Where Climate Recovery's EIC Accelerator Fire Ducts Stand Today

Most ventilation ducts in European buildings are sheet steel tubes wrapped on site in a separate layer of insulation. Climate Recovery Ind AB, a company in Kalmar on Sweden's south-east coast, made them from hard-pressed glass wool instead, so the duct and its insulation were one piece, delivered flat and folded round on site. In 2019 the EU backed a second product: a version in stone wool that would hold back a fully developed fire for 30 or 60 minutes. The European Commission selected the project, SAFEVENT, in the 9 January 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the grant-only forerunner of today's EIC Accelerator, according to the Commission's list of selected companies. CORDIS records an EU contribution of €1,673,875 towards a total cost of €2,391,250, with Climate Recovery as the only beneficiary, from 1 July 2019 to 30 April 2022, according to the project fact sheet.

The fire-rated duct was built. It was called Protector, and it had its premiere at Nordbygg, Scandinavia's largest construction fair, at the end of April 2022, according to the project's final report on CORDIS. Two years later the company was bankrupt. Bankruptcy proceedings opened on 31 July 2024, according to Newsworthy, and the trustee said the filing followed a decision by the company's Dutch owner to stop putting in money, according to Branschaktuellt, citing the local paper Barometern.

Where the Company Stands Now

Climate Recovery Ind AB no longer exists as an operating company. Ratsit, which publishes data from the Swedish Companies Registration Office, gives its status as "Konkurs avslutad 2026-04-17", bankruptcy concluded on 17 April 2026, and lists the company as no longer registered for VAT, for F-tax or as an employer, according to its company page. North Data marks the company as terminated, the label it uses for dissolved companies. The credit agency Syna still shows the earlier status "Försatt i konkurs", declared bankrupt; the two sources disagree only on whether the proceedings have ended.

The company's websites are gone. The domain climaterecovery.se, which CORDIS lists as the project website, no longer resolves, and climaterecovery.com redirects to a GoDaddy page offering the domain for sale, as checked in October 2026.

A new company was formed in Båstad on 11 November 2024 and took the name Climate Recovery Duct in Kalmar AB on 7 March 2025. Its stated purpose is the manufacture and sale of ventilation ducts, and its only board member, Göran Bernhardsson, also sat on the board of the bankrupt company, according to Ratsit and Syna. Climate Recovery's president was named as "Grand Bernhardsson" in a 2016 announcement. The new company is not registered as an employer or for VAT, has no industry code and has filed no accounts. Whether it bought any of the bankrupt company's machines, patents or stock from the estate could not be verified, and no product or sale of the new company is public.

The Technology: A Duct That Is Its Own Insulation

Sources differ on when the company started: CORDIS and the Swedish register give 2009, while the Impulse Foundation (formerly Solar Impulse) profile gives 2008 and names Jarl Bengtson as founder. Climate Recovery's first system, Originator, was launched in 2015. It is a round duct with a 30 millimetre layer of hardened glass wool made from recycled glass, faced with aluminium foil, hexagonal on the inside and delivered in flat packs, according to Ahlsell, the Nordic installation wholesaler that sold it. The company claimed over 80% lower CO2 emissions than a conventional duct; Ahlsell repeats the figure, but it comes from the company and no independent check of it was found. In 2016 the company ordered production equipment from the machine maker MPN and claimed its ducts were 50% lighter and 50% faster to install than sheet metal, according to Global Insulation.

Glass wool cannot stand the heat of a fire, which kept the product out of the many building zones where ducts must pass between fire compartments. Those ducts are usually steel, wrapped in a separate fire-rated insulation on site. SAFEVENT was meant to close that gap. The CORDIS objective describes a "steel-free" pre-insulated duct based on mineral wool for land and marine construction, and names installers, distributors, licensees and building owners as users.

The finished product was not entirely steel-free. Climate Recovery's archived Protector product page from August 2022 describes a stone wool core lined inside with a 0.05 millimetre stainless steel foil, covered with aluminium foil and a black polypropylene layer, built for fire compartments that must withstand 30 or 60 minutes of fire, with all parts tested to the European standard EN 1366-1. The company claimed 50% less environmental impact than conventional manufacture, a figure no independent source confirms. Ahlsell's 2024 article says Protector meets fire resistance EI30 and EI60 and reaction-to-fire class A2-s1, d0, and the construction product database of Svensk Byggtjänst lists the company's pre-insulated ducts as class A2-s1, d0. The test reports themselves are not public.

What SAFEVENT Promised, and What the Record Shows

The January 2019 round was competitive: 1,752 proposals were submitted and 64 projects were proposed for funding, sharing €119,986,758.94, according to the Commission's flash call information for the cut-off. The project ran for 34 months and finished on its scheduled end date. Its final report, for December 2021 to April 2022, says the team spent most of that period on fire resistance testing and on the redesign of the production equipment, that "all milestones have been achieved", and that the product had its world premiere in April 2022. The report also says the product was to be "approved for European sales through CE-certification and launched on the market" within the project. Among its public deliverables, CORDIS lists one titled "Full scale production launched", alongside a white paper on fire safety rules and an in-house training programme.

The record after the project tells a different story about production. In March 2024, almost two years after the launch, Ahlsell wrote that for Protector the company was "waiting for a larger order to be able to make the investments required in production equipment". That is hard to reconcile with a full-scale production launch by April 2022, and on Ahlsell's account the fire-rated duct was still not made on a production line of its own. No CE declaration for Protector was found. No customer, building or sales figure for Protector is public. The marine market named in the CORDIS objective appears in no later announcement: the references the company and Ahlsell cite, such as the Hoppets preschool in Gothenburg and the K1 Karlbergs Strand office building in Solna, are land buildings using its ducts, and none is named as a Protector installation.

1. Fire-resistant mineral wool duct and fittingsDeliveredProtector, EI30 and EI60, per the product page and Ahlsell.
2. Market launch within the projectDeliveredPremiere at Nordbygg, April 2022, per the final report.
3. CE certification for European salesNot verifiedNo CE declaration found; standard tests are claimed.
4. Full-scale productionDisputedCORDIS deliverable title against Ahlsell's March 2024 report of a missing production investment.
5. Entry into marine constructionNot achievedNo marine customer or order announced.
6. Growth of the companyNot achievedBankrupt in July 2024.

The Money

The filed accounts show a company that never sold much. Net sales were SEK 5.4 million in 2019, SEK 4.2 million in 2020, SEK 5.0 million in 2021, SEK 3.9 million in 2022 and SEK 4.2 million in 2023. Net losses in the same five years were SEK 21.1 million, 19.2 million, 21.3 million, 24.3 million and 18.1 million, a total of SEK 104.0 million, according to the annual accounts as published by Ratsit. Syna gives the same 2023 figures: SEK 6,464 thousand in turnover, a loss of SEK 18,133 thousand and 14 employees. The headline turnover figures of SEK 6.3 million for 2022 and 6.5 million for 2023 include other operating income of SEK 2.4 million and 2.3 million; that is why Newsworthy reports SEK 6.3 million for 2022 while Branschaktuellt reports SEK 3.9 million. The accounts as published do not say what the other income was.

Staff rose from 4 in 2019 to 11 in 2020 and 14 from 2021 to 2023, as the EU project ran. At the end of 2023 the company reported equity of SEK 19.5 million and an equity ratio of 79.5%, up from 22.4% in 2019. With losses of around SEK 20 million a year, that ratio could only rise with new capital, and Barometern's reporting attributes the support to the owner. It stopped in 2024. Chief executive Ulf Arnemo told Barometern that the Dutch owner, which had supported the company for ten years, had decided to end the relationship, and that he still hoped for a new owner who could continue making the ducts, according to Barometern. The trustee, Erik Gabrielsson of Maze Advokater, said he would examine keeping the business running in the short term and prepare a sale. No buyer of the business has been announced.

Why It Matters for Europe

Buildings use around 40% of the energy consumed in the EU, and the recast Energy Performance of Buildings Directive requires the life-cycle global warming potential of new buildings to be disclosed in their energy certificates from January 2028 for buildings over 1,000 square metres and from January 2030 for all new buildings, according to the European Commission. That puts the embodied carbon of building services such as ductwork on the table for the first time, which is the market Climate Recovery bet on. Barometern's report on the bankruptcy noted that new EU directives pointed to good market prospects. The company did not survive long enough to test them.

Mineral wool ducts were also not unique to Climate Recovery. In October 2023 it agreed to resell Isover's Climaver, a rectangular duct of glass wool from recycled glass, in Sweden, and Isover described the combined offer as a self-supporting alternative to sheet metal ducts, according to Energi & Miljö. The idea of insulation that carries the air itself therefore lives on with a much larger manufacturer.

The Verdict

The company's former management and the EIC have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records and published statements, linked throughout.