Concrete is the backbone of modern infrastructure—but it has had environmental costs. Cement, the key ingredient in concrete, accounts for an estimated 7% of global carbon emissions, making it a significant contributor to climate change. As the construction sector explores ways to decarbonize and reduce its environmental impact, companies in the building and construction supply chain will be focused on innovating without compromising cost or performance.

In this episode of Sustainability Leaders, Caroline Donlin, Managing Director and Head of Engineering and Construction at BMO, speaks with Kristal Kaye, Interim CEO of CarbonCure, and Marty Ozinga, CEO of Ozinga, about their partnership to advance sustainable concrete. CarbonCure’s technology permanently stores captured CO₂ in concrete while reducing cement use, and Ozinga—a century-old concrete supplier—has embraced this innovation to scale sustainable solutions across its operations. Together, they explore the economic, technical, and cultural shifts needed to decarbonize one of the world’s most essential building materials.

Below are highlights from the conversation.

Caroline Donlin: Kristal, could you set the scene for us by describing what are the challenges that CarbonCure is addressing through its unique mission?

Kristal Kaye: The scale of global construction is really hard to put into words. In effect, the world is building a new New York City every month. Most of that is infrastructure, housing, and commercial centers will be built with concrete. It's the world's most used building material, thanks to its versatility, reliability, and durability.

Our technologies enable producers like Ozinga to permanently store captured CO2 in concrete and allows them to adjust the amount of emissions intensive cement in their mixes.

Less cement means less emissions, but as important, less material costs for manufacturers. For every metric ton of CO2 reduction, CarbonCure also generates carbon credits. Our carbon credit revenue sharing program neutralizes the cost of the technology for our producer partners, and it removes an adoption barrier for our technology by unlocking the opportunity to win new green building projects.

Caroline Donlin: I'd love if you could explain more about how CarbonCure's technology works and what makes it distinctive in the sustainable building material space.

Kristal Kaye: CarbonCure’s solution is a drop-in technology, so it easily integrates with existing plant operations and batching softwares in a number of concrete producers around the world. More important, it's stackable, so it can be used with other sustainability solutions such as lower carbon cement materials, cement replacements like fly ash or slag or other products.

Caroline Donlin: Marty, what motivated Ozinga to partner with CarbonCure and what impact has the collaboration had on your customers and your business?

Marty Ozinga: We've always been interested in new technology, innovation in our space, things that create value-add for our product. And so we've always been on the lookout for those. And so it was natural for us to embrace something that was new and different for our industry. And what appealed to us was that it was fairly seamless with integrating into our plant, but also seamless to our customer.

Caroline Donlin: What other barriers do you see to adoption of a technology like this from the manufacturer side?

Marty Ozinga: When you get right down to the concrete plant, you really need to have high production and not disruptive sort of things that really change how you do things. But I think for new technologies, I think for people to be thinking about is how do we make this as easy to use, user-friendly as possible and is the price point competitive in the marketplace?

I think those are two key factors that someone should be thinking about as they think about new tech in our space.

Caroline Donlin: How do you see the future of this technology evolving in the sector?

Marty Ozinga: So, I think it's an issue that doesn't seem to be going away worldwide. This issue of trying to decarbonize all aspects of products and services. Part of the issue right now, depending on the jurisdiction, a lot of it continues to be voluntary, and yet there's a lot of people trying to get ahead of any kind of mandates that would be in place or incentives, whether it's sticks or carrots, it's to be determined depending on where you are. But I think the issue that's really critical is measurement and making sure that there's third party verification of the measurement because you can't really manage what you don't measure.

Caroline Donlin: What's one bold step the industry must take in the next year to truly move the needle?

Marty Ozinga: I think the biggest thing continues to be transparency of the data, just making sure that everybody has good high-quality data that they can trust.

Kristal Kaye: I would agree with Marty. Data is key. We're focused ourselves right now on ensuring our customers have the data on hand to show them specifically what the CO2 impact they're having in their business, how they could do better, where they have batches, perhaps where they haven't used our product as much as they could or what the potential in the cement savings could be.