Freya Burton, Chief Sustainability Officer and Head of Europe at LanzaTech, discusses carbon recycling, sustainable aviation fuel, and the 20-year journey from a four-person startup to a public company on Episode 27 of Scaling Green Tech, a podcast by Adopter.

Burton describes how LanzaTech captures waste carbon from industrial sites such as steel mills and uses microbes to ferment it into ethanol, a process she likens to brewing beer with carbon instead of sugar and bacteria instead of yeast. She traces the company from its 2005 founding in New Zealand by Dr Sean Simpson and Dr Richard Forster, through a 2008 pilot and a 2012 demonstration plant in China, to its first commercial plant in 2018 and six plants today. The conversation turns to why LanzaTech narrowed its focus to sustainable aviation fuel after listing on the Nasdaq, and how it reframes its work around energy security and economic value rather than emissions alone. Burton also explains why getting fuels policy right has taken more than a decade of work across the UK, EU and US.

This episode is relevant for founders scaling capital-intensive climate tech, carbon capture and utilisation investors, sustainable aviation fuel producers and buyers, and policymakers working on fuels regulation. 

Guest profile

Freya Burton is the Chief Sustainability Officer and Head of Europe at LanzaTech. She joined the company in 2007 as one of its first four employees, working in borrowed lab space, and has since held roles spanning safety, human resources, external affairs and policy. She previously served as the company's Chief People Officer and spent a long period based in the United States before moving into her current sustainability and Europe-focused leadership role.

LanzaTech is a carbon recycling company that converts waste carbon from industrial emissions into ethanol and other chemicals using a gas fermentation process. Founded in New Zealand in 2005 and now listed on the Nasdaq, the company operates six commercial plants worldwide across steel mills, ferro alloy mills and a refinery. It supplies ethanol made from recycled carbon, and related materials, to consumer brands in fashion, fragrance and household goods.

Explore the LanzaTech website. 

Find Freya Burton on LinkedIn 

Topics covered

• Explaining complex deep tech simply

• How carbon recycling works: the brewery analogy and the microbes

• Reaching commercial scale with a first-of-a-kind technology

• A non-linear founder journey: finding problems and solving them

• Building company culture and the risk of leader burnout

• How commercial strategy shifts from startup to public company

• Narrowing focus to win a single market

• Leading with value and energy security, not sustainability alone

• Building partnerships on data and proof points

• What investors prioritise at different stages of growth

• Funding capital-intensive tough tech, and marketing it to mainstream audiences

• Navigating regulatory uncertainty and advice for the next stage of scaling