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All Right, everybody, when we talk about carbon emissions on our program and the Patsinet zero, we often talk about the carbon emissions associated with power generation, transportation, food production, a lot of things. There is, though, a big one lurking that doesn't get as much attention, although BusinessWeek has been kind of certainly trying to get to it, and that is cement production, what goes into building materials and manufacturing.
Cement is responsible for seven percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, more than what comes from all the trucks in the world. This according to the International Energy Agency.
That's an important stat it is. And you're not going to believe where I'm going to go right now, Okay, I'm going to go there. Three time NBA champion Rick Fox is trying to do something about this. You know him from his time on the Boston Celtics and the Lakers, or maybe even as an actor producer. He's got hundreds of movie and TV episode credits. But he's also the founder and CEO of Partana. It's a company that creates
an alternative to Portland cement made of recycled ingredients. The company says it's quote developed the world's first building material that avoids emissions and removes carbon from the atmosphere. Rick Fox joins us here in the Bloomberg Interactive at Brokers Studio. Wow, I mean, okay, we talk about the NBA career, talk about your Hollywood career. How do you get to this part of your career?
What's Rick Fox doing in concrete?
Yes?
Yeah. The short version is a call to service. It started as a call to service to my home country in the Bahamas, on the heels of Hurricane disaster Durian
in twenty nineteen. We were displaced. Some thirty thousand people were displaced, Homes were destroyed, people were swept out to see and outside of donating money from my Bahamas Relief Foundation, I decided to get on the ground and start to ask the question of how do we build more hurricane resilient homes, more sustainable homes to dig ourselves out of the eleven billion dollars debt that we were in as
a country because of the repeated storms. Now, I grew up as a kid in the Bahamas, where hurricanes were our version of an amusement park at the time in the seventies and eighties. Yeah, it wasn't as severe as you see today, and those storms are more and more frequent.
So for me, it was a call to service to try and find a solution beyond just donating money, and that led me to a search around twenty twenty when the world shut down and we can rest asshore Rick Fox is not the material science behind the technology here. We'll state that up front here. I have a number of scientists and partners who have been innovating concrete for decades. They're the best in the industry. One of them have been cement Man of the Year, others are.
On the board to day. Hold on, yeah, such a thing, right, Yeah, I was not such a congratulations to him.
Yeah, No, it's nice to have that. It reminds me of my Shack and Kobe days when we have some of the best in the business to work with. So they've been innovating concrete and over the course of some six years of rigorous innovation. They got to this material not only catching lightning in a bottle for multitude of times in their careers, but in the case of Partana, I meant them the point when they were patenting this formula and trying to get it from lab into a
commercial state. And so I formed a company along with my founder called Partana Global to bring that out of the lab and into the world.
Rick tell us exactly what they're doing and what makes it sustainable and less impactful on the environment.
Yes. So, the first thing that you may learn about cement as a binder in the production of concrete is that it takes an immense amount of energy to get to a clinker state, which allows you then to produce concrete. We are a plug and play solution without the heating and the emissions that come with the creation of clinker. We have zero Portland cement in our production of concrete.
We take upscale big industry waste, one product of it being from the slag industry to steel manufacturing industry, which is slag, and another one being brine, which is a desalination industry where those waste materials are pumped into the ocean or pumped into landfills. We take them and through our.
Products can be devastating.
It can be extremely devastating when if you think about cement and its impact on the environment. Heats up our planet, then it heats up our oceans and destroys our coral It's a repeated cycle of negativity. Right. We get to a nature positive concrete by swapping out the bind of the Portland cement and replacing it with partana. Those waste materials.
Through our process and our patented formula get us to a interaction with CO two which not only avoids the CO two negative emissions when we produce it, but also absorbs and remove CO two from the atmosphere carbonation process.
So don't trees do that?
Trees do it?
Actually building it?
Well, it's it's chemistry, right, So the magic of chemistry will generate the process through the interaction and activation of the brine in our mix. But but even cement, the negativity of cement, it is also absorbing CO two, So let's not the problem with us cement is that it does so much harm on the front end that it can't celebrate the back end.
In the actual manufacturing em Yes, you.
Can't celebrate the back end of it. And so in the case of our company, we had a two year close working relationship with one of the top manufacturers of cement products, Top Works out of Germany. They just validated us at the World of Concrete in Vegas as the only replacement for Portland cement in the concrete industry right now today. Now there are a lot of people out there reducing Portland cement in the production of concrete, but no one can one PC replace it, avoid and remove COEO too.
At the same time, who's back in the company?
So I'd give a huge gratitude and shout out to cherubc Ventures, our angel investors that have been there from day one. They've brought a number of their network folks along with us, major individuals that have supported us. And now as we move towards this year, scaling being the next challenge. We're hoping to have the likes of some of the biggest movers in the world that can actually scale this.
Uh where are you right now? And it's like how much of you is right now?
We raised thirty million dollars, so we're moving into this year now to scale four factories in different regions globally.
If it's If it's so sounds like win win. Yes, it would seem to me that anybody who was in the building environment would say, I'm in it. Let us help you scale it up. Yes, what's what's the Does it cost a lot to do this?
So prices in terms of manufacturing and capex building a facility is something that's not exciting to investors when you're when you're burying capitas dollars. But once you establish that, then you have the ability to generate return on that investment in our factories in the first year. So we we turn around rather quickly here.
So the actual product is competitive with existing building or so existing concrete.
Right, So cementcha is a commodity. Uh And as you can imagine different parts of the world on where you get your materials from, cement can be priced slightly all over the place, right, No different with our formula. The exciting part of our business model is we become a plug and play. When you go to a factory that is producing cement products today to get to concrete products finished products, we can swap that in and out in a plug in play fashion in less than a week.
So the excitement level there is no new equipment, no new materials. You're really taking out the binder of Portland cement and you're adding our binder of partana. So that's so when you talk about the cost, cost is relative, right, I'll just say this one point I'd like to remind people you will pay depending on your problem. That will
determine what you're willing to pay. Correct And so in the case of our products and material we're making affordable homes in the Bahamas some thousand homes all the way up to luxury based developments. So whether we're making a CMU block or a pouring a bridge or a planter, or whatever retail product you can make, you're going to
find a wide range of product and pricing. But for us, we hope with scale to bring our products down below what cement products cost, which we know we can get to, and then on top of that we generate an asset class at a bottom line in carbon credits that can be used for good and actually can incentivize our partners.
This is one of those Internet You're going to have to come back because we're running out of time and we know we want to do more good luck. Let us know how things are going. Thank you, Rick Fox, of course, we appreciate your time today a partana well. From rainwater in the Himalayas to whales off the Pharoh Paroll Islands.
You've got to go there. I know I haven't been there, but.
I want to go.
Well, whales off the Pharaoeh Islands to groundwater in Minnesota.
P FAT.
So called forever chemicals have been detected in every corner of the planet and in the blood of almost every human test it. If you've been listening to us over the last couple of weeks, you know we are a little obsessed with this and trying to get to the bottom of it.
Well.
It makes sense though, because these so called forever chemicals have been linked to an increasingly long list of health problems, including obesity, fertility issues, and cancer and carol. There's a very high chance that will come into contact with them today and they are almost certainly already in our bodies.
We talk about a lot at home. I'm going to say we talked about it over the weekend. We wanted to understand a little bit more about them and on an industrial level, what's being done. Joining us is Kelly Edgren and she is senior director of Sustainability over Ascent. A. Set works with manufacturing companies to analyze their global supply chains and look for sustainability risks, and she focuses specifically on risks from Pithaz. Yeah. She joins us from Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
She's on zoom.
Kelly. Great to have you here with us. You know, I was just thinking. I paused for a moment because I was just thinking about the conversation we were just having with Rick Fox about just looking for ways to do things that are sustainable and don't harm the environment, Like how could we all get on board and how do we unwind ourselves from how much as a society we rely on plastics, all different types of plastics for just about it. I look around me and I'm surrounded by plastic.
I look around at home, I'm surrounded by plastic.
Yeah, it's definitely a struggle because, of course, a lot of those things make life more convenient, right, and the kypos are no different. So I think that's the challenge is we have to maybe adjust the way that we're living in our expectations for those materials as well, you know, before we can really.
Get them out of our lives.
What do you mean by adjusting expectations sort of? Is that just resigning to the notion that these are in our bodies?
Don't say that?
What does it mean though?
Please?
Yeah?
So I think when I when I say that, think of something like a nonstick pan that's coded with teflon and that's a.
Very We got rid of those in our house, right, that's great.
I love that you're all obsessed with PPOs, because so am I. Yeah.
So a lot of people, though, you know, are maybe ready to make a shift to cast iron because it's a little less convenient and a little more work. And I think that's the challenge, and that's the struggle that a lot of manufacturers have, is this paradox between customers who want them to get rid of pfoss and yet those customers maybe are ready to give up the properties.
That they're used to from PPOs.
And I think that's the real challenge, right, is changing that understanding and expectations among customers as well.
Should we as consumers expect that it's got to be a slow transition just because they're so entrenched in the system, And can we really afford to slow down or do we need to kind of do something radical and what might that be or how can we get there?
Well, I do think one radical disruption coming from manufacturers is three discontinuing the manufacture of pipos And this is kind of forcing everybody's hand, right, because if you can't get the parts anymore, it doesn't matter if you've designed them out or not, you can't make those products. So I do think we see some radical forces already affecting this change, and we'll have to see if some other chemical manufacturers follow Threem's lead and stop making those PFOS
chemicals altogether. If you can't get the parts, it doesn't matter, you know, if you're in the scope of a regulation or not.
Right, they're going to exit all PIFAs manufacturing by the end of twenty twenty five. How big is three AM compared to some of the other players that are out there.
If you look at the NGO keem SEC it's a Swedish NGO. They've looked at the top twelve p FOS manufacturers.
In the world, and three M is on that list.
They're not the largest one, but they have a very broad range of PFOS chemicals. Of course, they've been making them for getting close to one hundred years. So I think it is going to have a significant impact because they have a lot of niche chemicals that they're manufacturing as well, and again their downstream customers are not going to be able to get those parts anymore.
Okay, so the cats out of the bag. We know that. When it comes to PFOS, I always like to ask people like you who live in these worlds day in and day out, Cali, how you have adjusted your lifestyle to live in a world like this. I mean, are you doing certain things at home that you think all of us should do because you're aware of the presence of these chemicals? Apart from getting rid of nonstick, have.
You banned every plastic container in your home?
Well, I do have.
My glass water bottle here that I drink out of. Yeah, you know, I get ask that question actually a lot. So of course there's the pants, I've changed my makeup, I've changed my dental floss. Definitely trying to avoid plastic for a number of reasons, not just pifoss. There's a lot of other chemicals in plastic, right, but then there's some other things that there's just not alternatives yet. So
I am waiting for industry to somewhat catch up. I no longer spray my you know, winter booths with with pfos. So I just where you become aware of it, you know, that's a choice that you can make and try to find an alternative.
Well, I wonder if that's the first thing to do in terms of labeling, right that if there is something on a product. We've done that with what transfats and different things, right, We're all very aware things like corn syrup, you know, and just there are things that raise the awareness that if a consumer starts saying no, that's got to impact a company's decisions and their supply chain partners. Is that fair or Yeah?
Absolutely?
And there's already a few a handful of state laws that are migrating towards this, especially for cookware. They're starting to require disclosure, you know, in California they have cleaning products disclosure rules. Of course, California also has Proposition sixty five, which has a few peposts in it, and that has to be warned to consumers. So I do think that
we're going to see more laws coming like that. But maybe we can't design it out yet, but we at least want to make sure that customers are aware before they buy the product what they're going to be exposed to, and I think we're going to see some growing state regulations.
Along that line.
That much has been written over the past few years, indeed even a decade about how companies knew about these chemicals, what they did in terms of disposing these chemicals. You have an inside view on what these companies are doing. CALLI are they doing the right thing right now?
Well, I don't want to speak to the past, but I do think that in the current regulatory framework they absolutely are, at least certainly the companies that I engage with. I think it's important to point out that there are very few PFOS chemicals that have actually had laws written against them, and so what's happened in the past is the way companies were discharging maybe water from their processes
that had some PFOSS in it. They weren't doing anything that wasn't legal, and so I think the thing to note here is that our understanding of the hazards has changed, and we are looking backwards. We see things like super fun is going to be adding some some PFOS chemicals to it.
So I do think there will be some reckoning coming.
But it is important to note that most of those companies weren't actually, you know, violating any regulations. We just are all becoming much more aware now of the hazards of pivos. Right.
The EPA is right, from my understanding, expected to release a list of known pifiles that companies must report, and so we know this is kind of coming down a lot of industrial facilities, military locations, airports, wastewater plants. What's the number one reason for anyone who is listening and watching right now why we should be really worried if we let this continue at the current rate in terms of the amount of pifiles that are out there.
I don't like to cause panic now.
I just I want to be smart and like because you are in this and what people need to know.
I think, first off, drinking water right is a is a large concern, and so a lot of states are enacting laws to start remediation of that drinking water. There are ways that you can filter pfas out. You know, it's expensive, but there are ways to do it. And I see a lot of state laws that are really focused on drinking water, soil, and air remediation and that's certainly going to help. Right, let's get it out of
the water that we live with every single day. I think that you know more awareness of things, even choices like I will I don't make microwave popcorn because there's pifos in those bags.
So that education for people, well know.
That, Hey, ten seconds, where do we look to find this information? Ten seconds?
I think there's a lot of great resources out there. I mentioned the NGO ChemSec out of Sweden. They have a lot of great information on where key boss can be found.
And that's a great starting point.
Well, we so appreciate it. Phil smarter already and a little freaked out already too, but you shared it in a calm way. It's just things we need to know. Lit Meditation required right now. Kelly Agrin a senior director of sustainability over Assent on Zoom from Milwaukee, Wisconsin.