NRMCA, Build With Strength Attend Boston Ceremony for Low Carbon Cement 

NRMCA Senior Director, Building Innovations, Frank Mruk attended yesterday (October 1) the WS Development and Sublime System’s ribbon cutting ceremony (seen here) for the first commercial application of its low-carbon Sublime Cement™. The concrete placement is located in the indoor public space of WS Development’s One Boston Wharf, Boston's largest net-zero-carbon office building, in the Seaport district. The building is a 707,000 square feet, 17-story, mixed-use structure designed by world-renowned Henning Larsen architects of Copenhagen, Denmark. In addition to 630,000 square feet of office space leased to Amazon, One Boston Wharf Road will feature ground floor retail and a new performing arts center.

Sublime Systems has developed a breakthrough process to make low-carbon cement. The technology replaces a fossil-fuel-intensive thermal calciner process with an electrochemical process that produces low-carbon cement at ambient temperatures with renewable electricity. Sublime was started in 2020 as an offshoot of Yet-Ming Chiang's lab at MIT.

Speakers included Massachusetts Governor Maura Healy, U.S. House of Representatives member Ayanna Presley, House Rep. Richard Neal, Yanni Tsipis, senior vice president, WS Development; Robin Carnahan, administrator, General Services Administration; Andrew Mayock, White House chief sustainability officer; Jonathan Gulliver, administrator, MassDOT; Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, Kent Kunkle, vice president and general manager, Turner; Jim Carreira, technical director, Boston Sand and Gravel; Don Davies, co-founder Davies Crooks and Associates; Ben Beachy, White House special assistant to the president; Emil Ramirez, vice president and Cement Council chairman, United Steelworkers Union; Justina Gallegos, White House deputy director and Leah Ellis, co-founder and CEO, Sublime Systems.

The Build With Strength program is a leader in supporting project teams in the crafting of high-performance, energy-efficient concrete buildings. For more information, contact Frank Mruk at fmruk@nrmca.org.