Rural Women's Award finalist turning waste into biochar

CHRISTINA Guidici, co-owner of a local biochar business, is making waves as one of the five Tasmanian finalists for the Agri Futures Rural Women’s Award. 

The award celebrates the contributions of rural women across Australia with each state and territory winner to recieve a $15,000 Westpac grant to support their business, program or project, along with access to professional development opportunities.

Ms Guidici is the co-owner of the business The New Black Biochar which she founded with her business partner and engineer Bodie Cavanagh in 2021. 

The company is now on the cusp of scaling up its operations and entering full commercial production in the coming year. 

Ms Guidici first became passionate about agriculture and natural systems at a young age. 

“I was always interested in natural systems, even when I was a nerdy five-year-old I was telling everyone I would be an entomologist when I grew up,” she said. 

This early curiosity led her to pursue an agricultural science degree at university. 

After completing her degree, Ms Guidici worked in the renew able energy industry before venturing into a small business with her friend Juliet Chapman called FIMBY (Food In My Back Yard) to help clients grow their own food at home.

“At that time, I started to learn about biochar and began using it with my gardening clients and became more and more interested in it,” she said.

She soon became more serious about biochar, realising it was not only useful in growing more nutrient dense food but also to have an impact against climate change.

Ms Guidici said the process of making Biochar can be “very simple or very highly technical.” 

Created through a process called pyrolysis, it involves heating organic material without much oxygen to transform it into a stable, carbon-rich substance that resists decay. 

The process has significant environmental benefits, including carbon sequestration and the conversion of waste into some thing valuable.

“When you pyrolyze material you’re stabilising a good part of the carbon and it won’t ever break down, so if you use it in soils then it’ll be there for hundreds if not thousands of years, so essentially it’s very long term and durable storage of that carbon,” Ms Guidici said.

“The nice thing about biochar is that it can have multiple beneficial uses once it’s been made.” 

Ms Guidici said that biochar can be fed to animals to sup port their gut microbiome, and because it isn’t absorbed into their system their manure enriches the soil when returned to pastures. 

Ms Guidici’s goal with the business is to show it’s possible to build an environmentally and economically sustainable business out of waste, helping to turn what would otherwise be discarded materials into some thing valuable. 

If she wins the Rural Women’s Award for Tasmania, she hopes the increased exposure will raise awareness of biochar’s many benefits. 

“Any opportunity to let more people know about what it can do is really beneficial,” she said. 

“It’s very flattering, very humbling and very exciting to be a finalist,” Ms Guidici said.

“The other women— not just the finalists but all the women who were in the first round are all fantastic, exciting, and inspiring women doing really interesting things.

“Looking at the past years’ finalists and winners is also really inspiring; there’s people doing amazing things, so I was very grateful.”

Ms Guidici hopes that by demonstrating the viability of a business based on turning waste into biochar, others will be inspired to do the same.

“It is possible to make an environmentally and economically sustainable business from turning waste into biochar,” she said.

“I really hope that other people will see that and be inspired to do the same.”