Licensing Agreement with Carbon Minds

A start-up that’s looking for the smallest possible impact? When you’re working for sustainability in the chemical industry, small impacts are a good thing. Carbon Minds is all about helping the chemical industry lower their environmental impacts through evidence-based decision making. And good decisions require good data.

Dr. Arne Kätelhön, Raoul Meys, and Prof. André Bardow of the RWTH Aachen University’s Institute of Technical Thermodynamics have been working with Prof. Sangwon Suh of the University of California to build the largest and most regionalised chemical life cycle database to date. The numbers are impressive - 30,000 datasets, 1000 chemicals, 24 regions. But what these numbers mean is much more important.

With this data, chemical companies can not only conduct their own Life Cycle Assessments to improve their environmental performance. Carbon Minds also performs their unique analysis to identify cost-efficient ways for achieving even the most ambitious environmental targets. By this means, Carbon Minds helps chemical companies turn data into evidence and make sound decisions on how to position themselves at the forefront of the transition to sustainability.

Transferring innovations like this from research into practice is one of our major aims. We are happy that we became part of Carbon Minds’ story by enabling the transfer of IP from RWTH Aachen into the start-up through an exclusive licensing agreement. And we’re proud to see how research from RWTH labs is being taken by our entrepreneurs to have a real impact on the most pressing issues of our time - even if that impact is the smallest one possible.