Cypher Environmental Shares Cleantech for Clean Roads

The Cypher Green Roads program helps conserve water while keeping harmful chloride-based products from being exposed to the environment by sharing the same cleantech solutions used globally by major industries with communities next door.

Cypher Environmental’s core mandate is to develop 100% environmentally friendly products that help their clients solve environmental challenges like dust and poor road quality. Many chloride-based products used for dust suppression and road stabilization are harmful to the environment, rusting vehicles, destroying infrastructure, polluting ground water, and killing roadside vegetation.

The cleantech road solutions offered by Cypher Environmental have been adopted worldwide, which has given the Cypher Environmental team the opportunity to travel to many countries around the world to offer on-site support. Often, the application sites are in remote areas where new cleantech innovations aren’t readily available, or affordable. It became apparent that many of the host communities near the application sites also faced the same challenges on their roads as the major industries next door.

Cypher Environmental wanted to find a way to offer these small communities the benefits of the cleantech solutions’ major industries — such as mines, forestry, and energy companies — use to be more sustainable and environmentally friendly. The Cypher Green Roads program was launched in 2021 with this objective in mind.

Through the Cypher Green Roads program, Cypher Environmental, along with their community-focused and like-minded customers, donates up to 5% of a project’s value to local communities nearest to the client. The Cypher Environmental donation is made in the form of the identical product being used by the clients to make their road networks more sustainable, thus, encouraging the sharing of best practices of a cleantech product between the mine (or other industrial partner) and the local community.

This sharing of both product and best practices is intended to involve community members who can gain essential knowledge and skill sets in applying the cleantech solutions to their road networks, helping to promote a more sustainable community long-term.

By using Cypher Environmental products on their haul roads, for example, mining clients can save millions of litres of water per year, eliminate any potential dust emissions, and substantially reduce fuel consumption while improving road conditions and reducing the operation’s overall CO2 emissions.

Add in the reduced need to maintain the road and Cypher Environmental clients see significant savings in operating costs and environmental footprint — benefits that can all be extended to communities when their roads are treated.

While the program is global in scope — the initial project was successfully undertaken with B2Gold in New Fadougou, Mali, West Africa — in Canada, all Cypher Green Roads donations have been made to First Nations communities, helping to create positive economic and environmental impact in First Nations communities across Canada.

Buy-in for the Cypher Green Roads program has been very high, with the mining, forestry, and energy companies etc. that participate often agreeing to publicly share the joint initiative, thus shedding light on the uptake of cleantech solutions by small communities globally.

This helps to support a trend towards net-zero and more sustainable communities and sets the bar high for other companies in the industry to follow suit.

Through the donation of products, labour, equipment, and know-how, Cypher Environmental, in partnership with their customers worldwide, can create long-term value for local communities by improving and strengthening their roadway infrastructure by shaking things up a bit and helping the dust settle.