“Concrete is essentially three things: sand, aggregate, which usually is stone or gravel, and a cementitious binder that holds them together. But to make cement, the industry needs enormous heat, and that releases huge amounts of CO₂,” explains Camilo Restrepo, CEO of Biomason.

“Biomason’s founder and architect, Ginger Dosier, saw how much cement was being used in the construction industry and began to wonder whether natural alternatives existed. She asked a simple question: “How does nature grow cement, and can we mimic this process?”

The answer she found in coral reefs. Corals synthesise a cementitious material called calcium carbonate to build their sturdy skeletons out of. Biomason harnesses the same process, known as Microbial Induced Carbonate Precipitation.

In this process, bacteria act as microscopic production plants, taking a source of carbon and calcium and crystallising them into calcium carbonate. These crystals then bind the aggregates into a material with the compressive strength of conventional concrete, no heat required.

“In fact, the CO₂ in the raw materials is not released but transformed: captured into the crystalline structure of the calcium carbonate, locked and immobilised. The result is a building material with 60% fewer emissions than traditional cement products. And it reaches full strength in approximately 40 hours, compared to the 28 days that conventional concrete needs to cure,” says Restrepo.

Restrepo spent 19 years inside the traditional cement and pre-cast industry before joining Biomason two years ago. “Even when I was working with regular cement, my focus was always on sustainability and innovation,” he says.

“I kept looking for ways to improve the product, to make it more sustainable. When I came across Biomason, I thought, ‘This is it.’ This is the technology that makes a concrete alternative industrially feasible. But to convince the rest I needed to prove that it was as trustworthy as the original.”

Disrupting a conservative industry with innovative biotech

Thus began the journey from the laboratory petri dish to an industrial product at scale. “Trying to move our invention into production was not easy; we were met with a lot of resistance. The cement industry has spent decades optimising its factories to do one thing very efficiently, so it doesn’t welcome new ingredients or new processes with open arms,” the Biomason frontman explains.

But around 2019, Biomason got a surprising offer. “IBF, a visionary Danish pre-cast manufacturer, reached out because they were looking for alternatives to cement. They could see where regulation and investor pressure were heading and wanted to be ahead of it,” Restrepo says.

“They were willing to open up their facility for us and take the risk. Together, we built the first-of-its-kind bio-concrete tile manufacturing facility in the world. A place where biotechnology and industrial pre-cast manufacturing meet for the first time. It is true innovation, not just in the product but in the entire production process.”

The facility currently produces 8,000 square metres of tiles per year, with plans to scale to 20,000. The tiles are distributed across Europe by FRONT, the Amsterdam-based platform for sustainable building materials led by Ward Massa and Thomas Zeegers. 

The connection between the two companies was made years earlier, when Massa got in touch with founder Dosier after she had won a prize for her groundbreaking idea. He reached out, but the technology was still premature, and an actual product was still a distant dream. In 2020, Massa tried again, and this time, Biomason was on the verge of opening its first small-scale production facility in Denmark. The timing was right. FRONT had spent years building a network of forward-thinking architects and developers eager for materials exactly like this. “They have the technology; we have the route to market,” Massa says. “And we both had the same objective: making sustainable construction the obvious choice, not the niche exception.”