The Next Frontiers: CarbonBuilt's Cindy McLaughlin on Fighting Pollution, Individual Action, and Urban Transformation
By Julia Gamolina
Cindy joined CarbonBuilt as Head of Product, overseeing carbon monetization and policy. Previously, she started or helped lead technology companies across a range of industries, from prison education to commercial real estate. Cindy co-Chaired the Urban Land Institute's Tech and Innovation Council, serves on the Editorial Board of Propmodo, and advises sustainability startups. She has an MBA from MIT Sloan, served as a water and sanitation volunteer in Peace Corps Congo, and lives in Brooklyn. In her interview with Julia Gamolina, Cindy talks about embodied carbon as the next frontier of decarbonization and how we can make cities places to live and age well in, advising those just starting their careers to know that there’s power in individual action.
JG: You studied international relations and then worked for the Peace Corps — huge kudos on this. What did you learn from this time period, and how did it inform your next step for your MBA, a focus of which was tech?
CML: Post-college, I thought I wanted to go into international nonprofit or NGO work, maybe at the Red Cross or USAID. My reasoning was fuzzy, not entirely altruistic — mostly, I had gone to college about a forty-minute drive from my childhood home, so I had a pent-up yen to get out into the world, to take risks, experience danger, learn lots of languages, and generally get out of my comfort zone. So I joined the Peace Corps and was sent to the Republic of Congo. My job was to do basic community health and sanitation education; build Ventilated, Improved, Pit (VIP!) latrines; cap freshwater springs; and dig wells.
At first, I couldn’t figure out how to get anyone in the village to volunteer for big projects that would benefit the community — they had too much sickness, too much subsistence work, often too much palm wine. So I built a rather elegant VIP latrine in my backyard for my own use. To my surprise, the governor of the District stopped by shortly thereafter and asked me if I would build him one like mine, though unsubsidized. The Mayor asked for one like the Governor’s, and paid for it. The most prominent family wanted one like the Mayor’s, and so forth. By the end of my two-year stint, I had built lots of latrines through the universal principle of Keeping Up With The Jones’s. That was a powerful and unexpected lesson, which somehow made for-profit work seem much more compelling as the way to get things done.
When I returned from Congo, I did a couple of years of technology consulting and then went to MIT for business school. I loved it there. The academics were rigorous, the thinking was original, and my classmates and professors were kind and brilliant. While I was in school, the 1998-2000 dot-com boom was in full swing, so I focused on strategy, entrepreneurship, and technology, the opportunities for which seemed vast.
“For most, pollution is in the background as just one of a list of issues — war, crime, inflation, housing, poverty, democracy, traffic — whereas, to me, it’s the only thing that’s truly existential. If we continue to damage our planetary, natural, and biological systems; everything else will cease to matter.”
You went from your time in Congo to having a fashion focus post-MBA to then working for American Prison Data Systems — wow! Tell me about this.
The early fashion focus was a fun fluke. My favorite strategy professor, who was wildly smart but not so stylish — sorry deFig, you’re still the best — asked me to help him start a retail-tech company for apparel with a bunch of undergrads from the electrical engineering department. The company failed within three months when the retail market crashed, but not before we had all dropped out of school to pursue it. Luckily, MIT has an open-door-for-life policy, so I went back the next year and finished my degree. But entrepreneurship and fashion had me hooked. While most of my classmates were applying for banking and consulting jobs, I moved to NYC, got a job in industry, and then quickly started a couple of fashion companies, which was a blast.
A decade later, I was starting to think about my next chapter, and met the founders of American Prison Data Systems, now Orijin. They were looking for help getting the company off the ground. By then, I had gone through the startup cycle a few times, and I loved their mission of using “hardened” tablets on a private cellular network to bring education, job training, mental health resources, and more to prisoners. There were just a few of us at the beginning. We got to do the best part of startups, which is building a company from scratch, creating something out of nothing. At the time, there was almost nothing technological at all behind bars — no online library, no digital communications system, very little e-learning. The GED was just about to go online-only, leaving this enormous incarcerated population without any options for a high school credential. So we scrambled to figure it out and build all of it as quickly as possible. National Corrections Library was one of my proudest projects. It lives on today as the world’s first free digital library for prisoners.
This is wonderful work. How did your interest in sustainability start to develop?
In 2020, when COVID hit, I was leading Envelope, a technology startup that had built a kind of SimCity for NYC, turning the 1400 page zoning code of NYC into 3D software. I was surrounded by a bunch of urban planners and zoning specialists and tech nerds who cared very deeply about New York, and who had a unique tool to model, plan, and understand it. We didn’t have enough revenue-generating work, since the real estate industry had ground to a halt, so we started researching and writing about policies that would allow NYC to come back post-COVID greener, cleaner, more affordable, more vibrant and more equitable than it was before.
I also became quite focused on sustainability. I found so much respite, even joy, in that early COVID moment when everything stopped — when there were no factories running, no cars on the road, and you could hear the birds and breathe clean air and see the skyline crisp and clear. I have teenage kids and decided that I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t try to ensure their ability to have a future like that, even in a bustling city.
CarbonBuilt ultra-low carbon concrete, courtesy of Cindy McLaughlin
CarbonBuilt retrofit, courtesy of Cindy McLaughlin.
How did you eventually get to CarbonBuilt? What are you focused on in your role these days?
As those who know me will attest, once I find a big, hairy problem to solve, I don’t give up. I started getting involved in local sustainability projects by joining the board of my neighborhood association in Brooklyn Heights and chairing their Public Realm Committee. We’ve been working successfully for years to revitalize our main commercial corridor — Montague Street — with new small businesses, and giving them Open Streets to help them thrive. I also took on the co-Chair role at ULI’s Tech + Innovation Council, and dragged everyone into urban sustainability tech. I became an advisor to Llama, an urban logistics company doing last-mile delivery using e-cargo bikes and micro-containers instead of trucks. In 2018, I became, and remain, enormously involved in the evolving world of urban highway removal. Along with a growing coalition of neighborhood, environmental justice, and transit groups, I’ve been working to make sure NYC’s crumbling highways like the BQE are not simply rebuilt, as currently planned, for another century of motor-vehicle priority, but rather repaired in the short term and then transformed into things the city needs far more than outdated car and truck infrastructure — like transit, housing, green space.
I left Envelope in late 2021 and joined CarbonBuilt, an ultra-low carbon concrete company, as Head of Product. CarbonBuilt retrofits existing concrete block plants with our decarbonization technology, reducing the carbon footprint of their products by 70-100%. I was drawn to it because concrete is everywhere, especially in cities. It’s responsible for more than 8% of global CO2 emissions, and my beloved commercial real estate industry uses oodles of it. If you’re going to fix a single material for more sustainable urban development, it should be concrete. When I encountered CarbonBuilt, they had just won the Carbon XPRIZE which is a really big deal — like winning the carbon Oscars if the Oscars were only held every five years, came with a $20m prize, and recognized efforts to rescue humanity from itself. It had and has a terrific CEO and wonderful founders, and it felt and is full of potential.
I was only the fifth employee, so I had a very broad role. I focused on carbon monetization, public policy, end-user awareness, and everything else one does in a scrum at tiny companies. We have now grown much larger so we’ve parsed these roles into more robust teams, and I’m focusing primarily on our carbon impact and how that relates to revenue. We’ve started to produce ultra-low carbon concrete masonry commercially, and we’re scaling quickly across the country. It’s amazing to be part of this intense, demanding, but joyful ride.
“The only way we’ll have a truly sustainable, decarbonized New York City and a better quality of life, better health, etc., is if we aggressively deprioritize motor vehicles in our public realm...Our city could be quiet, fresh, green, healthy, affordable, and economically vibrant while enabling more people to live and age in place.”
Looking back at it all, what have been the biggest challenges? How did you both manage through perceived disappointments or setbacks?
My single biggest challenge in the last few years has been learning to live with my growing horror at the scale of our pollution problem — greenhouse gases, plastics, forever chemicals, PM2.5 emissions. It’s stressful and discouraging and sometimes lonely to watch the avalanche of totally avoidable harm we’re visiting upon ourselves and our kids and our grandkids. Moreso because most people simply aren’t yet in that mindset. For most, pollution is in the background as just one of a list of issues — war, crime, inflation, housing, poverty, democracy, traffic — whereas, to me, it’s the only thing that’s truly existential. If we continue to damage our planetary, natural, and biological systems; everything else will cease to matter. It’s a lot to hold while still being a relaxed, cheerful, and present mom, wife, friend, colleague, citizen, and human. I can sometimes pull it off, and my family seems happy to roll their eyes when I don’t.
I’ve been managing through it with therapy, which I highly recommend, working hard at my job and my advocacy, trying to hang out more with my excellent family and friends, and succumbing to a nice cocktail every now and then. When people around me don’t have the urgency that I have, I try to take a deep breath and remember that there was a time not so long ago when I too wasn’t as acutely aware of it as I am now. I’m doing a lot of deep breathing these days.
You know, I am too Cindy. I also agree with you on therapy! What have you also learned in the last six months?
A wonderful learning is that it’s possible for regular citizens on the right side of history to make meaningful positive changes in their own neighborhood, even when the forces of bureaucracy and urban politics feel so huge and impossible to crack. It takes clarity of vision and strategy and patience and lots of relationship and community building, but it works — and can even be a lot of fun — if you believe in what you’re doing.
Car Free Seine highway, courtesy of Cindy McLaughlin
BQE traffic, courtesy of Cindy McLaughlin.
What are you most excited about right now?
Of course, CarbonBuilt’s ability to decarbonize concrete is enormously exciting and motivating. My job keeps me hopeful and inspires my sense of possibility.
I’m also loving the growing movement of mayors and urbanists and climate activists and young people demanding a paradigm shift away from cars and trucks and the dangerous, neighborhood-dividing infrastructure we’ve built to support them. The only way we’ll have a truly sustainable, decarbonized New York City and a better quality of life, better health, etc., is if we aggressively deprioritize motor vehicles in our public realm. This means getting rid of parking on our city streets; it means pedestrian-primary corridors everywhere; it means Barcelona-style superblocks in our neighborhoods; it means Amsterdam levels of walking and biking and transit. It means sunsetting our pollution-sewer, 20th century urban highways, like the BQE and the FDR and the Cross Bronx Expressway and using all that freed-up space for parks and housing and transit and reconnecting communities. It means planting urban thickets of trees and gardens, bioswales, parklets everywhere. Our city could be quiet, fresh, green, healthy, affordable, and economically vibrant while enabling more people to live and age in place. But we need bold leadership to make that happen.
Who are you admiring now and why?
So many people! The CarbonBuilt team is incredible. They’re brilliant doers, making ultra-low carbon concrete a scaled, broadly-available reality out of a glimmer in the eye of a professor at UCLA a decade ago.
I also so appreciate the heroes who are doing the really hard day-to-day work of organizing to make the world and NYC a better place, with far fewer cars. Kathy Park Price from Transportation Alternatives is omnipresent in Brooklyn when there’s a problem with a bike lane, or a complete street. Shabazz Stuart at Oonee is quietly building a huge network of secure bike parking infrastructure in the NY area. Laura Fox totally nailed the expansion and evolution of Citi Bike; she’ll be DOT commissioner someday if we’re very, very lucky. Lara Birnback of the Brooklyn Heights Association has been a steadfast, progressive, Jane Jacobs-style fighter for urban sustainability in our neighborhood and for the city at large. Marco Carrion and his team at El Puente, and their counterparts at NYC EJA and UPROSE have been doing tireless, methodical, community-oriented work to focus public attention on a new future for NYC’s toxic highways, and especially the BQE. I’m grateful for each of them.
Nationally, Ben Crowther from Freeway Fighters is doing incredible things across the country. On the international front, I’m obsessed with Carlos Moreno and the 15-minute City; and Anne Hidalgo, Mayor of Paris, who’s implementing it with the boldest moves and clearest understanding of the math of proximity and spatial utilization. As leader of the Conseil de Paris, she voted to pilot turning the polluting Seine highway into a car-free space, and as Mayor of Paris has made it permanent. Her low-car, green, proximity-oriented policies have reduced the carbon footprint of Paris by 40% in just a decade. That’s the kind of leadership we need in cities around the globe, including NYC.
“Remember to lift up from your screen and go into nature to breathe the air and soak in the songs of the trees and birds and bright blue sky — then get back to work and fight like hell for their continued existence.”
What is the impact you’d like to have on the world? What is your core mission? And, what does success in that look like to you?
We’ve now spent a lot of time focusing on renewable energy and cleaning up the grid. The next frontier of decarbonization is embodied carbon — all the CO2 and other greenhouse gasses created when we make stuff. Embodied carbon is in literally everything — from our little impulse buys and tchotchkes, to our cars and trucks, to our buildings and infrastructure.
The readers of this piece will appreciate the enormous amount of CO2 generated from concrete, steel, plastics, and glass. If we can totally decarbonize building materials like concrete, I’ll rest a lot easier. And many of us are doing it as we speak, which is exciting.
But before I die, I want to see the BQE demolished. That alone would save millions of tonnes of CO2 per year; protect tens of thousands of kids from asthma and adults from cardiovascular disease, dementia, and more; free up thousands of acres of space in our space-constrained city; and reconnect divided, isolated neighborhoods that deserve better. The FDR and the Cross-Bronx Expressway and all the others should go too, with similar impact. We’ve done it before with the West Side Highway; we can do it again. New York City could be a glorious beacon of green, healthy, vibrant living if we had some long-range vision about it.
Finally, what advice do you have for those starting their career? Would your advice be any different for women?
My advice would be exactly the same for women and men. Do what challenges and interests you. Don’t be afraid to try entirely new things. Don’t worry too much about your resume or your “career path” – that will work itself out if you’re a quick learner and willing to pitch in and work hard and care about what you’re doing. Bring authenticity and joy to your work as much as possible. Know that there’s power in individual action — you can get big things done if you keep at it. Remember to lift up from your screen and go into nature to breathe the air and soak in the songs of the trees and birds and bright blue sky — then get back to work and fight like hell for their continued existence.