VRDR Is Revolutionizing The $72.8 Billion Asphalt Market
Nearly every paved road in America is asphalt, and when a road gets repaved, more than 95% of the old surface is ground up and recycled into new roadway surfaces. Verde Resources (OTCQB: $VRDR) adds engineered biochar to the recycled mix, turning a repaved road into a place to store carbon that can earn carbon removal credits. The biochar behind it has now passed independent verification, and its carbon numbers sit in ASTM International's public library for any road builder or credit buyer to check.
VRDR's engineered biochar is biomass waste converted into a stable form of carbon, and its BioAsphalt binds the charcoal into pavement made entirely from recycled road that goes down cold, with no burners or solvents, so crews can lay it year-round. Fully recycled mixes usually end up buried in a road's lower layers, but Auburn University's National Center for Asphalt Technology measured a tensile strength ratio of 0.74 on VRDR's against the 0.70 threshold typically required for cold-recycled materials, putting it in line for the surface drivers ride on. The goal is a surface course made from a contractor's own scrap that paves year-round and stores carbon.
Public road jobs are starting to ask for documented carbon numbers, and VRDR's come in an Environmental Product Declaration, the standardized carbon report card for building materials, that WAP Sustainability, a part of SLR, built from a full life cycle assessment of VRDR's biochar. The declaration then cleared third-party verification for ASTM International's EPD library, making it among the first verified for biochar in road construction, and it reports the biochar's embodied carbon in a way that can capture the stable carbon locked inside it. California's transportation department requires the declarations on hot mix asphalt for qualifying projects, giving road builders who use VRDR's biochar verified numbers to count when a road's footprint is tallied.
The carbon stored in a VRDR road can also qualify for carbon removal credits, and a test strip at NCAT built from 5 tons of VRDR's biochar mixed into 110 tons of asphalt generated 8 tons of credits from Puroearth, the first ever issued from asphalt. A major global financial institution focused on carbon removal bought those credits, and VRDR is now working with Isometric to certify the carbon removal its roads produce. To supply those roads, Biochar Solutions has agreed to deliver up to 38,500 tons of engineered biochar a year, about half of it expected to qualify. Biochar credits typically sell in the mid-$100s per metric tonne of CO₂ removed, giving qualifying projects a second revenue stream alongside paving materials.
Ergon Asphalt & Emulsions, the largest asphalt marketer in North America, is taking that paving material to market under a 10-year agreement signed in July that makes VRDR its preferred vendor of engineered biochar for cold paving. The first project under that deal has VRDR supplying the biochar for Ergon's initial cold mix paving product, and the two are advancing the fully recycled BioAsphalt formulation that cleared NCAT's strength threshold. Ergon's first purchases pushed VRDR's FY2026 revenue up 251%, and Ergon has also invested in the company, with Ergon Asphalt & Emulsions CEO Patrick Nation calling the technology "simple, proven, and impactful." The two companies have pitched BioAsphalt for the next wave of AI data centers, where every campus needs roads, parking lots, and access drives paved before the first server goes in.
Companies making lower-carbon building materials are attracting billion-dollar acquisitions, and building materials maker CRH (NYSE: $CRH) agreed last year to pay $2.1 billion for Eco Material Technologies, which turns power-plant fly ash into lower-carbon cement material. VRDR applies the same waste-into-materials approach to roads and earns carbon credits on top of the material sale. The credits come from biochar, the same kind of carbon removal Microsoft (NASDAQ: $MSFT) has bought more of than any other company, signing for 46% of all biochar removal contracted through mid-2025. Fortune Business Insights sizes global asphalt at $72.8 billion in 2026 while Oliver Wyman projects carbon removal could reach up to $100 billion a year between 2030 and 2035, and VRDR's business model targets both markets.
Selling into both takes people who know biochar and pavement, and Director of Biochar Karl Strahl expanded Oregon Biochar Solutions into agriculture, environmental remediation, and sustainable building materials as its COO, helping launch the world's first insured biochar carbon removal credits along the way. Board member Dr. Raymond "Buzz" Powell covers the pavement side, having managed NCAT's test track before becoming Technical Director of the Asphalt Pavement Alliance. Chief Growth Officer Jeremy Concannon brings the sales record, having grown Innovative Packaging Co. year over year as its President until 360 Pack acquired it in 2021. CEO Jack Wong and COO Eric Bava, a Plantwise co-founder, lead the company, and with this bench in place VRDR has carried its technology from the lab to its first commercial-scale sales with Ergon.
Following testing and development with NCAT at Auburn, VRDR now heads into commercial paving with its carbon verified and the biggest asphalt seller in North America carrying the product. At home, Ergon and VRDR plan commercial projects through the rest of 2026, with target product volumes meant to move VRDR into recurring commercial revenue. Overseas, Highway International, the Singapore asphalt producer that developed the surface course for the country's Formula 1 street circuit, is preparing a pilot meant to make it VRDR's first foreign licensee. While pursuing a Nasdaq listing, VRDR is taking a cold, recycled road with a carbon buyer behind it into an industry that has paved with hot oil and burners for as long as there have been highways. Every mile that industry repaves is a road VRDR can sell twice, once as pavement and once as stored carbon, which is a lot of runway for a company with a market cap of $60 million.
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