Resources

• CarbonBuilt company profile
• Carbon XPRIZE
• Industry Resources
  • Decarbonizing Concrete: Deep decarbonization pathways for the cement and concrete cycle in the United States, India, and China (Industrial Sustainability Analysis Laboratory)
  • BCG-WEF Project: Mission Possible Partnership (BCG)
  • To Decarbonize Cement, the Industry Needs a Full Transformation (Canary Media)
  • Cementing your lead: The cement Industry in the net zero transition (McKinsey)
  • Concrete is Worse for the Climate Than Flying. Why Aren’t More People Talking About It? (Inside Climate News)
  • Concrete needs to lose its colossal carbon footprint (Nature)

Guests

Climate Rising Host: Professor Mike Toffel, Faculty Chair, Business & Environment Initiative

Moderator/Panelists:

• Rahul Shendure, CEO and Director at CarbonBuilt.

Transcript

Editor’s Note: The following was prepared by a machine algorithm, and may not perfectly reflect the audio file of the interview.

Rahul Shendure:
Growth is going to happen one way or another. With the choice we have to make is, is it going to happen with the emissions intensity of concrete in the past or the way we can make it happen going forward? To me, there's a clear right answer on that.

Mike Toffel:
This is Climate Rising, a podcast from Harvard Business School, and I'm your host, Mike Toffel, a professor here at HBS. Today's episode is the second in our series on hard to abate sectors, those sectors with some of the most significant contributions to global greenhouse gas emissions and where decarbonization depends on scalable cost-competitive technologies. In this episode I'm talking with Rahul Shendure, CEO and Director of CarbonBuilt. His company is developing technologies to decarbonize concrete by replacing carbon-intensive cement with a combination of industrial waste materials and carbon dioxide often captured directly from industrial sources.

I ask Rahul about how CarbonBuilt's technologies both reduce cost and concrete's massive carbon footprint as well as their customer acquisition strategy. Here's my interview with Rahul Shendure from CarbonBuilt. Rahul, thank you so much for joining us here on Climate Rising.

Rahul Shendure:
Thanks, Mike. It's great to be with you today.

Mike Toffel:
So it's always especially great to have guests who are alum of our schools. So you graduated from our MBA program in 2001. Have been out for just over 20 years. I'd love to hear a bit about your role at CarbonBuilt.

Rahul Shendure:
Yeah. I'm the CEO of CarbonBuilt, but that means I partnered with our founder who's a professor and the original inventor of the technology at UCLA to spin the company out in late 2020. This is very much a culmination of a journey that began at HBS almost 25 years ago in terms of when I landed there. I was already focused on the environment coming in, but B-School really gave me the opportunity to pivot from working primarily as an engineer or analyst to product or general management, and really to narrow my focus from the environment broadly to climate specifically and been very focused on climate and climate tech since then.

I've worked in a number of areas ranging from hydrogen to advanced biofuels and chemicals and ocean energy, have spent some time as an early stage investor, and a lot of this was trying to commercialize technologies that weren't quite ready for pride time, of course, hindsight's 2020, it didn't necessarily seem like that at the moment, but there's some wins in there and plenty of lessons learned and as I was contemplating what was next for me a few years ago was very focused on solutions that I could see delivering a meaningful impact in a shorter time period the next five to 10 years, and that's what got me interested in this.

Mike Toffel:
Great. So you entered the cement and concrete industry that supplies the construction industry. There's some really striking statistics about what proportion of global emissions are associated with concrete, and as you mentioned, that means largely cement.

Rahul Shendure:
Rough numbers, we think about concrete as getting pretty close to 10%. It's probably a little short of that, but as we make improvements globally on lots of other things, the share here is going up. Cement is the bulk of that.

Mike Toffel:
Let's break down the basic facts about cement and concrete because there's always a little bit of confusion about which is which, are they synonyms, and of course they're not. The basics as I understand it is the cement is the glue that's used in concrete and cement is produced with a combination of limestone and clay and a lot of processed heat, which then becomes a material that you grind down, add gypsum, and then you've got cement. And then from cement, you add aggregates, which can be sand or gravel and water, and then you get concrete. So is that thumbnail sketch of the process about right?

Rahul Shendure:
That was perfect. I think the layer I'd add to that is around the emissions contribution. So cement as the glue only makes up 10 to 15% of the mass of that finished product, but it's responsible for 90% of its emissions. The emissions that come from cement, two thirds of those relate to the core reaction that's happening. You talked about heating up limestone and clay, so you're breaking down limestone in doing that, you release CO2, so that's one reason why cement has so many emissions. The other third or 40% comes from the heat required to do that, which you also hinted at. Today, the only way to really do that is coal. We can talk about some of the changes or improvements folks are trying to make, but in large part, heat from burning coal is what's required there. You put these two things together, the energy use that has to come from coal today, plus the core reaction chemistry, both of which are releasing a lot of CO2 is what puts cement in. It's kind of its own category, carbon emitting or hard debate materials.

Mike Toffel:
So when we think about real opportunities, if we can get one technology or a set of technologies on a product right, boy, this represents really an amazing opportunity. So let's talk about the opportunities to decarbonize concrete, and we could talk about cement in particular if that's where it is. There's moonshot opportunities, there's more incremental opportunities, and then there's nearer to market opportunities. So I wonder if you can just walk through different opportunities to decarbonize concrete.

Rahul Shendure:
There is no silver bullet in this. This will require lots of different solutions. Different solutions are going to make more sense in different parts of the world. There's also the time aspect and the risk aspect which you hinted at. To the specific point you raised, there are approaches either in cement or concrete that one could take that are, let's call them the moonshots, right? They're striving to be impactful, but they require fundamental rethinking of the chemistries involved. The equipment that's involved almost always very capital intensive, probably requiring lots of new permitting, regulatory, and so these things are going to take time and there's execution risk, technical risk. At the other end of the spectrum, there's lots of different options that are available that are incremental that can utilize a lot of the existing infrastructure or business practices, but each just make a small change and oftentimes these are very local in nature, so the idea of sort of stacking them all up together is tough.

So that's the spectrum. There are couple others that I think your audience would be familiar with. There should be, for example, on the moonshot side, there's things like totally different cement chemistries. You could also layer in there things like carbon capture where you're doing it the same way, but you're putting in the equipment and the energy to take that CO2 and either put it underground or put it in a pipeline and all these things come with cost in that case.

So that's the spectrum that as I was looking at this prior to starting CarbonBuilt as an investor, that I was judging particular opportunities to invest and thinking about where they fit on that spectrum. The challenge I had was I wasn't really interested in coming in and working on something for 30 or 40 years or the sort of moonshot ideas. I've spent plenty of my career working on those things and while there's a joy that comes from that, that's just not what I was interested in doing today. My time horizon had shrunk. And at the other end of the spectrum, I was not interested in incremental solutions. The thing I was really looking for was something that could bridge those two, could have a near term impact, and did not require the timeframe and technical risk and business practice change that goes along with a lot of these moonshot scenarios.

Mike Toffel:
Before we talk about that middle area that CarbonBuilt is operating in, I wonder if we can just talk through a couple of examples of the other two. Help me categorize them. So for example, electric kilns. Now these kilns have to create processed heat. It's something like 1,500 degrees centigrade or Celsius that's really, really high temperature heat, and I imagine the idea of electrifying the kilns as opposed to relying on the fossil fuel combustion. Is that a long way off? Is that so much less where would you get the power?

Rahul Shendure:
This remains a vexing techno economic problem and you'll hear a lot that, "Hey, we've solved the technical problem, it's just an economic problem." Those two things aren't really separable, particularly in a commodity material situation like we've got with cement and concrete. You've got a real economic problem to solve. You've got a couple other problems to solve that you mentioned like this is something that might make sense from an emission standpoint with a decarbonized grid. We're a long ways away from that. That's number one. And the second is just the capital intensity and industry transformation. If you've got a technology that's going to be replacing cement kilns, that can't just happen overnight. Even if you had all the money, there's a certain capacity for the industry and a certain demand and you've got depreciated assets, and so whether it's electric kilns or other things you could do at the cement plant level, you're going to face a lot of those same dynamics.

Mike Toffel:
And then other technologies include things like switching the energy source to biofuels. So instead of using coal or natural gas, we could use biofuels.

Rahul Shendure:
Fuel switching, this is a trend that's been happening particularly in Europe quite successfully, but it's incremental and if you have a very expensive kiln that's been designed and been operating to run on coal, you can't just switch it to biomass and have it work the same way. So there are consequences to doing that. Efficiency goes down, production of waste materials goes up. Traditionally that's been a very incremental slow transition and with limits to how much you can transition.

Mike Toffel:
When it comes to building materials, I know that wood laminate, for example, is shown to be an increasing substitute for other building materials. You can build taller buildings with wood than you used to be able to do so. To what extent is that a potential solution to the concrete issue?

Rahul Shendure:
There's lots of materials on the margins that can help in some specific niche opportunities, but I think when you step back and think about some big global trends, it's very clear that the normal uses of concrete are going to dominate that growth. Examples here, I think we're all aware of the massive increase in data centers as an example or warehousing related to e-commerce and AI. As this continues to grow around the world, we need concrete to do that. You're not going to be able to solve all of this with wood certainly, and also I think the environmental trade-offs are not necessarily quite as clear as you might think. Just moving from something that's like cement to wood. The devil can be in the details on that. We could probably spend an hour just talking about that. So I think what I would say overall is that yes, you'll see some of that on the margins, but for a lot of the applications for concrete, that's not an option.

I think the other trend that I think is inescapable as we think about over the next coming decades is just the growth of urban centers and housing across the global south, India, Africa in particular, homes, schools, plus all the data centers and warehouses that we just talked about a second ago.

Again, wood might be opportunity in some small fraction of those, but for the most part, these are buildings that need to be built for low cost and concrete is going to be the answer, and we have a choice to make right from our perspective that growth is going to happen one way or another. With the choice we have to make, is it going to happen with the emissions intensity of concrete in the past or the way we can make it happen going forward? To me, there's a clear right answer on that. For us, that drives a lot of our urgency. There's going to be build-outs in some of these countries. Again, whether it's for IT and AI related stuff or for low cost housing. If we miss those windows, we miss the window, and so trying to be ready for that growth is critical.

Mike Toffel:
Yeah, just thinking about the urbanization piece that you mentioned, you think about entering cities new and old that are just rising right before our eyes, the high rise structures as well as all the infrastructure that's required for all that, which so heavily relies on concrete.

Rahul Shendure:
For us, when we think about geographic strategy, that becomes a great piece of knowledge to focus where we work. I've talked about not trying to be too broad in terms of trying to take on too many applications at once. The same could go for geographies, right? We get inbound inquiries from all over the world. We're focused on the US right now for a reason, but as we move forward, moving into some of these specific countries and geographies that are going to be experiencing large infrastructure growth that can only be met with concrete is paramount in our mind.

Mike Toffel:
Let's jump into the intermediate area, the quicker to market and scale that you mentioned excited you about CarbonBuilt. Tell us a little bit about the technology and how it works and how has it reduced carbon?

Rahul Shendure:
We talked about a few things that happened at the cement plant point in the value chain. One of the things I was looking for when I was looking at investments was innovations that could be implemented at the next point in the value chain, which is the production of concrete. As much lower capital required in order to do transformation of at a given site, much easier to execute in terms of the speed of a transformation, whether it's the engineering or the permitting, you could do many more of those pretty quickly with less CapEx, that meant easier access to debt capital. So forgetting about the technologies from an execution standpoint, there were a lot of things that were attractive about that. And I think on the technical side, once you go to concrete, it's much easier to have the technology be tuned for a given application or a given product.

And when you're trying to introduce new technology into a pretty conservative market, that just struck me as another way to get to market faster. So philosophically was sort of looking at the concrete position of the value chain and the opportunity that really allows is rather than changing cement or how it's made, just reducing its use in concrete was really the uptake. Can we decarbonize concrete by getting rid of cement in the mix? We've already talked about how much of concrete's emissions come from cement, so how can we get rid of it? And while there were a number of people working on this, what I found at UCLA was the combination of high impact on the carbon side, limited or no impact or a benefit on the cost side. I've been doing climate tech in commodity sectors long enough to recognize that there was something different and special here, which I had not really seen before.

This team had been at it since 2013. Much of that time had been spent not just in the lab working on the technology, but actually working through one of the XPRIZE programs being a five-year competition that imposed a set of requirements and discipline on an academic team that normally wouldn't have that. And as a result, when I met them, they had already piloted the technology at about 10th scale. They demonstrated about a 50% carbon reduction and cost parity. That was a huge important data set for me to be able to look at in my own diligence for what I was going to spend time on. But the other thing that was cool about it is I was able to see that there was still some room in front for improvements, so it didn't seem like it was going to be that difficult for us to take that to 70%, 80% reduction in carbon and price parity, which was from my perspective, was critical to that near term adoption rate.

In terms of the technology itself and how some of it works, we're replacing most or all of the Portland cement in our customer's mixes with a combination of several industrial byproduct materials that exist at very large scales and are typically used in very low value applications or landfill. These materials, you can't just substitute them for Portland cement and do nothing else. In order to make them work and deliver strength, you need to react them with carbon dioxide. That's really where the equipment and capital for our retrofits comes in is how do we bring not just carbon dioxide to bear, but low cost carbon dioxide in an energy efficient manner. And so you get these low cost byproduct materials combined with low cost, easy to deliver carbon dioxide, and those two things together can substitute for much or all of the Portland cement that's used.

Mike Toffel:
This process then results in a product that is indistinguishable from concrete. Does it have different properties? Do regulators get involved here and say, "Hang on a minute, you're lots of different ingredients, are buildings going to still hold up and our roads and our sidewalks still going to be in place?"

Rahul Shendure:
That was one of the key questions that motivated both my interest in this specific team and what they delivered to date, but also our business model going forward. Taking a step back, concrete, while it's a pretty common material, there's lots of different applications and there's things at the hard end. You're trying to build a state-of-the-art skyscraper in down cities urban core, and there's things at the easier end. We are very deliberately focused on some things at the easier end, and by that I mean applications that are easy to decarbonize, easier for us to deliver an economic return to our producers and are made in a factory so we can test them against an existing specification. When they leave that factory, they're indistinguishable and they're sold the same way as they would be today and are indistinguishable from the current product to their customer. You put all those together and that was another reason why this approach made sense in terms of timeframe to market.

Mike Toffel:
So this product is being used to create concrete masonry blocks, which are dry cast as opposed to the wet cast ready mix where you see the cement trucks down the street, pouring foundations and walls and sidewalks. You're doing the block concrete masonry, which sounds like is much more controlled environment in factories.

Rahul Shendure:
That's correct, yeah. So masonry represents about 10% of the US market, and so this is not just blocks, but things like pavers and retaining wall segments. And so these are all generally made in the same types of factories by the same company. So this is where we're starting. It's our beachhead, if you will. It's a big enough market for us to build the company around. We definitely got technology and aspirations and other applications as we move towards cast in place, but I think that's a business strategy question for us is how do we allocate our resources between growth in our initial markets and expansion into other applications. Geographies would be the other vector on that, and all of those things are possible, and we just need to constantly make decisions about what's the right thing to do there.

Mike Toffel:
And to ensure the quality or the performance of these pavers, retaining walls, applications. These are sent to test labs to validate that it meets regulatory and private sector standards. Is that right?

Rahul Shendure:
Yeah, exactly. So there's ASTM specifications that govern all of these. One of the other nice things about some of these applications at this end of the spectrum is that there's a history around using alternative materials. So the specifications already have some flexibility in them as long as the materials you're using have some connection to things that have been used before, which is the case in our situation. So you're able to test this stuff upfront. At the end of the day, the real test is, is your customer, the producer, ready to put it on their trucks and send it to their customers, right? Because they've got a business that has been running for probably decades in most of these situations is very likely to be a family business or one with some heritage, and that's not a decision they would make lightly if they were concerned about it.

Mike Toffel:
So I imagine with your go-to-market strategy and your efforts to convince folks to adopt this technology, you could go directly to the factories who would purchase your technology or you can skip over them and go to their buyers, the people who buy say pavers and retaining walls and try and get them to ask for it of their suppliers, who then would ask you, "Please sell us your technology so we can satisfy this growing demand that we're seeing." So where have you put your effort? Are you tackling both of those or are you focusing on one much more than the other?

Rahul Shendure:
We do tackle both, but I would say we are principally focused on concrete producers as our customers. There's a couple of reasons for this. One is it's a very fragmented industry and any given customer is going to be a very small portion of one producer's marketplace. There might be an exception or two here or there if you've got a very large university that dominates concrete deployment in town or something like that, but that's the exception. So for the most part, relying on just end user poll would be a tough sell, particularly if there wasn't a clear economic win for the producer in that or a major one. So in our case, the ability to go to producers with a economic value proposition, they're really not doing this for the sustainability aspects. That's icing on the cake for many of them, but there's a clear economic value proposition in here that enables them to make this their mainstay product, and that's how we focus our conversation with them.

They need to make sure that it's working and feel comfortable that it's a lot easier to do that today. Now that we've got a first commercial plant up and running, one of the benefits of this being a fragmented industry is our producer in Central Alabama is happy to have 99% of his theoretical competitors. The other people producing these products come visit the plant because he really doesn't compete with them, and that's kind of cool. We have access to end customers who are interested in sustainable lower carbon product. Sometimes the more access to them than an individual producer we have just from knowledge about what the company's doing. Some of these are national accounts.

We do try to help our producers connect with them to drive growth. The economics of a project with us are retrofit are not conditioned on achieving a certain growth threshold, but obviously if the product has carbon benefits and there's customers who might've otherwise been slightly outside of the target zone for a producer and they can access them because those customers are willing to maybe not pay extra for the product but pay a little extra for transportation for example, we can make those connections happen and we are doing that.

Mike Toffel:
Got it. So the technology must have matured quite a bit. When you entered, there was the one-tenth size pilot project, which was a cost parity, and so now there's an economic incentive, which means they're going to pay for your technology and have, I presume, lower operating costs than before in order to pay back for the technology and make profit. So is that where you are right now?

Rahul Shendure:
Indeed, it has. And I would say there's been two phases of that. I mean, it hasn't been that long. It's been a few years, but we spent about a year after spinning out getting the business model right. So this whole idea of retrofitting existing concrete plants was new and really related to our thinking around company strategy and not around things that UCLA had done in advance, but over the course of that year, we were also able to push the technology further, and that was both from the standpoint of materials and in terms of the mineralization use of CO2 aspects. So that was about a year of continued work in the lab and figuring out what was our go-to-market going to be. We landed our first customer in terms of getting them under contract in April of 2022, took us until early this year to go from that contract to starting production.

So actually relatively short timeframe illustrating the point I made earlier that even for our first plant, it was a year or a little less than a year, and we've been in production since Q2, been making deliveries since Q3, and really delivering on the unit economics out of the gate. So not one of these technologies where we're up and running and we have to keep making improvements and hopefully if we make improvements, we'll get there. First plant's up and running. Plenty of lessons learned and improvements to make. It's delivering on the unit economics, which feels pretty good.

Mike Toffel:
Yeah, that's great. What's the ballpark payback period that you talk to customers about? I imagine it ranges with the scale of the technology, scale of the plant.

Rahul Shendure:
While there are certainly some economies of scale that you don't see a huge range in terms of the scale of these plants, because the product is so heavy and there's a big transportation penalty if you have to move it too far. So these tend to be very localized plants and as a result, they tend to have a certain scale to them. Vast majority have two production lines of a certain size. You'll have some that have one, maybe in Florida where block is used at its greatest amount. You have a few plants that have three or four lines, but you don't see plants that have 10. As a result, our whole economic argument has to work with a single line because it'll take a few years before a new producer who's never put the technology in would say, "Just convert my whole plant over." So we think most of them are going to start by doing one line and it has to work at that scale.

The cost reductions that we're able to deliver, deliver a pretty good return, five, six year payback, and this is with no other incentives or anything else. That's where we can use on top of that, either incentives that are out there today or carbon credits as a way of accelerating that to get below three years, which is what we need to really put this at the top of their list in terms of what's the best use of my dollar. We can also use these early deployments as a way of accelerating our access to debt capital, and that's another way of accelerating the payback period on equity. When you put any of those situations together, we're looking at less than three year payback, and that's what we think is required if we're going to transform an industry at the pace that we want to and we think is necessary.

Mike Toffel:
Let's talk through a couple of these. What I'll think of as sweeteners to sweeten the deal for the client. One might be just policy. So in the US we have the Inflation Reduction Act, which has lots of incentives for lowering carbon intensity. Is concrete part of that story?

Rahul Shendure:
It is and could be. I mean, I think a lot of those programs they have now transitioned from being legislative text and law to programs that have funding opportunity announcements have come out and companies are trying for them. We'll see where it all shakes out, but concrete is definitely named in the text, and so we're optimistic there'll be some of that. I think the three specific vehicles are first grants, so there's big grants available for industrial retrofits, for demonstration greenfield plants. You don't have to be a finance pro to know that that can materially change the payback. If we're getting a 50% grant on the initial CapEx, for example, that can go a long way. There's also some great new tax credits.

These are things that have worked for solar or wind or other sectors in the past more energy related and that these have been used as a model for accelerating and improving the economics for hard to abate innovation. There's an investment tax credit, for example, that is something we could look at and are looking at that would apply a 30% tax credit to any equipment. It could have a similar impact on the core economics and payback.

Mike Toffel:
Got it. And on the carbon credit side, I guess the logic there is if customers, or at least some customers, wouldn't take on this technology even though it has roughly six year payback period unless it had a three-year payback period, then if carbon credit buyers could provide incremental capital, then you could offer it to customers with a three-year payback. Is that the basic logic of the carbon credits?

Rahul Shendure:
That's correct. I mean, we would think about it as a source of additional revenue. So if the core piece of the value proposition is around cost reduction, the other way we can expand margin is by increasing on the revenue side and really taking an attribute that they haven't had the ability to monetize in the past because it's just their baseline product. But if we're making a change on the carbon side and we can package that up and sell it and bring in more revenue, that can also work to improve the financial.

Mike Toffel:
One other way to add value to the market deployment of your technology to the factories that are building these blocks might be to try and convince their customers to pay a premium. Now, you mentioned it's viewed right now as a commodity product, but so too were many things at one point like coffee for example, that's far from a commodity product now. Do you see any movement toward a willingness to pay for green concrete, I guess, is how one would call that?

Rahul Shendure:
That's a great question. You could come at this from two angles, right? You could come at it from the angle of we're going to look for those customers and condition the way we think as a business and as a team around this is a premium product because it does have value. Those of us who are working at CarbonBuilt don't question the fact that there's more value in this product we're making. Or you force yourself to say, "This is a commodity." And at least for the people that I need to start driving volume, which is what we're interested in, they are willing to do that, and that's great when that shifts. If you've conditioned your business and your approach to be foundationed on a commodity world where people don't care, you're at a good position to take advantage of it as things change.

Mike Toffel:
Right. And your products right now are, I think I read 70% less carbon emissions than traditional.

Rahul Shendure:
Yeah. Those are choices that we make. So we could make the product less economically interesting and more beneficial carbon wise or vice versa. And so these are choices we need to make. I'm pretty firm in my conviction that if we can deliver a strong economic value to producers with a 70% reduction, we're going to make a bigger carbon impact than something that is carbon negative or 150% reduction that is uncompetitive price-wise. That's a bet I'll make any day.

Mike Toffel:
So let's talk about the growth trajectory. Your first deployment here, Central Alabama, what are you seeing in terms of the factories you're speaking with? Where are you finding more interest in uptake?

Rahul Shendure:
Let's focus on the US for a second. Geographic hotspot, we have a pipeline that includes more than a quarter of US production capacity, and that includes small businesses that have one plant with one line, and the market share leader that's part of a big global materials conglomerate. So entities across that spectrum brings something to our adoption strategy. The smaller companies are able to move faster than the bigger ones are, and the big ones bring the volume. So I think we think about all of them geographically, there's interest across the board. I think it's a testament to if you could deliver good economics, that's why everyone's in business at the end of the day, and if we're taking a low margin business and making it better, there's going to be interest in that in different places.

So I suspect that our next geographically area of focus is probably going to be the Southwest US. That's a combination of where we've got some good materials, but also just the right producers who are energized and ready to move next. Really for the near term, the thing that gates us is just our own resource, how big of a team we are. That's the biggest issue we have, not customer interest, because I think now that we've got the first plan up and running and we can talk about that this is really replicating what we've done already. That goes a long way to convincing customers that they shouldn't be worried about saying yes.

Mike Toffel:
Key factors, if I'm hearing you right, in terms of where you might find the most interest, include sort of management interest, just like how jazzed are they on this idea and pursuing new technologies. There's also, of course, the economics of it, like who's most eager to reduce costs? And then I imagine proximity to feedstock must play a role as well. Is that right?

Rahul Shendure:
There's certainly enabling materials, including some of the CO2 sources that we find preferable. We take care of all of that. So it's not like we hand a package over to our customers and say, "You figure this out." For us, as we look at the opportunities that come next, the access to what's the delivered cost of a particular byproduct material to that site is a part of it, but that criteria doesn't lead us to saying, "Oh, there's one geography that works until we have a tax credit or a grant," or something like that. There's opportunities all around the country that we can make work.

Mike Toffel:
Great. Well, this has been a really fabulous conversation. Let me ask you the final question I ask all of our guests, which is for folks interested in getting into this space or more broadly into business and climate change, what advice or recommendations do you have?

Rahul Shendure:
This is the defining problem of the next century. If this is an area of interest, don't analyze it to death. We don't have time. There's windows of opportunity. Sometimes you just need to move, and so my advice is jump in, learn on the fly. Climate is really huge, so I think we sometimes put it all together and treat it as one sector for someone looking at where is venture capital dollars going or something like, it's a cut across the entire economy.

Like anything else, everyone should ask themselves, what sort of industries do they like to work in? What kind of work day-to-day gets them excited and motivated to get up? If you put the layer of climate on top of that, there's an answer. There's a bunch of things one could do, and working on something that you know is this critical to the planet, to our kids and grandkids, I think adds a level of satisfaction to work. That is really tough to quantify. There's going to be plenty of challenging days, plenty of hard days working in a sector like this, but as one of my colleagues likes to say, a bad day working in climate is better than a good day working in almost anything else.

Mike Toffel:
Thank you so much for spending the time with us. We really appreciate it.

Rahul Shendure:
My pleasure.

Mike Toffel:
That was my conversation with Rahul Shendure, CEO and Director of CarbonBuilt. You've been listening to Climate Rising. To hear more episodes, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Share with your friends, and don't forget to rate and review. For show notes, head over to climaterising.org or click on this episode. I'm your host, Mike Toffel. Lynn Schenk is our producer, and Craig McDonald is our audio engineer. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode of Climate Rising. See you then.