In the beginning of October, in the small Italian town of Troia, a pilot plant started sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere and turning it into carbon-neutral fuel. In Squamish, Canada, another pilot plant is doing the same thing. In Switzerland, a third plant is capturing CO2 to sell to a nearby greenhouse .

Run by two startups at the vanguard of the “direct air capture” industry, the plants use technology that can also be used for negative emissions–capturing carbon from the air to bury underground–something that the world will have to do at a large scale to avoid the worst global warming. (Climeworks, one of the startups, is already working in Iceland to capture CO2 that is injected underground and turned into stone.) But they also point to another opportunity. Because the level of atmospheric CO2 is equally high everywhere, capturing it and turning it into products can potentially bring back jobs to areas that have lost other industry.

“The beauty of direct air capture is you can build it really anywhere,” says Louise Charles, a senior representative for Climeworks, the company running the pilot plant in Italy and commercial plant in Switzerland. (Capturing CO2 from existing power plants could also help power industry where they’re already built.)

A plant in Ohio or Turkey or Palau could capture CO2 to make a variety of products, from plastics to fuel. A shoe company, for example, could use it to make the materials for a new shoe, says Julio Friedmann, a senior research scholar at the Center for Global Energy Policy at Columbia University and former Obama administration official who has studied direct air capture for years. “You could have a manufacturing base in the heartland, in small rural America, making whatever the community needs, potentially manufacturing it for sale nearby.”

The first product from the nascent industry is likely to be fuel (the liquid fuel works in any current gas engine). “Our near term business plan focuses around what economic value can we get out of atmospheric CO2, and the answer is you have to make a product that values carbon and for which there is a market, and that today is fuel,” says Steve Oldham, CEO of Carbon Engineering, which expects to finish raising financing for its first commercial plant over the next few months.

A study earlier this year found that the cost of capturing carbon could be far less than previous estimates, at less than $100 a ton. It’s still much pricier than a barrel of crude oil, though the company expects to reach cost parity over time. But even now, carbon pricing in place in some regions makes fuel economically viable. Airlines will be able pay the same amount as they would for normal jet fuel, while Carbon Engineering can recoup the additional cost through a carbon credit or carbon tax program.

If similar policies existed for plastic–a penalty for plastic made from fossil fuels and an incentive for plastic made from atmospheric CO2–that industry could also shift, Oldham says. “If that was the case for plastics, then the plastics industry will be phoning us up straight away saying, ‘We want to buy your CO2.’ It’s really a question of policy to try and direct whatever dollars governments choose to put into decarbonizing.”