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Terraforming the Earth for a Better Future
United Terraform, LLC was founded on a simple premise: environmental progress should produce measurable results.
We are not interested in sustainability as a slogan. Our objective is to take materials and environments that have lost productive value and transform them into something useful again. That is what we mean by terraforming.
Our technology is designed to address several environmental challenges simultaneously: organic waste accumulation, offensive odors, greenhouse gas emissions, declining soil quality, and the loss of productive agricultural land.
Turning Waste Into Value
Lumber mills, municipalities, agricultural operations, orchards, landscapers, and other industries generate enormous quantities of organic residual material.
Wet bark, wood chips, sawdust, agricultural residues, vegetation, and other biomass are commonly treated as low value waste. In some locations, these materials create significant storage, transportation, odor, fire, emissions, and disposal challenges.
United Terraform sees something different. We see feedstock. Our MicroSnap process uses specialized microbial technology to accelerate the biological conversion of suitable organic residuals into a dark, nutrient rich living soil product.
Instead of simply moving waste from one location to another, our objective is to transform it into something the Earth needs.
Cleaner Air Around Waste Operations
Anyone who has lived or worked near a large organic waste operation understands that environmental quality is not measured only in carbon. It is also measured by the air people breathe.
Decomposing organic material can generate objectionable odors and gases that affect employees, neighbors, businesses, and surrounding communities.
MicroSnap treatment is designed to rapidly alter the biological processes occurring within treated organic material, substantially reducing the conditions responsible for offensive odors and undesirable emissions. For participating waste operations, that means environmental improvement that people can actually see, smell, and experience.
Carbon Sequestration
United Terraform develops projects intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase the amount of carbon retained in useful terrestrial materials. Rather than allowing suitable biomass carbon to follow conventional decomposition pathways, our objective is to manage that material so that a greater portion of its carbon can be retained within beneficial soil products and terrestrial applications.
Where carbon removal or sequestration is claimed, United Terraform employs project specific measurement, lifecycle analysis, engineering review, monitoring, and appropriate independent verification. Our goal is not merely to purchase offsets for emissions occurring somewhere else. Our goal is to physically change what happens to carbon at the source.
Building Living Soil
Perhaps the most important product of the United Terraform process is not a carbon credit, but nutrient rich soil.
Healthy soil is fundamental to food production and human civilization. Yet agricultural land throughout the world has suffered from erosion, nutrient depletion, declining organic matter, drought, salinity, intensive cultivation, and other forms of degradation.
United Terraform is developing methods to convert suitable organic residuals into nutrient rich black soil and soil amendments containing organic matter and biologically active material.
The objective is to return carbon and nutrients to the land and create productive value from material that might otherwise have been discarded.
From Depleted Ground to Productive Land
The long term vision extends beyond waste management. United Terraform seeks to use soil creation, biological technology, water management, and modern agriculture to help restore land that has become depleted, damaged, or poorly suited to conventional food production. This includes opportunities involving degraded agricultural soils and, where water, climate, soil chemistry, infrastructure, and agronomic conditions permit, arid and desert environments.
The ambition is substantial.
Turn waste into soil. Turn depleted soil into productive soil. Turn unproductive land into gardens and farms. Use those farms to help feed future generations.
This is the meaning behind the name United Terraform. We are working toward technologies and projects capable of improving the physical environment itself.
A Circular Environmental Model
Our model seeks to create a productive cycle.
Organic Waste → Biological Treatment → Reduced Environmental Burden → Carbon Retention → Living Soil → Agriculture → Food
Each stage is intended to create value from the stage before it. The result can be less waste, cleaner operations, healthier soils, additional agricultural productivity, new commercial products, and new economic incentives for businesses to participate in environmental improvement.
Environmentalism That Pays for Itself
United Terraform believes one of the most powerful ways to achieve environmental change is to make that change economically attractive.
A lumber mill should benefit from finding a better use for its residual biomass. A waste facility should benefit from reducing odors and emissions. A farmer should benefit from healthier soil. A landowner should benefit from restoring depleted acreage.
When environmental improvement creates economic value, sustainability no longer depends exclusively upon philanthropy or corporate promises. It becomes good business.
We are not simply talking about a better Earth. We are working to build one.
United Terraform is working toward a future in which organic waste is increasingly regarded as a resource, carbon is responsibly managed, depleted soils are restored, previously marginal land becomes productive, and environmental technology contributes directly to the world's capacity to produce food.
We believe environmental stewardship should be judged by what actually changes, including
less waste, cleaner air, more carbon retained in the Earth, better soil, more productive land, and more food.