One of the processes with the highest climate emissions is the production of cement and concrete - and one of the largest producers of cement and concrete is the Swiss multinational Holcim.
Holcim have some really interesting sustainability initiatives, so I invited their Chief Sustainability Officer Magali Anderson to come on the podcast to tell me all about them.
She very graciously obliged and we had an excellent discussion talking about the difference between cement and concrete (it's like flour and cake!), some of the fascinating ways Holcim have reduced their emissions 28% globally to-date, and their really interesting options for the other 72%.
This was a truly fascinating episode of the podcast and I learned loads as always, and I hope you do too.
If you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podcast - feel free to leave me a voice message on my SpeakPipe page, head on over to the Climate 21 Podcast Forum, or just send it to me as a direct message on Twitter/LinkedIn. Audio messages will get played (unless you specifically ask me not to).
Podcast supporters I'd like to sincerely thank this podcast's amazing supporters:
Lorcan Sheehan
Jerry Sweeney
Andreas Werner
Devaang Bhatt
Stephen Carroll
Roger Arnold
And remember you too can Support the Podcast - it is really easy and hugely important as it will enable me to continue to create more excellent Climate Confident episodes like this one.
Contact If you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podcast - get in touch via direct message on Twitter/LinkedIn.
One of the processes with the highest climate emissions is the production of cement and concrete - and one of the largest producers of cement and concrete is the Swiss multinational Holcim.
Holcim have some really interesting sustainability initiatives, so I invited their Chief Sustainability Officer Magali Anderson to come on the podcast to tell me all about them.
She very graciously obliged and we had an excellent discussion talking about the difference between cement and concrete (it's like flour and cake!), some of the fascinating ways Holcim have reduced their emissions 28% globally to-date, and their really interesting options for the other 72%.
This was a truly fascinating episode of the podcast and I learned loads as always, and I hope you do too.
If you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podcast - feel free to leave me a voice message on my SpeakPipe page, head on over to the Climate 21 Podcast Forum, or just send it to me as a direct message on Twitter/LinkedIn. Audio messages will get played (unless you specifically ask me not to).
Podcast supporters I'd like to sincerely thank this podcast's amazing supporters:
Lorcan Sheehan
Jerry Sweeney
Andreas Werner
Devaang Bhatt
Stephen Carroll
Roger Arnold
And remember you too can Support the Podcast - it is really easy and hugely important as it will enable me to continue to create more excellent Climate Confident episodes like this one.
Contact If you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podcast - get in touch via direct message on Twitter/LinkedIn.
Credits Music credits - Intro by Joseph McDade, and Outro music for this podcast was composed, played, and produced by my daughter Luna Juniper
Magali Anderson:
In the future, and we're not talking science fiction here, we're already doing it. But it could mean that if you need, you should expand the life of your buildings as much as you want, as you can. But if you need to destroy a building because it's really too old, you could almost rebuild it with the same product at the same place
Tom Raftery:
Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. This is the climate 21 podcast. The number one podcast, showcasing best practices in climate emission reductions. And I'm your host, Tom Raftery. Don't forget to click follow on this podcast in your podcast app of choice, to be sure you don't miss any episodes. Hi everyone. Welcome to the Climate 21 Podcast. My name is Tom Raftery, and with me on the show today, I have my special guest, Magali. Magali, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself?
Magali Anderson:
Sure. Hi Tom. Very happy to be with you here today. So I'm Magali Anderson. I am the Chief Sustainability and Innovation Officer at Holcim. Holcim is the largest, largest building material company outside China, and as you can imagine, I have a fantastic and great challenge and opportunities in my day to day job.
Tom Raftery:
Yeah, so as you say, Holcim, is the largest outside of China in terms of concrete production and as you say, that's a challenge and an opportunity. For people who might be unaware, concrete and concrete production is massively polluting in terms of carbon. So how do you approach that in terms of sustainability and in terms of reducing the carbon footprint of one of the largest CO2 producers on the planet?
Magali Anderson:
So we are actually not one of the largest polluting company. I would like to straight that first because, yes, cement and concrete are definitely emit a lot, but we are lower than certain sectors and other company, if you take those three scopes who are way lower than many companies, so I just want to set the record straight first, but, but yes, we do emit some, some tons of CO2 every year and we're part of what we call the hard to abate sector, which I love to rename the full of opportunity sector because this is where we can do absolutely fantastic things. And the, the cement industry at large has been working on, on reducing the cement footprint for many, many years. It's actually quite an advanced sector, which not that many people know, but for example, Holcim has reduced their footprint per ton of cement by 28% since 1990. So it's something that we have been doing that we know how to do. What has happened in the last two, three years is a clear acceleration, an understanding that we were not going fast enough. But the good news when you've been working on it for some years is you actually know what you have to do. So we don't have to spend time, like many companies, how do I account for my CO2? What do I need to do? What? What can I do? We know what to do. We just now need to mobilize everybody, mobilize the right resources, and get on and do the job. And maybe you want me to explain a bit what we need to do and how to do it.
Tom Raftery:
Yeah. Well let, let me before we get into that, I mean, you said that since 1990 you've reduced your emissions 28%. So this is obviously something you've been working on for a good while because you are, as you said, in the hard to abate sector. So could you, first of all, give us a, a couple of examples of how that 28% figure came about, because maybe that could help other people who are listening to the podcast before we get onto the next 72% that you still have to get outta your system.
Magali Anderson:
Well. We have what we call the traditional levers and we are not finished with them. So that's the past, but also the future. And I need to take two minutes here to go a little bit technical, if you don't mind, on how we make cement, but that's good because, your readers will learn something today of how we make the cement. So first of all, let's see what is cement. What is concrete? Many people don't understand the difference. I don't know if you bake Tom, but when you make a cake, you use flour. The flour is very complicated to make, but you can't eat it. It's only a product that you use to then make the cake. Once you make a cake is actually much easier to make than the flour, and you can eat it. It's your final product. So think of the cement as the flour. Think of the concrete as the cake
Tom Raftery:
Love it
Magali Anderson:
Now, or cookies, some people like to call it cookies and the chocolate things. The cookies are the aggregates anyway, to, to do this. So the cement is what actually emits CO2 the concrete doesn't emit any. And to make the cement. You need to hit up a huge oven, which is called kiln to 1,450 degrees. That uses about 30% of the emission of the sector. Now we know how to replace this fuel, these fossil fuels by waste biomass, maybe in the future green hydrogen, we don't know. But at the moment, we already know how to replace that and we, we already at over 20, 25% of replacement. And we have some plants that's already run at almost a hundred percent replacement. So we know how to do it. It's more a question of going from 20% to 80- 90%.
Tom Raftery:
Right.
Magali Anderson:
Then what comes, What you are heating up, what you are cooking in that oven is limestone. So the calcination process of limestone emits CO2. What comes out of the oven is called clinker. And to make the cement, you would mix that clinker with other product. And the lower clinker, the better The clinker is really what has the co2. We, we put with the clinker to make the cement byproducts from other industries such as slag and fly ash, but also more and more because we all know that slag and fly ash is going to reduce over time and we actually hope it'll reduce over time because we, we hope that there will be less and less coal industries, which is fly ash being the byproduct of the coal industry. And we put that with the clinker and we call that a clinker factor. So the lower is a clinker factor, the better. We are at company level at about 70% clinker factor. But we would know, we have some products which are five, 10% clinker factor. So, those two traditional levers going from zero to 20% replacement of fossil fuel and 70% clinker factor is how we went to the reduction of 28%. But as you can see, we can, we still have a long way to go with those traditional levers that we can still action to, to progress. Right.
Tom Raftery:
And just outta curiosity, what is it that you're replace in the fossil fuels with in those 20%?
Magali Anderson:
So we replace it with all kind of waste. Can be tires, can be biomass can be municipal waste. The first time I visited one of our cement plant, it was this very strong smell of rubbish, like, like being next to rubbish truck, and I could not understand that. That's because we were co processing all this rubbish and transforming all these waste in energy.
Tom Raftery:
Okay. Okay. Interesting, Interesting. And so that's. Got you so far, 28%, and as you say, that's like 20% of your facilities, you can go to 80, 90% and get it even more. What are other ideas beyond that though?
Magali Anderson:
Those two traditional levers, like I said, will continue them and it'll be the majority of the reduction we will do by 2030. Then the other thing we can do is replace some minerals. Instead of using limestone, we can use calcium clay, we can put all kind of alternative raw materials within the kin, which will not emit CO2 while they're being transformed into clinker. Our total rate of replacement is relatively low today, so that's really where innovation kicks in. We are really working on novel cements. We know how to do some, though, the challenges to do it at scale. Because again, everything I talk about you always have to remember, I need to do it at scale. We, we, we make 180 million tons of cement, so we have a lot of niche ideas of products that regularly I get people contacting me saying, What do you think of that product, that product? And they're super. Don't get me wrong, but they will always remain niche either because of the cost, because of the availability of the material or whatever. And I'm not interested by niche. I'm only interested by scale. I'm only interested by impact. So, so that's one of the way so noble, all the novel cements and what will be left, even if we reduce our clinker factor a lot, we still have to make some clinker. Then the ultimate space is carbon capture. So that we will need to really start it at scale by 2030. And the carbon capture, we have about 40, 50 projects ongoing right now, so it's something we're preparing ourself for. I dunno if you want me to talk a bit more, about carbon capture.
Tom Raftery:
please.
Magali Anderson:
so in short, carbon capture has existed since the seventies, so it's not a new thing. There are today a few plant that capturing several million tons, not cement plants other because everyone is using carbon capture but there haven't been the focus that was needed on it just because it was something that was done for all kind of reasons, but not necessarily with the part of decarbonization strategy at large like it's needed now, but today you hear more and more government talking about it. For example, the US it's part of their, of their strategies. They want to accelerate carbon capture. The UK announced a couple of years ago that they were going to put 1 billion pounds in carbon capture. So I think there's a big understanding from the politics and governments and everyone else that without carbon capture, again not necessarily for the cement industry, but at large. We won't get where we go, so, So I'm very confident that there is now enough mobilization from scientific people, from startups, universities, you name it, to make it happen. So, because a lot of people say, Yeah, it's been existing for 50 years, but we hardly capture 10 million tons per year. So how can you bet on it? And that's the reason why we have those, all those pilots, is because we want to use the next few years to fully understand what will be the most economical and scalable solutions. Solutions, Not one. There will be more than one. Because you have the, the technology part, which is how to scale up and how to replicate what already exists at a new technologies to, because you have to think of one cement plant is about 1 million tons of CO2 you have to capture. So it's a large, very large quantity. And then what do you do with that CO2? And what you do is at co2 you can bury it. So that's what we call carbon capture and sequestration or storage. You can bury it in a depleted oil and gas reservoirs or in saline reservoirs. There is many things. Usually you try to do that offshore cause there is it is really the type of thing, the famous, not in my backyard. I don't think many people would like to know that their house is above a big reservoir of co2. So even though it's extremely safe, there's still a lot of work to do there to convince population that we can bury CO2 without any risk. This is where the oil and gas people expertise can be very interesting. Or the usage and the usage, you can turn it into mineral, you can turn it into aviation fuels, you can turn it into plastics. Even we use it in, in Spain. We are using it for greenhouses to, to grow vegetables. Because they need CO2 to grow. So there's many, many, you, you, I don't know what's your favorite energy drink, but you have CO2 into those drinks. So there are many usages of co2. And, and you need to think of CO2 at the resource, other useful resource, and not as a waste. And if you do it that way, it, it'll work, but there's still a long way to go just purely because of the quantity. Again, using 20, 30, 40,000 tons co2. I know to do that very well today, but I need to use 1 million tons. So we have all this time to do it. But again, I am very confident that it'll happen. And then the cement that will come out of that cement plant will be absolutely net zero or actually zero, not even net zero.
Tom Raftery:
Okay. Nice, well, first of all, my favorite energy drink is beer. But , that's
Magali Anderson:
I dunno if they put CO2 in beer.
Tom Raftery:
I don't, I don't think so. I think it's naturally produced by the, the fermentation. So I I, I imagine, I imagine. To your mind, what are the technologies or the processes or whatever that hold the most potential for getting Holcim to net zero or absolute zero.
Magali Anderson:
Well, the CCUS is fantastic. What carbon capture utilization and storage is fantastic because once you have that functioning, that's it. You are at zero all finished, you know, the only job is done. And by the way, something I forgot to mention when I was talking about CCUS and why I have great hope into it. Holcim just got 330 million from the EU Innovation Fund to finance two of the projects.
Tom Raftery:
Oh wow.
Magali Anderson:
So, because again, governments understand that for their own commitment to go to net zero, they will need CCUS. So that's really completely changed the equation when we look at one of the big concern that our investors have is that we would end up putting so much money in c c s that we would be lose our competitiveness. And if we lose our market share and go bankrupt, we're not helping the planet much. Right. So, so knowing that there is so much public money, ready to go into helping company that are trying to decarbonize at scale again with large impact is really good news. So CCUS absolutely no question is, is a magic stick. Once a plant is there, I don't need, I don't even need to do the replacing of the fossil fuel because that CO2 that I've emitted, I'm capturing it. But again, we know that we're not going to be able to deploy CCUS that quickly and not in all countries because we can do it in EU. Because of the EU price, we can try to do it in the US because there is some tax incentive.
Tom Raftery:
Okay.
Magali Anderson:
We can, of course, when we have a grant, it's fantastic. But it's going to be complicated to do it in the very near future in emerging market if there is no market for it, market for the cost of it. But the two other levers, the clinker factor is definitely the second one in term of big, I mean it's, it's super basic, right? If you have clinker factor of 70, or if you have alinker factor of 30, 35 to make it simple, you have divided by two your co2. So that's super basic. But I think what is even more interesting is, is not even, how do you reduce the CO2 at product level? It's what you do with that product. And that's for me, where the immediate scalability can happen. that's what we are working on a lot with my teams is today we want to go from selling concrete as a product to sell a system. Because one thing that is missing today is the right incentive for the right action for climate. So you are, look, I think I'm being a bit secret here, I'm talking a bit obscure, but let me explain
Tom Raftery:
Yep.
Magali Anderson:
Today, the relationship we have with our clients is really based on selling volumes of cement or concrete. And because of that our incentive is to sell the more cement as the more concrete possible. When we are working with university, we are working a lot in our innovation center on how to put much less cement to build the same object. And today we know how to do using artificial intelligence, using all kind of super smart design. So again, something that would take a little while maybe to scale, but that we know how to do already. We can use up to 30% of the cement so we can reduce 70% of the cement, for the same flooring system, for example. And then because you also have much less enforce, et cetera, because you use inter artificial or intelligence to put the exact amount of product following where the compressive strengths are going and remove the product where it's not needed for strengths, purpose. So if we do that, we can reduce by 70, 80% the CO2 of the same flooring system right now. Of course I'm using a, a low CO2 cement that I already have of the market that's, I am already selling low carbon cement, low carbon concrete that are more than 30% below the standard. So I'm already doing that. But if I can also design differently, but that mean I need to start selling a system. I need to prove that in term of strength, nothing will collapse. It will be strong. The insurance companies need to accept to pay for the insurance, and one of the issues we have seen over the years is that it's overdesigned and because everyone takes safety margins, the first designer takes safety margin, The engineer takes safety margin, the architect takes a safety margin, and then the construction takes a safety margin and the supplier takes a safety margin. And once you accumulate all of that, you end up having at least a double of product, a double of CO2 that you actually would need. If you are streamlining all those safety margins while remaining safe, but it's such a change of mindset. It's such a change of how you look at, things that in one hand, technically we could do it tomorrow morning, but because it requires changing our relationship with our clients, going from selling product to selling system, aligning with the insurance companies, aligning with the public, aligning with everything, it might take a little bit longer.
Tom Raftery:
Okay. And how do you square the factor that you are selling less product and and stay financially viable. I mean, by
Magali Anderson:
Well, that's exactly, yeah, that's exactly why I was saying that it requires a complete change of business model, which mean that I should stop selling cement or concrete, but I should start selling flooring systems. And then I can make it at a higher price than just a product because you need to pay for the intelligence that you have put into designing it that way. Which mean that at the end my cost will remain, will be a bit lower, and my revenue will be slightly higher than my my margin will be higher. So maybe I will make less, but I will get more margin. So at the end, it's really quite a good way to uh, reduce the amount of cement, you put object, but remember there's going to be a huge growth in the need of cement and concrete in the coming years because what I haven't talked about yet is the famous mega trend. And if you think of, you know, 1.2 billion people don't have a house on their head today with climate change and weather events, more and more people are losing their house and need stronger houses. And so concrete will become more and more important for resilience of those houses on, on geographies and those geographies, as we have seen particularly last summer, is now every geograph is not anymore. A few, like it was just five years ago. But also urbanization. 2.5 billion people are going to move to urban area. That's. The equivalent of building New York City on a monthly base, and I haven't even talked about the energy transformation. If we want to go fully renewable, if we want to have electrical vehicles everywhere with charging station everywhere, you, you need concrete to do the windmills foot you need concrete to do, the dams you need. So I think there will be so much increase of demand of concrete in the coming years. And I know a lot of people think it's not a good idea, but there will be a lot of demand of more objects. We don't need to transform that into more concrete. It can be the same amount of concrete and doing more things. And it's a famous building, more with less. And this is where all those technology are 3D printing, we do 3D printing where we can do the foot of of windmill with about 50% of the, of the concrete versus a normal foot. And there is even, we, we have a partnership with GE to do that. And the windmill itself makes 25% more output of electricity. So, so there's many, many things we can do today. We have all the solutions exist. It's really a question of changing the business model, changing the way people perceive things, and being able to scale that as rapidly as we can.
Tom Raftery:
So it's, you're not selling dumb concrete, you're selling intelligence and less concrete.
Magali Anderson:
Correct. Which is way super exciting, frankly. But it, it's going to take, So we are starting with pilots and with pilot, with leading construction companies, leading who are developers who are really wanting to. To move on on that and we're piloting with them and to prove it can be done, and then we will be able after to scale it to, to the rest of the, of the companies.
Tom Raftery:
Okay. Fascinating. You mentioned as well that with the c, C US, that you can potentially not have to replace the fossil fuels with some kind of alternative, but if you did, if you replaced the fossil fuel, With some carbon free fuel and you did the ccc us, wouldn't that take you carbon negative? And is that something you're thinking of doing as well?
Magali Anderson:
Well, then you go into accounting, right? Because at the end, what CCUs does is it takes the CO2 that comes out of the chimney, and does some. Something with it. So if you are using fossil fuel, fossil free fuel, such as biomass, you could say, Well, I'm just capturing less CO2 because less CO2 comes out of the chimney. So the end result is the same. Now in terms of accounting with the world that they are, you could end up being negative, but it's more an accounting thing. You know, I'm an engineer. Everything has to be scientific at the end of the day, I emit 10 CO2, I capture 10 C02. I do something with 10 CO2 and zero You know, I don't know what negative means. Now, having said that, the I PCC report recognized for the first time, the last one, the one that came out about a year ago. Recognize for the first time, the recarbonation of the concrete is something that is well known in the concrete industry, but not part of the greenhouse gas protocols yet. So that's why we don't mention it very often is that 25% of the CO2 that was emitted during process is reabsorbed, chemically. It's a chemical interaction. Buys the concrete. Of course, if you have an exposed concrete without anything on it outside, it'll absorb more that if it's a foundation. But yes, we could go negative that way because we reabsorb that concrete and that's why concrete is so beautiful. You should leave it natural because the more natural it is, the more it absorbs. So don't put carpet it on your floors, keep it concrete. Don't put
Tom Raftery:
Fascinating.
Magali Anderson:
for health by the way.
Tom Raftery:
Okay.
Magali Anderson:
Because all the things you put on concrete usually have been made with some chemicals of, some kind. So when Cocreate is fully natural, which is the beauty of concrete right?
Tom Raftery:
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you have any Referencable use cases of carbon reduction that you can actually speak to any success stories?
Magali Anderson:
Yeah. So what we are doing today, so success stories, we have plenty. So we launched a bit more than two years ago now, we launched the first global brand of low carbon concrete called Eco Pact. That Eco Pact you can only called Eco Pact if you are 30% less CO2 than the standard of the country where you are. So simple rules but effective. When we launched it people told us that no market for it. No one is interested by low carbon concrete and you know,
Tom Raftery:
And is more
Magali Anderson:
do you do? You don't launch it. But if you don't, well we can't. We put a slight premium but not much really very little. And again, when you build a house, concrete is 5% of the cost of your house. So even if there's a 5% on the 5% is remains pretty, pretty small impact. But now people just said there is no market. So we were in that chicken and egg situation where, Yeah, well there is also no market because there's no product on the shelf to buy. So, which, who, who start. So we decided to be bold at go, and we deployed straight away in something like 25 markets. Today it represent 15% of our concrete sales across the world.
Tom Raftery:
Wow.
Magali Anderson:
And we launched Eco Planet last year, and Eco Planet is also now deployed in 20, more than 20 markets. 25 I think. And same thing, we can see the same success take up of the Eco Planet that we did with Eco Pack. So, so, and, and that's something we really wanted to do. So we have what kind of echo pack?
Tom Raftery:
what's eco planet?? to, just to clarify what, what's the difference
Magali Anderson:
It's the same one for cement.
Tom Raftery:
Ah,
Magali Anderson:
Eco pack is concrete. Eco Planet is cement and you know the difference between concrete and
Tom Raftery:
Flour and cake
Magali Anderson:
Exactly. So Eco Planet, we can focus the same type of success and eco pack just came one year later. So we need to, but, and we have several grade. Right? We have the normal one and then we have the prime and we have the plus. And because, so that's one success story. The other success story is, Waste usage. We use an enormous amount of waste. Last year we used 54 million tons of waste. That makes us bigger than a company like Veolia, which is one of the biggest waste treatment companies. So I like to say we are a major waste treatment company that makes cement as a byproduct because we use it to do our clinker factor. We use it to do all the the replacing of the fossil fuel, et cetera, et cetera. So, and now what we are doing is we have a cement in Switzerland where we use what we call construction demolition waste. So basically you take a old building full of concrete. You take the concrete you grind it. And you use those fines, put them straight back in cement. And if you think about what that could mean in the future, and we're not talking science fiction here, we're already doing it. But it could mean that if you need, you should expand the life of your buildings as much as you want, as you can. But if you need to destroy a building because it's really too old, you could almost rebuild it with the same product at the same place. It's not there yet because you, for the moment, you need to take the cement back to the cement plant. But you know, the potential this is opening is absolutely fantastic. So we've been selling this cement in Switzerland since 2018. It has been very successful there. And the reason we, the only one in the world is because Switzerland is the only country where the norms allows it. It'll be soon allowed in all of Europe end of this year, beginning of next year, and then we'll be able to expand it. So there's so many things already happening that are so exciting and which we have been doing for some years now.
Tom Raftery:
Phenomenal. And again, if you're recycling concrete does that put a price premium on it? Is it highly efficient? You know, how does that work?
Magali Anderson:
No, again, on the cost, it does not have a big cost impact and after it's a market price is market driven, right? I mean, it all depends what the demand is and what the appetite for people for low carbon product. But the reason why I like to put a little premium, even if it's a small one, it's because it really position it as a special product, which I think is also important not to sell it as the normal things that people, it, it's a way for us as well to advertise the fact that we know how to do super low carbon cement and concrete already today.
Tom Raftery:
Okay. Okay Interesting, interesting. Slightly left field question. Magali, as the chief sustainability officer of, you know, a large multinational organization in an a high abatement space., how do you get into a role like that? What's the kind of career path for people who are interested in something like that?
Magali Anderson:
It's funny, I get that question a lot. And I always tell people those profiles don't exist. Right?
Tom Raftery:
Hmm.
Magali Anderson:
The sustainability has been too recent as a function to have had time to produce people senior enough to be at office level. If you think of my own case, I happen to be in Holcim when the job was created and. I was lucky enough that honoured enough that the board of director and the CEO decided to, to, that I was the right person to take that role, but at that point, had never had a sustainability job in my life. So when they offered me the job, I went to the dictionary, read what does sustainability means, and I say, Yes, I will take it thank you. What I bring to the table though is my very deep knowledge of how a company work. Because I've had many roles. I was, I had supply chain roles, I've had technical roles, manufacturing roles, I've been P&L roles a lot. I was a country manager in Angola, was in charge of Europe as a P&L role for for Schlumberger at the time. But I was also had, I was a vp, maintenance supply chain, all kind of roles. And I think that's what you need. You need someone who is we, we call it Swiss Army knife. You know, who has all those skills
Tom Raftery:
Multidisciplinary
Magali Anderson:
Multi. Yeah, that's a much better way to say it. I guess . So you need a multidisciplinary person who understands the business super well because your problem is not so much how technical it is because I have an incredible team of experts and they know that stuff really, really well. What you need is to convince people to do it. You need to find ways to show to the people why it's everyone's interest to do it, why it's so win-win. And if you don't understand the business, it's going to be tough. And a lot of the problems we see and, and we see that all the time, we see that in the, in the public space, is how the technical people struggle to talk to other people.
Tom Raftery:
Yeah,
Magali Anderson:
Because are too technical and they really struggle to make their speech. And I know some people are really good at it, but some people are just brilliant and just don't mind. So sometimes I feel like I'm a translator. I'm the one who takes all the technical things because I do understand it and translate it into something that becomes actionable for a normal operation guy, because the operation guy, you need to understand his day life and you need to understand why. What would be the show stopper to implement what you want him to implement in, in sustainability? And, you know, it's not that he doesn't want or she doesn't want, I don't know anybody who goes to work every morning thinking, Ha ha, ha, I'm going to destroy the planet a bit more. If you give them the tool and the resource to, to do something good, they will. But the majority of the time, the way their bonus system work, the way they're evaluated and by the company, et cetera, is such that they're not encouraged to do it. So you can't rely on them just doing it because they're good guys or good girls. So one of the thing I did was aligning with the, with the financial function, but also again, being as executive committee helped aligning with everybody to make sure that. We had a long objective. So today, for example, 30% of the long time incentive of all our senior leaders are 200 top people of the company is sustainability. So, so once you manage to do that, you actually get much better alignment. And now people not only have the tools, but have the possibility and the incentive to do it. So that's why I think for those jobs, and I, and I tell that quite regularly because head hunters are all looking for, for those profile and ask me quite regularly how do we find them? I say, Well, take a risk. Take a risk on someone who is not a sustainability person who is a multidisciplinary question, passionate by the topic. And I was super lucky that I was in the company. I'm not sure anyone would've recruited me just looking at my CV because of what sustainability was nowhere to be seen in my cv.
Tom Raftery:
Right. Fascinating, Fascinating. Magali. We're coming towards the end of the podcast now. Is there any question that I haven't asked you that you wish I had or any aspect of this we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to be aware of?
Magali Anderson:
No, I think I've talked about. Everything. I'm happy to give you a little conclusion word though,
Tom Raftery:
Yeah, go.
Magali Anderson:
So I would say, you know, what happened this summer, what has been happening like even in this month of October, which no one talks so much about it, but it's even worse in term of temperature differential that then December was, even though because it's lower top ratio than thermal is maybe not as noticed as. I don't think there's ever been such an understanding that climate change is happening and such an acceptance on the fact that this is due to human activity. And I think that if we don't take that opportunity of that public awareness happening right now to act now and to take the right difficult political decision and company decisions to make the changes happen right now that would be absolutely criminal. So I really think that we just don't have time. We just need to all get on and, and work with it.
Tom Raftery:
Fantastic. Fantastic. Magali thats been really interesting. If people would like to know more about yourself or Holcim, or of the things we discussed on the podcast today, where would you have me direct them?
Magali Anderson:
There's many thing I realize, actually I did not even talk about the fact that our, we have a net zero pledge with sales based target initiative, et cetera, et cetera. I just wanted to talk about exciting stuff that this is also exciting, but, so if you want to know about all of this, just go to our website. Our website, holcim.com website is, I've got everything explained at that.
Tom Raftery:
Fantastic Magali that's been really interesting. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today.
Magali Anderson:
Thank you. Tom was a pleasure.
Tom Raftery:
Okay, we've come to the end of the show. Thanks everyone for listening. If you'd like to know more about Climate 21, feel free to drop me an email to Tom Raftery at outlook.com, or connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter. If you like the show, please, don't forget to click follow on it in your podcast application of choice to get new episodes as soon as they're published. Also, please don't forget to rate and review the podcast. It really does help new people to find the show Thanks. Catch you all next time.