ClimatePave Launches to Accelerate Sustainable Roadbuilding further
Author of the first transport sector carbon methodology moves beyond project development into standards for road building carbon and durable storage of high carbon materials in pavement
(Phoenix, Maryland) September 1, 2026 · ClimatePave today launched to address a compounding problem in public infrastructure. Road networks are deteriorating faster than they are being renewed, and the material already in the road is being discarded rather than reused. Each year that pattern continues, the backlog grows and the eventual cost of rehabilitating a road increases exponentially. ClimatePave treats the carbon in road rehabilitation as a measurable, verifiable asset, and directs the value it carries back into the cost of road reconstruction. The company authored VM0039 Methodology for Use of Foam Stabilized Base and Emulsion Asphalt Mixtures in Pavement Application, v1.1, the first carbon methodology approved for the transport sector, and holds US Patent 10,870,953 B2. It has since deployed five registered projects under the Verra’s Verified Carbon Standard, recycling 5.14 million tonnes of asphalt pavement across 4,926 lane miles and avoiding 384,973 tonnes of CO2 equivalent that conventional hot mix would have produced.
The methodology quantifies the emission reductions achieved when cold recycling of asphalt pavement replaces conventional methods such as hot mix and warm mix asphalt (hma/wma). A road is rehabilitated using the pavement from the damaged road, recycled in place, or with stockpiled asphalt millings that would otherwise sit abandoned and are instead put back into service. Conventional paving generates its emissions across a long chain: quarrying and crushing virgin aggregate, hauling it to a hot mix plant, heating it and introducing crude petroleum derived liquid bitumen binder to manufacture the mix at roughly 300 degrees Fahrenheit, then transporting the finished mix to the job site and installing it. Cold recycling eliminates every one of those steps by using the pavement already in place, reducing emissions by up to 70 percent for the same performance, on a road surface that can be recycled again on each subsequent rehabilitation cycle.
Why the backlog compounds
A road that is treated early can be preserved. A road that is deferred long enough must be reconstructed, at up to 10x times the cost per lane mile. Underfunded agencies defer, deferral escalates the treatment required, and the escalated cost consumes the budget that would have preserved the next road. The backlog does not sit still. It grows rapidly over time. The cost of that deferral falls on taxpayers, who fund the overwhelming majority of road mileage in the United States.
Discarding the existing pavement makes the arithmetic worse. Conventional rehabilitation removes a serviceable aggregate structure and the binder holding it together, hauls both away, and replaces them with virgin material mined from quarry and delivered at 300 degrees fahrenheit. The agency pays twice: once to remove an asset it already owned, and again to import its replacement. Cold recycling keeps that structure in service, which is why agencies specifying it report savings above 25% against conventional rehabilitation.
What ClimatePave does
ClimatePave takes road rehabilitation work that would have been completed with conventional hot mix and shifts it to cold recycling, then registers the difference as a verified carbon reduction. Across the five registered projects that has meant 741 individual road rehabilitations moved off the conventional method, in 21 states, alongside the contractors who bid them. The credits are issued, and the revenue returns to the parties carrying the risk of proposing the recycled option.
ClimatePave has built a platform that deploys methodologies into new markets, sets the standards by which road building carbon is quantified, scalability to federal standards, and gives road owners a way to treat carbon as part of the economics of the job.The engineering case for cold recycling has been settled for decades. The equipment is proven, the specifications exist, and the performance record is long. What has held adoption back is everything that surrounds the engineering: the burden of proof falls on the contractor, who carries the performance risk and then has to educate a specification writing audience of some at least 31,000 separate road owning agencies across the United States, each with its own manual, its own precedent, and its own reasons to repeat what it did last year. Inertia at that scale does not yield to a better argument. It yields to a change in economics.
Carbon finance supplies that change. Over six years of registered projects, ClimatePave has used carbon revenue to fund demonstration work, underwrite contractor risk, and give agencies grounds to write cold recycling into the next bid rather than the one after it.
"You cannot persuade thirty-one thousand agencies to rewrite their specifications one meeting at a time. You change the economics of the bid and the specifications follow. That is what a carbon methodology does." ClimatePave’s CEO Tim Kenney
A verified track record
The five registered projects span 21 states and cover work delivered between 2018 and 2024. Beyond the recycled tonnage and avoided emissions, shifting those rehabilitations off conventional methods eliminated 190,879 haul truck trips that would otherwise have carried old pavement out and new material in. Pilot programmes now active in five additional states bring the total footprint to 26.
Why roads
Roads are the largest publicly owned asset in most jurisdictions and among the most costly and carbon intensive things public agencies buy. Underfunding turns the emissions problem and the budget problem into a single problem, and the same intervention addresses both.
California illustrates the pattern at scale. The state's most recent statewide needs assessment identified a $74.3 billion pavement funding shortfall, with 54 of its 58 counties carrying networks at risk of falling below serviceable condition. Comparable arithmetic holds across most road owning economies.
"We have spent six years quantifying what a road can avoid. The next question is what a road can hold. There is a considerable volume of carbon in biomass waste seeking a durable home, and a considerable volume of pavement under our feet."
Founder, ClimatePave, Harold Green
What comes next
ClimatePave is developing standards and methodologies that treat the road itself as durable carbon storage. Biochar, bio oils, and other high carbon materials derived from biomass waste require a permanent destination. Pavement is a large, engineered, long lived structure that exists in every jurisdiction on earth and is rebuilt on a known cycle, which makes it one of the more credible options available. The work now is the technical foundation: quantification protocols, specification language, performance criteria, and verification pathways rigorous enough for stored carbon in a road to be recognised by a registry and trusted by a buyer. Storage performance figures under this pathway are modelled and pending independent validation.
About ClimatePave
ClimatePave makes the carbon reductions and storage in road building a financeable asset. The company authored VM0039 Methodology for Use of Foam Stabilized Base and Emulsion Asphalt Mixtures in Pavement Application, v1.1, the first carbon methodology approved for the transport sector under the Verra Carbon Standard, and holds US Patent 10,870,953 B2. It operates five registered projects, has delivered verified emission reductions across 21 states, and is developing the standards for durable carbon storage in pavement. ClimatePave works with road agencies, contractors, and corporate carbon credit buyers to make cold recycling the standard approach to road renewal.
Media contact
Theo Brandon, Commercial Director
