You're switching contexts.

When you switched from burning lignin to solar, you reduced your carbon usage.

However, what happened to the lignin that you stopped using?

If it was burned somewhere else, the total carbon usage remained the same even though you changed your usage.

If it was stockpiled and is now decomposing over three years, the carbon usage was time-shifted and will be back where it was in three years. (However, total carbon usage will be reduced the first and second year.)

This is supposedly a usage of lignin that results in no release, so it actually is carbon-negative (assuming that the processing doesn't use more carbon), regardless of what other folks think that they did. That said, it's probably actually just time-shifted, albeit on a long time-scale.

Note that both coal and diamonds are actually time-shifted carbon usage, on the scale of millions of years.

This is a very fair question. We need to be mindful going forward in how we communicate. We can say that our Scope 3 emissions are negative, but scope 1 we are slightly positive (but still much lower than competition) Just to clarify; we go from 7-10kg CO2 positive for traditional methods, to 5 kg negative in two steps; Step one is we reduce emissions from transport, extraction etc because we have a better Crusher which recycles the road better, which takes us to just above 1kg pr m2 - massive savings already from the traditional method, and this could be counted mostly in Scope 1 or 2, some of it in 3 (reduced extraction). The remaining ca -6 kg is the effect of lignin - here debated in the thread and that we are saying is carbon negative. This is a scope 3 effect.

Thanks for pointing out! We are still a young company and need to work on our Scope 1-3 accounting :)

Yes - time and degradation is key. All evidence we have as of today suggests close to none degradation of the lignin, and if/when eventually some degradation happens (yet to happen on the roads we have from 14y back), sequestration downwards in the soil, from the deep stabilized road layer we have bound with lignin. This is a very important area for us to pioneer research on going forward to get completely right, thanks for all the comments here, it will help us sharpen our efforts.

Its a complex highly aromatic (in the chemistry sense) large molecule that there is active research in trying to convert to useful chemical products.

However it's quite difficult to break its bonds in ways that yield useful compounds. And until there is a viable way of upcycling it, burning it for energy is what they do

This is how we lose the war against global warming. The process here is simple: 1. Tree captures carbon 2. Carbon gets buried in a road.

Simple.

For warming we can use electricity generated by wind, solar, tides etc.

Do not move the goalposts.

Do you have a source that the binder is currently being used as a fuel source? I'm missing where that's implied by the OP.