Across five continents and more than twenty locations, The Biochar Effect follows the scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, farmers and innovators building an industry of the future out of the world's suffocating waste.
At first glance, biochar bears a striking resemblance to the pernicious fossil fuel industry: black to the touch, incinerated, dead. Traditional climate activists have rejected it merely because of this superficial proximity and production process.
While carbon removal is the part people reach for first, it is not the most important part of this story. What matters is everything that happens on the way there: waste that becomes a valuable product, energy produced in the process, soil and water repaired, industrial materials enhanced.
The film travels from laboratories to landfills, from rice fields to concrete plants, from municipal waste facilities to 3D printing plants and almond farms — documenting how biochar is made, what it is used for, and how one material can heal the planet and make money doing it.
The world's waste is a huge unsolved problem — crop residue, agricultural residuals, forestry slash, municipal green waste, storm debris, biosolids, treated timber. Today each one is handled differently: landfilled, burned, composted, or spread on fields. All of it costs money to get rid of.
And none of those methods destroy what is inside. Pharmaceuticals pass through composting intact and end up on farmland. So do the persistent herbicides — clopyralid, aminopyralid, picloram — which survive for years and can ruin a crop at one part per billion. Composters have a name for the result: killer compost. Pyrolysis destroys all of it.
Pyrolysis takes nearly every one of them, through a single transformation. What comes out is a substance with a long list of uses that keeps growing — many of them not yet discovered.
This is what convinced me — not the applications, but the transformation itself. All waste is poison eventually, and not because of what it contains. It is poison because of where it sits: outside the cycle, unable to become anything else. Heat without oxygen does not destroy. It converts. What goes in is a liability someone is paying to bury. What comes out is an asset. A fever is heat that heals; this is the same principle at industrial scale, applied to the things we cannot otherwise get rid of.
These are the six the film follows.
Material that costs money to bury becomes a product worth selling.
Carbon-negative power generated by the process itself.
Soil that holds water, feeds crops, needs less fertiliser.
Water filtered, contaminated ground restored, pollutants destroyed.
Concrete, polymers, insulation and filters, without fossil carbon.
Carbon held out of the atmosphere for centuries.
But what actually is biochar?
It is a stable, carbon-rich material obtained through pyrolysis — a thermochemical conversion of biomass in a high-heat, oxygen-limited environment. This process binds the carbon to the material rather than burning and emitting it as CO₂ into the atmosphere. Pyrolysis is Greek: pyro, "fire," and lysis, "separating," "decomposing."
This black, light, lifeless, coal-like material is a phoenix rising from the ashes — blossoming a new era of innovation and offering a practical, essential tool to help reverse climate change. It is circular, local, agnostic, from the bottom up. Biochar is the world's first and only fully circular waste-to-value product that can be integrated on every level and in every aspect of our society. Ergo, I made The Biochar Effect.
The Biochar Effect is Tree Media's seventh feature-length documentary.
Our films are released by major studios. Ice on Fire came out through HBO, The 11th Hour through Warner Bros., and both premiered in Official Selection at the Festival de Cannes. Our short film series have taken awards at festivals worldwide, from Zurich International to Seattle International, and our work has been narrated by A-list talent.
We make films about the problems the world overlooks — and, more often, about the practical solutions that already exist and almost nobody has heard of.
Our films go places.
Joined Tree Media in 2008. Produced Legion 44, a documentary on carbon dioxide removal, Ice on Fire for HBO, and The Arrow of Time, on Gorbachev and the end of the Cold War. Wrote and directed the Pollinators Under Pressure series for the USDA. Trained as a teacher before working in film, and lives with his family in the Hudson Valley.
Directed The 11th Hour for Warner Bros. and Ice on Fire for HBO, both premiering in Official Selection at Cannes. Founder of Tree Media.
Cinematography on Ice on Fire and The Biochar Effect. His work has taken awards at festivals worldwide.