Waste to Value

When we think about wood products and our domestic forests that supply them, we arrive at mental images of large swaths of forestland that populate the Pacific Northwest or the Southeast; those places that provide abundances of Douglas fir and spruce and southern yellow pine, but we rarely consider urban forests. Urban forests are critical components for keeping our cities cooler and safer. Street...

Supplementary cementitious materials, or SCMs, have completely transformed the global cement industry. Where Portland cement once enjoyed a near monopoly in the industry, it’s now rapidly losing market share to all kinds of blended solutions using SCMs, which replace a large percentage of the cement clinker – that’s limestone and clay, cooked in a kiln at a balmy 1500 degrees Celsius – that goes i...

Featured guest Garrett Benisch is Chief Development Officer at Bioforcetech Corporation, a Bay Area company turning organic waste into carbon negative materials. Bioforcetech promotes a few basic tenets: Stop Landfill, Protect Ecosystems, and Utilize Waste, to name just a few. That last one is important. In the company’s efforts to Fix and Store Carbon (two other tenets), Bioforcetech manufactures...

For the inaugural episode of Waste to Value, I connected with Lew Epstein, CEO of Lot21 , a non-profit content platform and resource for advancing climate action across the built environment to help decarbonize the world. Lew’s environmental advocacy began decades ago with the emergence of the forestry stewardship movement and has since expanded to encompass a broader range of carbon removal solut...