Turning Waste Biomass Into Carbon-Negative Buildings with Allison Dring

Right now, roughly 40% of global emissions come from the built environment. Most of those emissions are hidden deep within the materials themselves, in the concrete, steel, and plastics that are mined or extracted from underground at enormous energy costs. What if that model could be reversed entirely?

 

In this episode of Business For Good, Paul Shapiro sits down with Allison Dring, CEO of Made of Air, to explore how waste biomass can be converted into carbon-storing building materials through a process called pyrolysis. Instead of mining resources from underground, the company uses sawdust and wood waste that would otherwise go to landfill, bakes it in a high-temperature, low-oxygen oven, and produces biochar, a stable form of elemental carbon that locks atmospheric CO2 away for roughly a thousand years.

 

The conversation covers why the built environment is such a massive source of emissions, how biochar-based cladding panels can replace steel, cement fiber board, and fossil-based plastics at competitive prices, and why the real bottleneck is not the technology but industry adoption.

 

Things You Will Learn:

1. Why roughly 40% of global emissions come from the built environment, with about half of that embedded in the materials themselves.
2. How pyrolysis converts waste biomass into biochar that locks carbon out of the atmosphere for approximately a thousand years.
3. Why no building on earth today has achieved a fully carbon-negative life cycle, and what it would take to change that.
4. How Made of Air's cladding panels replace steel, cement fiber board, and fossil-based plastics with carbon-negative alternatives.
5. Why the company is targeting price parity with conventional building materials by the end of 2027 without any green premium.

 

Tools & Frameworks Covered:

1. Biochar Through Pyrolysis: A process of baking waste biomass in a high-temperature, low-oxygen oven that converts stored CO₂ into stable elemental carbon, creating a material that does not re-release carbon for roughly a thousand years.
2. Above-Ground vs. Below-Ground Resources: A framework for rethinking where building materials come from, shifting from mined and fossil-extracted resources to biomass waste streams that already exist in agriculture and forestry.
3. Embodied Carbon Compliance: A long-term planning approach where real estate developers evaluate building materials based on 30 to 50 year regulatory trajectories rather than current requirements alone.

 

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