Berthoud’s BioChar Now makes national TV on ‘Dirty Jobs’

“Dirty Jobs,” the Discovery Channel TV show that spotlights those employed in particularly strange or dirty jobs, was renewed last year after its cancellation in 2012, and with it comes a look inside a Berthoud business striving to help save the environment: BioChar Now.

Hosted by Mike Rowe, who has made blue-collar affectations his signature for nearly two decades, the show picked BioChar Now in Berthoud because, as CEO James Gaspard, said environmentalism is dirty work.

The episode aired on the Discovery Channel on Monday.

The firm takes waste wood, things like used shipping pallets, rotted or beetle-infested trees, and, crucially for this area, burned vegetation from wildfires, and converts it into pure carbon, which can then be used for a dizzying array of purposes: it can fertilize farmland, can be manufactured into a “seed ball” that contains a single tree seed and all the nutrients needed for it to grow, can be made into plastic or carpeting, can be added to animal feed to increase nutrient uptake and reduce methane emissions from cattle, and can be used to filter algae out of ponds and lakes, essentially a giant carbon filter.

All of this takes place in a carbon neutral manner thanks to BioChar Now’s innovative technology.

The company owns 100 kilns that take wood that would otherwise either burned up or dumped in a landfill and “superheats” it, during which time a chemical reaction that turns it into biochar takes place.

Thanks to a special apparatus atop the kiln and a computer program cooked up by Gaspard and his daughter, Jordan Gaspard, his partner and managing director, the entire process is carbon neutral and produces a pure product, as well as lots of soot.

Biochar itself looks a bit like coal or charred firewood in its raw form, but is shredded into small shards or dust for easier manipulation. It tends to get everywhere, and workers finish their days covered in black powder, Jordan Gaspard said.

That’s part of what led “Dirty Jobs” to their doorstep. While BioChar Now doesn’t work with sewage, animal parts or any of the other unpleasant substances that frequent Rowe’s TV show, their workers do get dirty. Never mind the fact that they’re working with rotted, burned or otherwise useless wood.

Gaspard said that his firm is essentially one of the only buyers of this kind of wood in the country. Other firms make biochar, but it is usually a byproduct, not something that is manufactured intentionally. Because making biochar is their sole focus, the Berthoud firm puts out a superior product to their competitors, the two Gaspards said.

Some of the wood comes from a sobering source — one pile, about two stories high and sprawling over perhaps 100 yards, all came from the Marshall Fire of December 2021. Cleanup crews brought it to BioChar Now to keep it out of the landfill so that they could, in Gaspard’s words, make some lemonade out of lemons.

Besides filling up already dangerously near capacity landfills, wood releases methane as it rots even if its buried. No such byproduct exists with biochar carbon capture.

It can still be a more depressing source of material than simple wooden pallets though, Jordan Gaspard said. Amid one of the hundreds of truckloads of waste the company received from the fire, she found a Christmas tree with ornaments still attached.

Reducing the environmental impact of burning and doing something useful with the wood that nobody else wants, or at least keeping it out of the garbage, is the major motivation behind the company.

“The niche thing about it, which the show didn’t really touch on, is that the wood we’re using has no value anywhere else,” James Gaspard said. “This was all headed to the landfill if we didn’t take it.”

The blue-collar attitude of the company, which Gaspard described as “a technology company that gets dirty,” is what appealed to Rowe and his producers, but dispelling notions about environmental work being “clean” was one element of the daily routine that the show captured.

“When you’re cleaning up the environment,” Gaspard said. “You gotta get dirty.”

The show is still available on various streaming platforms like Hulu Premium and YouTube TV.