OurCarbon Joins Forces with WHIPSAW to Create Carbon-Negative Pavers
WHIPSAW’s paver design, incorporating OurCarbon
Imagine biking or walking through a city pavilion where the ground itself is paved with transformed waste from the city itself. This is what SF Design Firm WHIPSAW envisions with their investigation into city pavers infused with OurCarbon.
“As someone with an Industrial Design background working at the material level with OurCarbon, I was extremely excited to see WHIPSAW engage with this material. Together, we challenged ourselves to find a throughline between a city street and the people that inhabit it. The design that resulted embodies this idea of a circular city where you can bike on a pathway built by transforming and utilizing the very waste the city created.” - Garrett Benisch, Chief Development Officer
WHIPSAW’s paver design, incorporating OurCarbon, is innovative formally and aesthetically. It utilizes OurCarbon as an aggregate replacement and as a pigment, resulting in a deep black color and a stackable and a granulated texture unique to the character of the carbon. The form itself tessellates into unique patterns, with the wavy pattern interlocking to prevent movement.
The spacing tolerances of these pavers are specifically engineered to allow water to penetrate between pavers while meeting code requirements, a benefit that extends far beyond and below the city block. Non-permeable pavement often leads to stormwater events that overwhelm the sewage system of cities and lead to raw sewage overflows into waterways. This unique overlap between the cityscape and the wastewater infrastructure further ties together the relationship between OurCarbon and the paver design.
“Pavers rely on cement, one of the most carbon-intensive materials in use today. But they also depend on sand—a material so seemingly abundant, we hardly think about it. In reality, the world is running low on the kind of sand suitable for concrete. OurCarbon offers a timely alternative—not just as a pigment or additive, but as a structural replacement for sand itself.” Chloe Georgiades and Laura Ogle of WHIPSAW.
“Projects like this serve as a reminder that the systems we rely on—from wastewater treatment to sidewalks—aren’t just infrastructure. They’re incredible feats of design in their own right. They deserve more curiosity, more innovation, and more creative engagement.” - Chloe Georgiades and Laura Ogle of WHIPSAWx.
Learn more about the project in the article The Impact of Invisible Materials.
WHIPSAW is the San Francisco-based industrial design firm behind a slew of successful products ranging from the Tile that keeps your keys findable to the Tonal gym that revolutionizes training. When they approached Bioforcetech to work with OurCarbon, we were honored that they saw the beauty in our material and its story of transformation and circularity. We look forward to further collaborations with this innovative firm.
