01 / Waste-to-value systems / at mill scale
Soil-restoring fertilizer + carbon removal.
Kijani installs systems inside mills that turn agricultural waste into fertilizer, durable carbon removal, and power. On site, sold through the mill's own invoice. Defensible on feedstock, distribution, and data.
02 / The transformation
Harvested, crushed for sugar, fiber left behind
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03 / The problem
More than 540 million tons of bagasse is wasted every year.
Sugar is the first crop. Every mill sits on a mountain of bagasse, a problem the industry takes for granted: it burns or rots on site while the soils that grow the crop degrade.
A / Waste
Roughly 22 million shipping containers of fiber, every year, worldwide.
The piles smolder, leach into waterways, and self-ignite. What doesn't burn, rots.
Global rate: 540M+ t/yr ≈ 22M containers / one every ~1.4 s
B / Soil and farmers
Under the crop, the soil is failing.
The standard response is more chemical fertilizer. It feeds the loop instead of breaking it. Run each bag on the same soil and watch what holds.
- 65%of Africa's agricultural land is degraded
- 70%of applied nitrogen is lost to runoff and emissions
B / Soil and farmers
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C / The mill
For the mill, every pile is a standing liability.
Disposal costs money, environmental enforcement is tightening, and the pile earns nothing.
- Fire hazard
- Toxin source
- Compliance risk
Sources: Thiombiano & Tourino-Soto 2007 · IFDC 2023 · Burj Khalifa: CTBUH · Great Pyramid, Eiffel Tower: Britannica
04 / The system
Three waste streams in. Three products out.
Inputs already on site, zero collection logistics: the mill is the platform. Kijani converts bagasse, press mud, and fly ash in place, and the fertilizer sells back through the mill's own invoice to its contracted farmers.
Sugar mill
Bagasse, press mud, fly ash: waste already on site
Kijani system
Pyrolysis + activation, inside the mill fence
Three products
Fertilizer / durable carbon removal / surplus power
The mill's contracted farmers
Fertilizer sold on the mill invoice; cane returns to the mill
One platform, three products
01
Fertilizer sales
Semi-organic, cane-tailored, up to 40% cheaper for the farmer. Distributed through the mill invoice at near-zero acquisition cost.
02
Carbon removal credits
Durable removal from biochar locked in soil.
03
Clean power
Surplus energy from the system, returned to the mill as electricity where rural grids run weak.
05 / The engineering
Science isn't the bottleneck. Engineering is.
Bagasse pyrolysis is proven chemistry. Three reasons it never cracked mill scale: moisture, silica, and scale itself. All three are cleared. The specifics stay off the internet.
06 / The evidence
Four years in the field, peer reviewed.
The science of activated biochar is settled. The proof is in the field: a four-year trial on Louisiana sugarcane across full ratoon cycles, published by Lima and White in 2025 in Sugar Tech.
Source: Lima & White 2025, Sugar Tech. 4-year field trial, Louisiana.
07 / Impact: climate
21,000 tCO2e a year, per mill. Then multiply.
Locking carbon in soil, eliminating methane, and a profit incentive to keep doing it. Year 1 is one system at Angata; the buildout replicates it mill by mill.
Durable removal: carbon locked in soil as biocharBars on a square-root scale
08 / Impact: mills
The pile becomes a profit line.
Turning the mill's problem into a profit center: the pile becomes revenue, the cane supply grows, the compliance risk clears. That alignment is why the partnership holds for 20 years.
The pile becomes income instead of a disposal cost
Cane supply from healthier farmer soils
Environmental compliance exceeded
09 / Data & MRV
Every dot is a mapped farm.
18,000 farmers GIS-mapped before the first system ships. What exists today is below, next to what it is being built into: one data layer from feedstock to pyrolysis to distribution to field outcome.
In place today
- 18,000 farmers GIS-mapped
- Remote sensing tracking cane-growth progress
- Foundations for bag-level traceability
Building toward
- Estimating biochar output, carbon content, yield, and income across mills
- Bag-level traceability from batch to field
10 / Validation
Third-party signal, six months in.
MIT Climate & Energy Prize 2026
Finalist: 1 of 12 from 200+ applicants to the largest student-led climate startup competition in the world. The only startup from Yale, and the only one of ~60 African applicants to reach the finals.
Yale Miller Prize 2026
Finalist.
Yale Innovation Conference
Selected company.
HBS Foundry 2026
Cohort member, ~180 selected from thousands.
Partners and programs
- Decarbo Engineering
11 / Team
Built where the mills are.
Kijani is an American company, founded out of Yale. The founders grew up on western Kenya's sugar belt, and the mill and farming relationships behind the feedstock and distribution agreements are family relationships, decades old. US engineering discipline plus ground truth in the first market.
Sadiq Shamji
Co-Founder
Yale SOM, ex-McKinsey.
Aabid Shamji
Advisor
AI Lead, Ultraviolet.
Brian Ronson
Farmer Success
AI and data background.
Aali Shamji
Carbon & MRV
Puro and Isometric certification experience.
Venkatesh Prabhu
Agronomy & Soil Science
20+ years of sugarcane agronomy.
Thomas Hoffmann
Advisory Partner
Decarbo Engineering.
12 / Next step
Thirty minutes covers the numbers.
Unit economics, the Angata partnership, and the pilot plan, covered live. Investor access unlocks traction and farmer economics right on this page.
sadiq@kijani.io