The New Nature of Business

Chapter 7How the Waste Guy Became a Superhero

“I love concrete.” It's a phrase you won't hear very often in real life. But at Holcim, a Swiss multinational construction materials company, it's a credo all employees live by. We noticed it for the first time when we went to visit Holcim's global innovation center in Lyon, France. A company executive proudly repeated the phrase throughout his presentation to a group of journalists. It sounded like an oddity at first, a quirky catchphrase from a man on a PR mission.

But then we started hearing echoes of the same sentiment again and again. We heard it when Magali Anderson, Holcim's first chief sustainability officer until 2023, talked to us about the role of cement and concrete in the world's CO₂ emissions. “We need to get to net-zero concrete production,” she said firmly. “But it would be foolish to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and stop building with concrete,” she also insisted. “From a systemic perspective, you need concrete,” she said. We even got e-mails, and LinkedIn posts and messages, of people proudly announcing that they, too, loved concrete.

But what is it about the material that has so many people excited about it, especially when it is also responsible for so many CO₂ emissions—at least 8% of global emissions come from the cement industry¹? More important, could this gray commodity ever play the role of climate and nature hero? To find the answers to these questions, we would love to tell you the story of ...