A lot of the problem with plastics is that they become downgraded, right? You can only recycle them into downgraded applications, even just small dosages of our materials. We were finding that we could get first of all, more recyclability, so it could go through the recycling system more times without degrading or being reduced.

The other thing was the performance of it improve the product so it could almost act like an engineered plastic, which is very hard to combine in the recycling sector.

You’re listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern, your host, and I’ve got Madison Savilow on the Program Director of Corporate and External Affairs at carbon upcycling, a company that turns captured carbon into valuable materials like low carbon cement.

So Madison’s also an entrepreneur, and she co founded ACO, a consumer brand within the carbon upcycling company that partners with Adidas and has produced ink from carbon capture for more than 400 pairs of shoes. So excited to have you on the program Madison. Welcome.

Thanks so much. Really looking forward to it.

Tell us a little bit about what what started you on your trajectory to be in the environmental movement. It’s many things. I kind of fell into carbon capture and utilization, but I’ve always been interested in environmental sectors.

Growing up in Calgary, Alberta, obviously oil and gas and the energy sector is very prominent, but I was lucky to grow up with parents that were kind of environmentalists at heart and really interested in the Conservation of Nature and bunch of that really inspired me to be part of a space that was helping kind of, I guess, unroot some of the tendencies we have towards destruction of the environment.

So that’s really what got me started in this within carbon cap for utilization, I kind of just fell into it. I was looking for a part time job while I was actually still in university, and I found carbon upcycling, and I joined them planning just to have a relaxed, part time job while I finished my degree.

But of course, it was a startup, and it was nothing like that, but I fell in love with it, not just because we were building a company, which is super exciting to be a part of a startup, but we’re really shaping a new industry, and that opportunity doesn’t come around super often. So I was just, yeah, enthralled in it, and love the space.

That’s fantastic. And I guess no to all listeners, just kind of keeping your radar, you know, your radar screens open and to whatever may come your way, and some amazing opportunities can come when you’re the least expecting it. So tell us a little bit about carbon upcycling and what makes that company so special.

Yeah, so we are a carbon capture and utilization company, and first and foremost, that’s actually pretty unique. Most companies are either a carbon capture company, a removals company, a utilization company or a storage company, but we’re actually a full stack carbon capture and utilization company, without the use of a membrane or concentrating CO two before we sequester and store it into a final product that can be then used as the mint replacement within the concrete sector.

So the fact that we’re able to create value add products through our carbon capturing utilization process that’s very energy efficient, it’s very integratable into existing infrastructure allows us really to be adopted, kind of across the world, and we’ve really taken this stance of being a hyper local solution globally, and worked within the concrete and cement sectors to help them decarbonize what is already a very hard to decarbonize space.

So tell us a little bit about that hyper local and global. Those seem to be contradictory in terms, but I’m sure you’ll explain.

So the cement and concrete sector is kind of like a hub and spoke model. So you have a lot of concrete companies, because you can’t really transport concrete very far before it cures within the truck. So as you can imagine, there’s lots of them that kind of go small distances. However, there’s a lot of large but very few cement companies, so they act as that the hub that feeds into a whole bunch of bead downstream concrete companies. So it is a very local model.

We have to be working with it. And so that’s really what we’ve applied, is the circular economy model, localizing the supply chains by taking low grade industrial waste feed stocks, putting that into our carbon captioning utilization units that are based right at a cement facility, and allowing that material to kind of trickle downstream to the concrete companies, into the construction sector. And then we do that on a global scale. So in each region, we’ll go into cement companies and be able to place our technology and that gives us a global impact.

So are there other companies that are doing similar things to to your companies doing?

Yeah, so it’s been an interesting space. When I started, nobody was really talking about carbon utilization. It was a nascent field. Now it seems like there’s hundreds of different companies popping up here in. There. I think what’s really interesting about being in industrial decarbonization, particularly in the cement sector, is that the cement sector can’t really decarbonize without alternative materials. We can’t just electrify this problem away, mostly because it the chemistry problem.

As you heat limestone, you release CO two and that’s how you produce cement, and that process can’t be electrified. So there are a number of companies that are popping up that are doing alternative materials for different ingredients that go into concrete, and with the whole goal of basically being able to reduce the amount of cement we have to produce overall. What are your alternative materials? So the materials that we produce are from locally sourced industrial byproducts or waste.

So that’s part and parcel of our carbon capturing utilization process. So the first step is finding whatever material it is in a certain region that they have in abundance. So for instance, in Alberta, we have a lot of fly ash that sits in landfills. In Ontario, it’s going to be steel slag in the US, there’s a mix of those two, and there’s also a lot of clay that sits kind of just wayside from mining operation.
So we’ll take one of those three materials, the fly ash, the steel slag, or the clay, and we’ll put that into our carbon capturing utilization process, where we’re essentially exfoliating the particles of powder, of those materials in the presence of CO two to create alternative, cementitious materials. So that’s really what we’re putting into the concrete value gene. Are those alternative materials?

Oh, it’s fascinating, and obviously that is an important piece of the puzzle, because my understanding is that cement, concrete contributes a very substantial piece to the carbon usage of the planet. Absolutely

So. Concrete itself is 8% of global emissions, which is more than all the aviation worldwide. It’s a lot of emissions that are coming from this one building material. Of that, 90% of those emissions come specifically from cement formation. So a lot of people use cement and concrete interchangeably.

You can think of concrete essentially as cake. If you are making a cake, then the cement within that is the flour. So as you wet the flour, it becomes very sticky. It’s glue that holds all of the other ingredients together, and that’s a very carbon intensive process.

So where do you see your company going to next in terms of growth? And you haven’t spoken about another big market, China, which my understanding is China is using more cement and concrete than probably all of Europe and the US times five.

We do have to walk a little bit before we can run, although we’d like to think we can run first. So what we’re doing now is scaling up, first in in Canada, where we’ve been headquartered for years, and then into the US and into Europe. A lot of those have favorable markets for us. Another big thing that we focus on too is domestic manufacturing, because we are taking that hyper local, global kind of methodology to our work.

A lot of it is around securing supply chains, especially in North America, where we see this very problem, there’s a lot of forward import of cementitious materials and building materials. By localizing these supply chains, that’s a big focus. I mean, we’d love to get into other markets too. Definitely have a plan for that. But right now, we’re scaling up in the areas where we’re seeing some really great interest in decarbonization and in domestic supply chain manufacturing.

You know, I’ve heard some naysayers talk about carbon capture and that it encourages continued use of fossil fuels which are polluting. What’s your response to that?

It’s an interesting one. I think in some sectors, you can see that as being possible. I think right now, we’re not seeing a quick transition away from fossil fuels, and in sectors in particular, like cement, that production of material comes from chemistry. It’s not from necessarily fuel switching like this is something that we do need fossil fuels endlessly to produce.

We can’t really find any other solution for it. So if we can trap that before it causes any harm to the environment, that’s ideal, and utilizing that as a resource into the new materials that are acting as alternatives, that’s really the stats that we’ve been taking. I mean finding alternatives and obviously shutting off any fossil fuel use is the end goal, we want to see decarbonization and fall but if we have to act as fast as possible, we need all solutions deployed towards that. And CCU and CCS are a piece of that.

Although we really stand towards the utilization component, if you can find a value add from using the material rather than just storing it underground, I don’t see a better way of going about that.

So tell us how much savings of carbon, or less carbon is released if you are using your process versus the standard cement and concrete making process.

So typically, we see up to about a 60% carbon reduction. This is both from storing the CO two in. To that solid product that we’re selling, and also from the cement abatement. So there’s kind of two factors that go into our carbon reduction. We say 60% also, we’re playing really heavily within the ready mix concrete space.

There’s a lot of excellent solutions out there that are doing precast solutions. So these are like the molded concrete blocks jersey barriers. They take a bit of curing, and that only makes up about 15% of the market. The rest is already mixed.

So poured concrete on job sites is really hard to decarbonize, because you can’t cure it at the site. You have to be able to pour it and let it cure itself. And so finding alternatives for that is really where we’re geared towards.

Now, are you working in the carbon credit markets? And is that something that carbon upcycling is involved in, in any way?

Yeah, we’re starting down that route. We have done some work previously. There was a methodology under Vera that allowed us to access basically carbon utilization credits that were put into ready mix. I mean, there’s some new work that we’re looking to do, which should be very public very soon, on blended cement. So we’re really excited about that opportunity, also tracking quite closely some of the work by RMI and GMA on the book and claim system.

So essentially, this is decoupling the location of the concrete pour. Like I mentioned, it’s a very, very hyper local material use, because you can’t transport concrete very far without a curing and so they’re decoupling the poor from the environmental attribute and creating certificates, essentially that can be sold.

They’re a bit broader than carbon credits, and that’ll be a really exciting opportunity. It’s very similar, actually, to a power purchase agreement but you see in the renewable energy sector, so that’s something that we’re looking to take advantage of as well.

So do you think that the carbon credit market is working or in driving real change? Or, you know, there’s obviously a lot of criticism about that as well, saying, hey, there’s a lot of how many credits out there, especially as of the last five years or so, we’ve seen quite a few of the credits not be verified or audited in the way they should, and be found out to not be authentic.

So I think, obviously there is room for improvement significantly. So I think it’s a developing market, especially on the industrial decarbonization side, there’s actually very few sellers of these credits currently, if you compare it, especially to the natural solutions. I do think in terms of reducing green premiums and allowing these materials to be sold readily into the market to a very price and cost sensitive construction sector.

I think that’s a huge benefit, and can unlock a lot of potential material deployment that we wouldn’t see otherwise. But yeah, like anything else, I think in a new market, there’s a lot of room for improvement, and I think the scrutiny on it is air. I think we’ve seen some things not come out that are so great about this sector in particular.

Have you seen construction companies push back on using your materials as compared to traditional cement and concrete?

Yeah, really good question. I think the big thing they’re concerned about is two things. First of all, so there’s the cost associated with it, and then the performance. And what we’ve shown on the cost side of things is that because we’re using low grade waste materials to sequester and store CO2, which is also another waste, we’re able to keep our input costs quite low because we’re energy efficient with the way that we’re processing our material, it really keeps our costs low and comparative to what traditional costs are for cementing concrete.

So on a commercial scale, we’re able to address that quite readily and easily. The other side of things is performance. Of course, with any building material, you do not want to see it underperforming. That’s how you end up with a lot of building issues and cracks, and hopefully nothing that is too too serious. But in some cases, we’ve seen buildings come down because of the concrete mix designs, and I think they’re conservative for a reason.

And so the other piece of our work is making sure we can show that we have a high performance material that can go into the field, it meets specification, and we have robust testing on the back end here to show them with third party labs and everything to make sure that we’re meeting that. So those are kind of the two things that they consider and why they would maybe want to go towards what they’re conventionally used to. But once we prove those two things, we usually don’t have any issues.

So what kind of marquee type projects have? Has your product been used in done some some interesting ones.

A lot of them actually are in the realm of transportation and sidewalks, and those are a lot of the test bed applications that are used to de risk concrete. And so we’ve been really lucky. We’ll have those opportunities to trial the material. We’ve done some like housing foundations and residential sector opportunities. I think one of my favorite ones was a project we did with Minnesota Department of Transportation, and we talk about competitors, actually, it was a really interesting field deployment where 14 different low carbon concrete companies came out.

Everyone got an active section of highway to port. Their mix design within specification and show their carbon reduction. And we were really excited to have the highest level of carbon reduction of the 14 companies.

And of the 14 only three sections of highways didn’t have to be reported or refreshed, and ours was one of those. So when we talk about adoption of material, the workability and the deployability of the material is just as important as anything else, especially right at the operations level. So that’s probably my favorite project that we’ve done on the concrete side.

No, that’s fantastic. Kudos to you guys for coming in first. We’re all done. You kind of started to touch on how government can be involved and start to encourage that type of usage on a major scale, which then encourage, you know, 14 companies to get into the mix, or in the pun, you know, as to working on these types of projects. Are you seeing any governments require the usage of low carbon cement and concrete? And where do you see that going?

It’s a really good question. I don’t think we’re quite seeing it yet. I read this amazing white paper by WRI about a low carbon concrete national standard. How beneficial that could be. I think something like that, where you have to where a government would specify that low carbon concrete has to be the baseline would probably have to be tied to something like the environmental attribute certificates that can be traded just because of the location of some of those low carbon alternatives and just the scale that they’re currently at. I also don’t think it would be possible without performance based specifications.

So this is a big nuance in the sector, that a lot of the specifications of concrete are prescriptive. So it’ll tell you exactly what ingredients you have to put into your concrete versus performance base, which tells you what you want the concrete to do. And it seems intuitive that you just want to specify what you want the concrete to do and let everyone else figure out how to hit that. But you know, that’s something we advocate for, is switching more towards that performance base.

And I think that type of work is long time coming. It takes a lot of advocacy and swaying to make sure that those specifications bodies can work on that. But I think, yeah, if we can have some sort of national standard on low carbon concrete in a few nations, that will be really amazing. I think the only ones that we’re really seeing right now, we’re in Europe with maybe sea bam. So some of the carbon border adjustment work that’s happening, which does tie in cementing concrete, but nothing specific to a nation quite yet, is what I understand.

Well, I would think that you might have more luck at a local or state level, certainly not in the US right now on a federal level, so, but it seems like it wouldn’t be a bad place to start as starting local or starting at the state level, prove the concept and then go roll it out on a larger basis.

Oh, absolutely. And there are some good examples of that at the municipal level, like I noticing places like Vancouver and Toronto that are very interested in the sustainability factor have started to set the baseline, like the requirement of embodied carbon for each building. And they do it in different ways. In some regions, we’re seeing it as a function.

So say, a certain room could have X amount of carbon emissions associated with it, or the embodied carbon others on square or cubic meter or cubic yard of concrete. And so it’s been interesting to see how these are defined. And I think the more cities that can do that, or states that implement this, the better comparison we’ll have on how effective these regulations are. But yeah, those are starting to pop up, certainly at that level.

What are the most promising partnerships or collaborations you’re seeing that are helping scale the use of low carbon materials in the construction industry?

We have been super lucky to have some really great partners. So we got into carbon capture and utilization kind of as our platform technology, and you mentioned oko as our consumer brand, that was one of maybe 10 different applications of our CCU technology that we had had developed at the beginning of our work.

And it wasn’t actually until 2018 that we actually pinpointed concrete as our sole focus point, and that was through the Lafarge wholesome accelerator in France. So that partnership with Lafarge to be able to find our product market fit was excellent, and that really helped us shape our company. Going forward, we’ve had other investments from cement companies as well, from CRH, which is being by market cap, the largest cement company in the world, Cemex, which is the top five, and Titan, which is the top 10.

So we’ve had quite a great kind of buy in from the industry to be able to deploy this. And that’s something that’s been really helpful. I think, in terms of partnerships, finding industry champions, even if they haven’t invested, has been excellent. One of our local partners is called Burn Co.

They’re just not a running mix company. They’re 10 minutes down the road from us, and they’ve been outstanding and deploying our material and being that advocate for our work. So partnerships like that have been been amazing.

So how do the partnerships with these large, you know, top 10 companies in the cement industry? Well. Work. And what made is each one different kind of describe us a little describe your course.

In addition to the funding that these provided us through our financing rounds, they have also been obviously very incentivized at that point to do projects with us and help us along our journey and help us be successful in scaling up. And so part of that is project deployment and looking at site specific opportunities for us to deploy our CCU units right at their facilities.

That’s the biggest thing. Of course, they’re all different. They work at different paces. They’ve got different incentives, and even, I would say, channel partners for feedstock materials. And so that’s been a big thing to you, is trying to navigate that component in which regions are most applicable for us right now versus in later years. So that’s been the biggest thing, is that project execution partners have been really awesome.

So you’ve talked a little bit about Oka, and what are you doing with that project right now? I know you did the thing with Adidas and put the carbon, you know, put the ink on 400,000 pairs of shoes. What’s next?

So it was a really interesting product. So back when we found our product market fit, yet, we were really looking at the CCU spaces not being widely talked about. And so the whole purpose of VOCA really was just to bring awareness through the material. So essentially, to give people something tangible that they can touch and feel and start to understand what carbon utilization was, and it was supposed to be as simple as that, and kind of leave it as a marketing thing.

But then we got brands into it, and they got really excited about the material as it really aligned with their own decarbonization pathways, and how they were having few alternatives, materials wise, that they could implement to kind of de risk some of their own operations. And that’s kind of how it started, and we’ve had some really excellent opportunities.

So we did the pilot with Adidas, like you said on the ink that was a really cool project with their Terex shoe line to implement co tube into 400,000 pairs of shoes. We’ve just done a project with Kelly Ray so in the cosmetic sector, putting it into tubes, into plastics. Ground Truth has been an awesome partner of ours over the years. They’re both in the UK, and they make exceptional Bags.

They make backpacks and bags out of recycled plastic bottles, and then they integrated our material. Also is a bit of a performance piece, so it helped with the robustness of the material. So that’s been great. We are spinning this into more of an industrial plastics place, so that will continue to be a line of work. It will look a little bit different in coming months and years here, and we have a couple new partnerships that we’re working on, but that component itself has been really intriguing, even just to create the awareness of what CCU is.

I guess you use the P word plastics, and so normally that’s a bad word. But how are you making plastics better word for us to use?

So a lot of the problem with plastics is that they become downgraded. Right when you recycle them, you can only recycle them into downgraded applications. And so what we were finding with even just small dosages of our materials, we were using a CO two embedded graphitic nano platelet so graphite that we could put through our CCU unit.

We’d also use magnesium silicate, and we were finding that we could get, first of all, more recyclability, so it could go through the recycling system more times without degrading or being reduced. The other thing was the performance of it improved the product so it could almost like an engineered plastic, which was it’s very hard to combine in the recycling sector. Usually, like I said, it’s downgraded rather than finding higher use applications for it.

A part of the change or pivot that we’re doing to you is to find additional materials that are more like regenerative plastics, and so they can be recycled infinite number of times. So we’re working on some new applications there, and it goes beyond CCU. But, yeah, it’s an interesting space to play in, especially because plastic is so so villainized.

Yes, if it could be recycled infinitely, that certainly we give it, you know, it would be better product. I guess ultimately, if we recycle them all, I guess the problem is we don’t recycle them all, and that’s kind of gets out into the water and so on so forth, and degrades and we end up ingesting it. So that’s kind of the problem there. How do you see carbon utilization evolving over the next 5-10, years?

I think playing in the CCU space, in particular, the u component of that is so we’re not purely just storing the CO2. I think we’ll see just a more, like a wider variety, I guess, of materials that start to utilize CO2 as an input. So it actually could be plastics.

There’s a number of companies also working on plastic replications, bio plastics using CO2, and I think especially in the industrial components of the hard to decarbonize sectors, I think that’s where it fits so uniquely if we can create these circular economy models, or my favorite word is industrial symbiosis, of connecting these sectors together and having them kind of be inputs for each other where they weren’t otherwise.

I think that. Book work can be really impactful in decarbonizing these spaces. But, yeah, that’s the biggest thing I would see is kind of the breadth of materials that are being produced from CO2 I’m hoping that’s something we see increase significantly over the next five years and just the widespread adoption of it.

So how can consumers support these technologies? What choices can they be making that are more sustainable, more circular?

Really good question. I mean, there’s so many facets of that. From the concrete side, it’s interesting, because so much of the concrete that’s in use and in play today, obviously it doesn’t source co we’re still scaling up these technologies, and so consumers don’t really interact a lot with concrete. A lot of times they don’t even notice it. In a building that’s entirely concrete, when you’re looking at it, you don’t see it.

And so I think if you are a builder or you you’re about to develop a house or build something, you ask your general contractor what options you have for low carbon materials. And it’s very likely in a region that there will be some alternative material that you can access. It may not be the best alternative out there, just because it’s so localized, but there’s got to be something in a region, right?

And that’s where we can start to create this demand for the material. And if there’s enough demand in a region, we can go in and say, Oh, well, there’s so much here. We could develop a project. And so from our perspective, upstream of that creating that demand and that pull for the material throughout the value chain is hugely beneficial.

So really acting with your words, I guess, and being able to prescribe this if you are a project owner, is huge I think, in terms of circularity, I’m always on the side of not consuming what you don’t need. So, you know, trying to reduce and be more minimalistic, I think, is always a good one. It’s always easier not to have the product than have to deal with it later. And I think a big mindset shift is ownership.

So when you do have, you know, you’ve purchased or you’ve used a product, you’re responsible for that. Now, whatever it is, the packaging that it came in, the product itself, and taking ownership for it, I think is a really big mindset shift in putting that burden on yourself to deal with that. But that, of course, is behavior change, which is, in my opinion, one of the hardest pieces of climate change mitigation.

Absolutely, certainly a challenge, but I think that kind of dovetails with the idea of stewardship, and that we need to be good stewards of the planet and that for seven generations, or maybe 700 generations, if we’re really thinking out in the future that, how would we behave if we’re looking that far out in the future, would we pollute? I think the answer is no. So what’s your message to listeners who want to make a difference in the climate space? What do you say to them?

You know, there’s so many different ways to get involved, whether it’s voting, whether it is, like you said, getting involved in stewardship and making that mindset shift towards ownership of the impact that you have on the environment, whether it is with your work. I heard this really great stat not that long ago about how your climate impact is 1000 times greater your work and where you spend time during your job than it is in your own personal action, which is so interesting to think about, because you have so many more resources that are being pulled together as a collective.

And so if you can find work within a green space or a climate tech solution, I mean, that’s always an exceptional way to contribute. You know, spending time volunteering, and I think that’s a big thing. But I think of everything, the message that I would leave is just the education and awareness. I think one of the biggest problems that we’re facing right now in climate change mitigation is just the apathy component of it. And I think if we can get more people involved, I think that’s huge.

I appreciate that. And as you were speaking, you know, the last segment, I was thinking about the Cesar Chavez quote, which is, every dollar we spend is a vote. So, you know, certainly spending our dollars wisely on products that are less polluting, and as you said, Not using things that we don’t need, and take making more sustainable choices are all good ideas, I think, yeah, taking some action, I know, for me personally, just we have started the process of making our organization net zero and, like, just revealing in the process of trying to figure out what our missions are like.

Oh, coming from so many different angles, you know that you didn’t that I was completely kind of unaware of, you know or cannot as conscious of, and then you think, oh, yeah, we’re getting things from this place and that place and whatever. So yeah, everybody can have a voice at your workplace to say, hey, what can we do to cut emissions? What can we do to to be more sustainable? So for young innovators and entrepreneurs looking to make an impact in climate tech, what advice would you give them?

It’s kind of a similar response to what I said on you know, if you can find these opportunities to get involved with an innovative technology or startup, another big piece, actually, is being an intrapreneur. And I. I don’t think this gets enough attention. I guess it’s such an incredible unlocking of solutions and deployment of technology when you can find an internal champion at a large organization that’s willing to move the needle in adopting new solutions, new technology, low carbon technologies, and push them forward throughout a slow moving Corporation. Entrepreneurship is massive.

So if you can’t find a job at a clean tech startup or something working actually, and I know this is maybe criticized in some capacity, but working from the inside to find the opportunity to decarbonize can be just as valuable, especially when you have so many resources behind the large corporations. I would leave it at that is just thinking the entrepreneurship can be just as important.

I think that’s the word of the day for me. Intrapreneurs, we’re going to have to blast that out on the internet some more, because that’s kind of genius. Think that puts everybody in play. No matter where you are, you can start making a difference. You don’t have to be working for a tech startup that’s changing the world.

You could be working for a behemoth petroleum company, and still you can make a big difference, because they can cut their emissions more than anybody. They’re the biggest culprit. So you can make the most difference there. So, you know, everybody has a role to play. You know, I greatly appreciate Madison to have you on the program, it’s been fantastic.

Certainly gives me hope for the future to see young people who are so bright and doing such great work. And anything we can do to help you, please let us know. So everybody check out Madison and carbon upcycling and follow the company.

And who knows, maybe invest in the company at some point in time, maybe they’re going to go public and be a big hit. It sounds like they’re doing great stuff, and fortunate to have you on the show to tell us what you’re up to.

Thank you so much. That was great.

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