Air-Cleaning “Fruit”

Spiritus’s Carbon Orchard uses tennis-sized balls (which it calls “fruit”) made of a novel sorbent, or material that sucks up carbon dioxide, attached to pillar structures it calls “trees.” The “fruit,” which has a surface area of a whole tennis court, gets heavy with carbon and is taken off the “tree,” before being heated to remove the CO2, which is then stored underground. The “fruit” can be reused, and the process repeated to pull excess carbon from the air. Orchard One, the firm’s first large scale project, in Wyoming, will begin removal in 2026. “We expect that we’ll have a handful of these projects before the end of the decade,” says Spiritus co-founder Charles Cadieu. Early customers include Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, Meta, and McKinsey Sustainability, all through their collective $1 billion Frontier carbon commitment.