

The first was atmospheric. During pyrolysis, approximately two-thirds of the calorific value of the coconut shells escaped as volatiles — CO, CO₂, oily substances, and particulate matter. These were vented, often poorly controlled, into the surrounding air. The smell and smoke were pervasive. Residents who lived near production clusters had complained for years.

The second was hydrological. At the end of each 72-hour cycle, the red-hot charcoal inside the pit — at temperatures approaching 1,000°C — had to be quenched with water to stop combustion. That water, now saturated with dissolved organics, phenolic compounds, and high concentrations of chemical oxygen demand (COD), was often disposed of on land. It leached into the groundwater.

The Protest That Started a Decade of Legal Battle

In October 2012, the residents of Veeranampalayam Panchayat had had enough. A public protest forced the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board (TNPCB) to act. A committee was constituted to inspect units and direct them to install air pollution control systems — common hoods, scrubbers, tall chimneys, and impervious tanks to collect and recycle quench water.

The National Green Tribunal constituted its own expert committee in October 2013 to find a permanent solution. What the committee found was stark: virtually every unit was using partial underground pit carbonization. The pollution control measures in place were minimal. Quench water samples showed very high concentrations of organics and phenolic compounds.

"The two pollution sources from the coconut shell charcoal units are the emissions during the carbonisation process and the potential for groundwater contamination by the residual quench water/scrubber effluent, if disposed on land."

The committee's recommendation: no new units to be permitted until an above-ground pyrolysis design was proven feasible. Existing units that had obtained TNPCB consent might continue, provided they adopted the recommended pollution control measures.

But the industry pushed back. Units argued that above-ground chambers were unsafe — there had been explosions and accidents. The heat retention required for the process, they said, could not be achieved above ground. The case dragged through the NGT for seven years.

The Order That Changed Everything

On 20 November 2020, the NGT disposed of the applications with a final direction. The language left no room for interpretation:

The deadline for switching to continuous process manufacturing had technically been 1 April 2020 — before the order was even issued. The TNPCB issued a Circular Memo on 7 March 2022, directing all Joint Chief Environmental Engineers and District Environmental Engineers to ensure strict compliance. Anna University's Centre for Environmental Studies issued its vetted design guidelines in February 2022.

The message was unambiguous: operate with the new above-ground continuous process design, approved by IIT Madras or Anna University, or do not operate at all.

What Happened to Supply

The problem was that almost no one had the new technology.

The above-ground continuous process for charcoal manufacturing was not a mature commercial technology in India. A handful of units had attempted it; some had experienced operational difficulties. The TNPCB and Anna University had provided design guidelines, but guidelines are not the same as a proven, operating plant.

The result was predictable. With the traditional method banned and fresh licenses no longer being issued or renewed, a significant portion of the traditional supply — from the mud-pit units that had operated for decades — could no longer operate under the new rules. The compliant supply steadily contracted.

The demand did not.

India's activated carbon manufacturers — who depend on high-grade coconut shell charcoal as their primary feedstock — continued to operate. Their buyers continued to need activated carbon for gold recovery, water treatment, pharmaceutical applications. India's steel companies, under growing pressure from the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism in Europe, were actively looking for bio-based coke substitutes.

The gap between supply and demand widened. Import substitution opportunities emerged. And the premium for reliable, documented, NGT-compliant supply became significant.

Why This Is a Structural Event, Not a Temporary Disruption

This is the critical point that most observers miss. The NGT order did not create a temporary shortage that traditional producers can recover from by adding scrubbers and tall chimneys. It mandated a fundamental change in production technology — one that requires new capital, new design expertise, and regulatory sign-off from IIT Madras or Anna University.

The artisanal producers who have operated mud-pits for thirty years cannot simply pivot. The technology they would need to adopt requires engineering capabilities they do not have. The compliance pathway is real but requires significant new investment and institutional validation.

This means the structural supply gap will persist. New compliant entrants — those who have the technology already validated, the regulatory understanding already in place, and the operational track record already established — are not competing with legacy producers. They are replacing a category.

Where Susstains Stands

I should be transparent: I am the founder of Susstains Engineering Solutions, and this article makes the case for why the market we operate in is the right one to be in. The reader should weigh that accordingly.

But the facts are the facts. Our commercial plant in Tumkur, Karnataka is an above-ground, pollution-free, continuous process charcoal production facility. The process was developed over a decade of research at IIT Madras — the same institution named in the NGT order as the approving authority. Our first published paper in 2023 documented the URC-FD (Ultra-Rich Carbonization through Flash Devolatilization) process that achieves 34.2% biochar yield at 10× the production rate of the traditional mud-pit method, with no visible smoke or pollution.

My co-founder Karthik ran a traditional pit-method charcoal operation in Tamil Nadu. It was shut down under the NGT order. He brought that operational knowledge into Susstains — and we built a compliant alternative.

The question investors ask us is whether the demand is real. The answer is that the demand was always real — it was the compliant supply that thinned. We are rebuilding the supply chain, on the right side of the law, with technology that the NGT itself called for.

The compliant supply is shrinking. The demand is real. The window for building the replacement is open right now — and it will not stay open indefinitely.

Muthu Kumar K is the Founder & CEO of Susstains Engineering Solutions LLP, and holds a PhD in Aerospace Engineering from IIT Madras (PMRF). He is the inventor of two granted patents in biochar and activated carbon synthesis. Susstains is expanding its plant network across South India. Write to muthu@susstains.com or visit www.muthukumark.com.

Every tonne of coconut shell biochar starts long before it reaches a furnace. It starts on a farm, or in a household backyard, and moves through a chain of merchants, trucks, and collection yards that most people outside the industry never see. Having sourced coconut shells across Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Karnataka for over a decade, I've watched this chain work — and it works very differently depending on which state you're in.

Tamil Nadu: A Bulk Merchant Model

In Tamil Nadu, the supply chain is built around merchants rather than farmers directly. Merchants procure coconuts from farmers roughly every 50 days. They remove the husk, split the coconuts in half, dry them, and extract the dried kernel — the copra — which is sold on for oil production. The shells left behind are collected and stored in the merchant's own yard.

Within about a week, a medium-scale coconut merchant will typically accumulate five to ten tonnes of shells. Once roughly ten tonnes have built up, the lot is sold on to charcoal manufacturers or to shell traders who supply charcoal producers. The major harvesting season in Tamil Nadu runs from January to May.

A significant share of the shells collected in Tamil Nadu doesn't stay in-state — it is transported into Karnataka for charcoal production, for reasons that come down to licensing, which I'll get to below.

Karnataka and Kerala: A Household-by-Household Network

Karnataka and Kerala work on a completely different rhythm from Tamil Nadu, and the collection pattern in both states is broadly similar. Farmers harvest their own coconuts every 50 to 60 days and store them — not shelled — in mesh containers typically divided into three compartments. The coconuts sit in storage for around ten months to a year, until the water inside the kernel has fully dried.

Only once the water has dried do farmers de-husk the coconuts, usually with their own labourers if they farm at scale. The shell is removed, and the copra — known locally as ball copra — is sold at the coconut mandi, largely destined for north India ahead of festival seasons such as Ganesh Chaturthi, Navratri, and Diwali. This is why the harvesting season in Karnataka and Kerala runs July to November, opposite to Tamil Nadu's.

A collection yard near Tumkur, where a loader consolidates shells gathered by small truck merchants from across the surrounding hubs.

It's a fundamentally more fragmented, labour-intensive model than the bulk-merchant system in Tamil Nadu — every shell effectively has to be found, rather than simply accumulated in a merchant's yard.

Why Shells Cross State Lines

The reason a meaningful volume of shells from both Tamil Nadu and Kerala ends up in Karnataka comes down to licensing. Charcoal production in Karnataka is done largely through the artisanal method, and Karnataka's pollution control board issues licenses for artisanal production. Neither Tamil Nadu nor Kerala grants such licenses for the artisanal method — so producers there who want to work at scale, and within the rules, have limited options at home, aside from a small number of companies using modern technology.

Because Karnataka is willing to license artisanal charcoal production, producers based in both Tamil Nadu and Kerala transport their coconut shells into Karnataka to convert them into charcoal there, legally. That added transport cost is passed through to the raw material price — coconut shells typically cost about ₹2 per kg more in Karnataka than in Tamil Nadu or Kerala as a direct result.

What This Means for a Compliant Producer

Understanding this chain in detail — who holds material at each stage, when the harvest seasons peak in each state, and why the artisanal licensing gap pushes volume into Karnataka from both neighbouring states — is what lets us plan sourcing and pricing with real visibility, rather than reacting to spot shortages. My decade of relationships across these merchant and collection networks in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka remains one of the more difficult parts of this business for a new entrant to replicate quickly.

Karthik Kumar is the Co-Founder & Head of Sourcing and Sales at Susstains Engineering Solutions LLP, responsible for raw material sourcing and buyer relationships across Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. Susstains is expanding its plant network across South India. Write to muthu@susstains.com.

Every tonne of hot metal produced in an Indian blast furnace runs on carbon — roughly 555 kilograms of it, drawn from coke and pulverized coal, releasing close to 1.8 tonnes of CO₂ in the process. With India's steel industry targeting net-zero and biochar increasingly discussed as a "drop-in" fix, the question comes up often: can biocarbon simply replace coke? The honest answer is more interesting than a yes or no — and understanding it properly is what separates a real substitution roadmap from a marketing claim.

Carbon Enters Steelmaking at Three Different Points

Blast furnace steelmaking doesn't use carbon in one place — it uses it in three, and each has a different tolerance for substitution:

Why the Blast Furnace Itself Is the Hard Part

The intuitive answer would be to substitute biochar wherever coke is used. In practice, the blast furnace charge is the least forgiving of the three. Coke inside the furnace isn't just a fuel — it's a physical support structure, holding the burden porous enough for gas to flow upward through the stack while it slowly descends and reduces. Swap in biochar at any meaningful scale and it degrades fluidity, mechanical strength, and two of the furnace's key operating parameters: coke strength after reaction (CSR) and coke reactivity index (CRI). Based on current process constraints, only around 10% of blast furnace coke can realistically be replaced without compromising furnace performance.

Sintering is more forgiving. Coke breeze there acts primarily as a heat source to fuse the ore mix, and studies suggest up to 60% of it can be substituted with biochar — provided the biochar's sinter properties are tuned to the process.

Pulverized coal injection is where the real opportunity sits. PCI carbon is blown into the furnace as a supplementary fuel rather than a structural support, and secondary literature indicates it can be substituted almost completely — up to 100% — with suitably processed biochar.

The Blended Number: 47%

Weighted across all three inputs, roughly 47% of the coke and coal used per tonne of hot metal is realistically replaceable with biochar today — around 261 of the 555 kg. That single number is the honest answer to "can biocarbon replace coke": not all of it, but nearly half, concentrated almost entirely in PCI and sintering, not the blast furnace charge itself.

Scaled to India's roughly 120 MMT of annual steel production capacity, that per-tonne figure adds up to a genuinely large national picture:

India's steel industry runs on roughly 66.6 million tonnes of coke and coal every year. Of that, around 31 million tonnes is realistically replaceable with biochar under current process constraints — the national translation of the same 47% blended substitution rate calculated per tonne of hot metal above.

Translated into emissions, the scale becomes clearer still. India's steel industry emits roughly 296 million tonnes of CO₂ every year — about 275 MMT from coke and coal, plus a further ~21 MMT from coal mining. Applying the same 47% blendable share, biochar substitution represents an avoidance opportunity of up to ~129 million tonnes of CO₂ per year in India alone. It's a scale no single producer, including Susstains, can meet — but it frames just how large, and how early-stage, this substitution market still is.

The Carbon Case, Not Just the Process Case

The climate rationale for making that substitution is as strong as the technical case is nuanced. Replacing one tonne of coke — made from around 1.42 tonnes of coking coal — with one tonne of biocarbon cuts net emissions from roughly 4.57 tonnes of CO₂ down to just 0.06 tonnes: a reduction of 4.51 tonnes of CO₂, or close to 99%, per tonne replaced.

The reason the cut is so large is that coal is a fossil route — carbon that has been locked underground for millions of years enters the atmosphere for the first time when it's mined and burned. Biocarbon is different: the biogenic carbon absorbed by a coconut palm or a Prosopis tree during growth (around 4.85 tonnes of CO₂-equivalent) very nearly balances the carbon released back out through biocarbon production and use in steel (around 4.85 tonnes combined). What's left over — roughly 0.06 tonnes — is fossil diesel burned in transport, not the carbon cycle itself. It's the difference between a carbon-positive process and a carbon-neutral one.

Where Susstains Fits

This is exactly why Susstains' steel-focused roadmap centres on woody biomass — Prosopis juliflora, Eucalyptus, and Acacia — biocarbon for PCI and sintering substitution, rather than a blanket claim to replace blast furnace coke. AM/NS India — India's largest integrated steel producer — has already confirmed a 15,000-tonne trial of Susstains' biocarbon at its Corex plant in Hazira, validating this substitution pathway at industrial scale rather than in a lab. The trial itself ran on coconut shell biocarbon; commercial supply is moving to woody biomass, where the economics work at steel-industry volumes.

This shift isn't unproven territory. Tata Steel already injects biochar into blast furnaces at its Jamshedpur plant — India's first such deployment, now running across three furnaces. In Brazil, ArcelorMittal's own BioEnergia subsidiary grows and converts eucalyptus into charcoal to feed multiple blast furnaces in Minas Gerais, part of an industry where roughly 11% of national steel output already runs on biomass charcoal. Woody-biomass carbon works at blast-furnace scale — Susstains' roadmap follows a path steelmakers have already validated.

The science doesn't support replacing coke wholesale, and any claim that it does should be treated with scepticism. What it does support is a real, quantifiable, and currently underserved substitution opportunity — concentrated exactly where the physics allow it.

Dr. Muthu Kumar K is the Founder & CEO of Susstains Engineering Solutions LLP. His PhD research at IIT Madras forms the scientific foundation of Susstains' commercial carbonization process. Write to muthu@susstains.com.

Ask most people what biochar is for, and the answer is almost always the same: soil. Mix it into farmland, lock away some carbon, improve the soil while you're at it. That's true — and it matters. But it's also only the last stop on a much longer value chain, and stopping the conversation there undersells what this material actually is and where its real economic value lies.

A Stable Form of Carbon, Built to Last

Biochar is produced by heating biomass in a low-oxygen environment — a process called carbonization — which locks its carbon into a stable form that resists decomposition for centuries. That durability is precisely why biochar has become a serious global climate tool: carbon returned to soil in this form can stay locked away for generations, rather than cycling back into the atmosphere within a few years the way most organic matter does.

But that same stability and structure — high fixed-carbon content, extensive internal porosity, a large surface area relative to its weight — is also what makes biochar valuable well before it ever reaches a farm.

A Value Chain, Not a Single Use

Soil amendment gets most of the public attention, and deservedly so. But before biochar gets there, it has real, high-value industrial applications that the conversation around it usually skips entirely. At Susstains, we build value across the full chain — industrial demand first, with a substantial share still returning to soil to lock carbon away for good. Here's what that chain actually looks like.

1. Feedstock for Activated Carbon

Activated carbon — biochar that's undergone a further activation step to dramatically increase its porosity and surface area — is used far more widely than most people realise, and coconut shell char is a premium input for it:

Why coconut shell dominates this market so completely — and why the sizes that fall below gold-grade quietly supply the water and filter markets from the same production line — is a story worth telling in full. We've done exactly that in our piece on why gold mines run on coconut shell.

2. Electrodes for Supercapacitors

A newer and less widely discussed application: activated carbon's high surface area and porosity make it a strong electrode material for supercapacitors — energy storage devices valued for extremely fast charge and discharge cycles, used alongside batteries in applications that need high power density. This isn't a hypothetical use case for us — one of our own published research papers demonstrated activated carbon from coconut shells achieving a BET surface area of 965 m²/g, with supercapacitor and specialty carbon applications explicitly validated alongside the core activation process.

3. A Substitute for Coking Coal in Steel

Steelmaking runs on carbon at multiple points in the process — coke breeze in sintering, coke charged into the blast furnace, and pulverized coal injection. Biochar can't replace all of it (the blast furnace charge itself is far more constrained than people assume), but it can substitute meaningfully in sintering and almost completely in pulverized coal injection, cutting emissions by close to 99% per tonne replaced. We've written a full breakdown of exactly where that substitution works and why — see our piece on biocarbon and coke substitution in blast furnaces.

4. A Reductant in Ferroalloy Smelting

Steel isn't the only metallurgical process that runs on carbon. Ferroalloy production — ferrosilicon in particular, used to deoxidise and alloy steel — relies on a carbon reductant in its submerged-arc furnaces, a role traditionally filled by coal, coke, and charcoal. Biochar is a natural fit here for the same reason it works in steel's bulk-reduction stages: what matters is fixed-carbon content, reactivity, and cost per tonne of carbon delivered, not the mechanical hardness that gold and filtration demand. Because the carbon is consumed in a chemical reduction reaction rather than mechanically cycled, ferroalloy smelting is another genuine industrial outlet for biochar — and one where lower-cost, high-carbon biomass can compete effectively.

5. Soil Amendment and Carbon Removal

This is where most conversations about biochar start — and it remains genuinely important. Biochar improves soil structure and water retention, and because its carbon resists decomposition, applying it to farmland is a recognised carbon removal pathway, verifiable and creditable through platforms like Puro.earth's Biochar Carbon Removal methodology. It's the right ending to the value chain — just not the whole story.

The Insight

Biochar's value chain runs through industry long before it ever reaches the earth. Activated carbon, supercapacitors, steel substitution, and ferroalloy reduction are real, present-day markets — not future possibilities — and they're where the near-term commercial opportunity actually sits. Soil remains the endpoint, and a meaningful one. But treating biochar as "just a soil additive" misses most of where its value is created.

Dr. Muthu Kumar K is the Founder & CEO of Susstains Engineering Solutions LLP. His PhD research at IIT Madras forms the scientific foundation of Susstains' commercial carbonization process. Write to muthu@susstains.com.

In our earlier piece on what biochar actually is, we made the case that its value runs through industry long before it reaches soil — and that activated carbon is the first and largest of those industrial markets. This article goes one level deeper into that market, into the single most demanding application within it: gold recovery. Because once you understand why gold mines insist on coconut shell, you understand why coconut shell dominates the entire activated carbon supply chain.

Gold Sets the Standard for the Whole Industry

Gold recovery is the most punishing environment activated carbon is asked to work in. In the carbon-in-pulp (CIP) and carbon-in-leach (CIL) circuits that produce most of the world's gold, carbon is slurried together with crushed ore, pumped between six to eight agitated tanks, screened, stripped of its loaded gold at high temperature, and thermally reactivated in a kiln — then sent back to do it all over again, dozens of times across its service life. Coconut shell activated carbon is the overwhelming industry standard here, used in the large majority of CIP, CIL, and carbon-in-column operations worldwide. The reason comes down to one property above all: hardness.

Why Hardness Is the Deciding Property

Activated carbon hardness is measured as ball-pan hardness (BPH) under the ASTM D3802 standard — the percentage of carbon that survives intact after vigorous agitation with steel balls, a laboratory proxy for the mechanical punishment of a real circuit. Coconut shell activated carbon typically scores between 98.5% and 99% on this test. Coal-based grades usually sit at 85–92%. That gap looks small on paper and is enormous in practice.

Carbon Loss Is Gold Loss

Here is the chain that makes hardness a financial issue, not just a technical one. In an agitated CIP/CIL circuit, soft carbon abrades and shatters into fine particles. Those fines are too small to be held back by the inter-stage screens that are meant to retain the carbon while the ore slurry flows through. So the fines escape the circuit — and critically, they escape carrying the gold they have already adsorbed, straight into the tailings. In other words, every gram of carbon lost to attrition isn't just a carbon replacement cost; it's adsorbed gold walking out of the plant.

The economics are stark. A premium coconut-shell carbon at 98–99% hardness can hold total carbon consumption below 30 grams per tonne of ore processed, while standard grades run to 50–80 grams per tonne — with a proportional increase in the gold lost alongside the carbon. Across a large operation running thousands of tonnes of ore a day, over a carbon service life of dozens of reactivation cycles, that difference compounds into a very large number. This is why a mine will pay a premium for harder carbon: the higher purchase price is repaid many times over in reduced carbon and gold losses.

A Demand That Structurally Grows Every Year

There's a second dynamic that makes this market particularly attractive, and it's one most people miss. The world's gold output has been roughly flat for over a decade — hovering around 3,300 to 3,700 tonnes per year — but the amount of ore that has to be processed to produce it keeps climbing. Average gold head grades fell by an estimated 7.5% to 13.4% between 2012 and 2022, and the global tonnage of ore and waste moved has been hitting record highs year after year. Simply put, the world is digging through more and more rock to extract the same amount of gold.

Since activated carbon is consumed per tonne of ore processed — not per tonne of gold produced — falling ore grades translate directly into rising activated carbon demand. Every year that grades decline, more ore must be run through CIP and CIL circuits, and more make-up carbon is consumed to do it. It's a structural, compounding tailwind for exactly the hard coconut-shell carbon that gold recovery depends on — demand that grows regardless of the gold price or output.

The Carbon That Leaves the Circuit Doesn't Come Back

There's a climate footnote worth drawing out. The carbon fines that abrade off and leave the circuit don't vanish — they report to the tailings stream and settle into the mine's tailings storage. Because activated carbon is a stable, recalcitrant form of carbon that resists decomposition, that material remains as sequestered carbon rather than cycling back to the atmosphere as CO₂. It isn't a soil-carbon-credit removal in the agricultural sense, and we wouldn't claim it as one — but it does mean the biogenic carbon in coconut-shell activated carbon stays locked away even at the end of its working life, rather than being released.

Why 6×12 — and the Sieving Cascade

Carbon for gold circuits is supplied in a specific particle size range, expressed as a mesh grading. The industry-standard gold size is 6×12 mesh (roughly 1.7–3.4 mm), with 4×8 also accepted. That size range isn't arbitrary — it's the resolution of a three-way tradeoff:

Now the part that matters for the whole supply chain. When a manufacturer sieves its output to pull out those gold-grade 6×12 and 4×8 fractions, the finer material that falls below them isn't waste — it's the natural byproduct of the same production line. And those finer fractions are exactly what other markets need: water filtration, cigarette filters, and dye and wastewater treatment all use smaller-mesh carbon that doesn't face the mechanical cycling a gold circuit imposes. The gold producer doesn't set up a separate line to make water-grade carbon; it drops out of the sieve on the way to making gold-grade.

The Whole-Yield Logic

This is what ties the activated carbon story together. For the hardness-and-mesh-critical applications — gold at the top, then water and filters below it — coconut shell is the only feedstock that lets a producer win the premium gold market and monetize the residue that cascades down from it. Other biomass feedstocks generally can't meet the hardness bar for gold at all; they can only ever serve the lower-tier applications. So the strategic question almost answers itself: why build on a feedstock that can only reach the residue markets, when coconut shell reaches the premium market and hands you the residue markets as a byproduct?

It's worth being precise about where this logic stops. It applies to the particle-size-sensitive, mechanically demanding applications — the ones where hardness and mesh integrity decide everything. It does not extend to bulk-reduction markets like steelmaking and ferrosilicon production, where the carbon is consumed in a chemical reaction rather than mechanically cycled, and where fixed carbon content and cost per tonne — not hardness — drive the feedstock choice. In those markets, cheaper high-carbon biomass competes perfectly well, which is precisely why our own steel strategy is built on Prosopis juliflora rather than coconut shell. We cover that side of the business in our piece on biocarbon and coke substitution in steel.

The Takeaway

Gold recovery is the anchor that holds the entire coconut shell activated carbon industry in place. Its uncompromising hardness requirement is what makes coconut shell indispensable, and the sieving cascade beneath it is what makes coconut shell economically complete — one feedstock, one production line, serving the premium market and the volume markets together. Understanding that is central to understanding why Susstains built its first commercial line on coconut shell.

Dr. Muthu Kumar K is the Founder & CEO of Susstains Engineering Solutions LLP. His PhD research at IIT Madras forms the scientific foundation of Susstains' commercial carbonization process. Write to muthu@susstains.com.