Microsoft Corporation is pursuing a surprising strategy to reduce huge carbon emissions by buying human waste and farm waste to bury deep underground.
This is the technology company's latest effort to compensate for the growing amount of greenhouse gases, especially in the context of the development of artificial intelligence (AI) pushing up energy consumption.
On July 17, Microsoft announced that it had signed a deal to buy 4.9 million tons of sustainable carbon elimination from Vaulted Deep Company. For 12 years, starting in 2026, Microsoft will receive carbon credits for each ton of waste buried more than 1,500m deep under underground natural rock.
This amount of waste is a sludge mixture, including both human and agricultural waste, which was previously very difficult to process and was often left in the fields, causing the risk of spreading toxic chemicals to the soil and water environment.
The company is treating a variety of organic waste by burying them permanent in the soil to remove carbon, according to Julia Reichelstein, CEO of Vaulted Deep. We take the waste in mud form and bury it deep into the ground to permanently remove carbon, she stressed.
Vaulted Deep calculates the amount of carbon stored underground to issue carbon credits, currently priced at around $350 per ton. Microsoft said the purchase of these certificates is part of a major strategy to bring the group to negative carbon emissions by 2030 and eliminate more greenhouse gases than the company's total emissions since its establishment by 2050.
From 2020 to 2024, Microsoft emitted 75.5 million tons of CO2. In an effort to make up for it, the group has purchased more than 83 million tons of carbon emission products, of which 59 million tons were purchased this year alone, excluding a new agreement signed with Vaulted Deep. This shows that Microsoft is investing heavily in technology and bio-based solutions to solve the problem of emissions caused by high-tech activities.
