Advancing Solutions for a Safer World: Zirconia's CEO Story

A doctor's calling, redirected

When I first applied to college, I had originally wanted to be a pediatric doctor. Then I was admitted into UC Berkeley's Environmental program, where I began studying environmental science and researching pollution problems around the world. That research changed everything.

The more I studied environmental pollution and the toxicity generated by industry and agriculture, the more clearly I saw how those problems affected children, producing a wide variety of illnesses on a local and global scale. The inspiration to become a doctor gave way to something different: a drive to eliminate the source of the problem rather than treat its consequences.

Oakland, Berkeley, and a question that would not go away

One summer, I volunteered as an Emergency Room aide at Oakland Children's Hospital. A major concern at the time, one that has never fully gone away, was toxic lead contamination from leaded paint, gasoline, and industrial sources that had poisoned soils around older family homes where children played. As I sat with children lying sick in their beds, many of them children of color from low-income backgrounds, I kept asking myself why adults allowed these children to be poisoned by their immediate environment.

At Berkeley I also worked on reducing "Dirty Dozen" pesticide exposures in agriculture, developing antibody tests for pesticides that prevented migrant women and children from entering farm fields with dangerously high contamination levels. The stories of children exposed to those toxins were brutal and galvanizing.

I researched how toxic industrial chemicals in construction materials lead to cancer and other health problems for workers and building occupants alike. I took ecology classes that covered industrial pollution, including greenhouse gas emissions that were already creating measurable climate change, along with the long-term environmental and human health costs that would follow.

In my mind the question was simple: why wait until children were already sick? Why not eliminate the toxins in the first place and keep children safe?

The green-tech pivot

Around that same time, green industrial technologies were beginning to emerge: cleaner chemistries and processes that could substitute for older, more toxic ones. It was the start of a steady green-tech revolution that would only grow. I realized that this principle of technological substitution could be used systematically to reduce industrial toxicity, and that more science education was needed to change minds.

I also recognized that farmers and construction professionals were doing their best within the systems and tools they already knew. Better solutions needed to be created, but to be effective they also needed to be introduced in a language industry understood.

That realization shaped what I would become: a green-technologist who leverages science and education to reduce toxicity and solve ecological problems. I decided to pursue that path rather than enter the medical field. I became a serial entrepreneur in order to push green technology into the market and push toxic products out. Along the way I also earned an MBA from the nation's first Sustainable Business program at Pinchot University.

Three decades of green-tech building

I have been building green-tech businesses ever since graduating from UC Berkeley in 1993. The journey has taken several forms:

• An environmental laboratory focused on preventing contamination and worker exposure in construction.
• The Seattle area's largest green building program, built inside a local hardware chain.
• GeoTree Technologies, an infrastructure restoration company that created a green cement process capable of restoring water and sewer infrastructure underground, without excavating the road, while generating roughly half the CO2 of conventional repair.
• Ongoing work in green agricultural technology, promoting more restorative farming practices and reducing reliance on toxic pesticides.

Zirconia Inc.: the latest and most focused chapter

My latest company, Zirconia Inc., is leading the charge for more sustainable infrastructure through green-tech advances in industrial coatings. The specific target is the elimination of volatile organics and toxic products like epoxies, replaced by a new generation of green-tech nano-ceramic coating technology.

At Zirconia we make specialized water-borne ceramic coatings, including CeramycGuard™, that dramatically increase the durability of concrete infrastructure while lowering the financial and ecological costs that current infrastructure imposes on future generations, including a meaningful reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

I have chosen to focus on infrastructure because infrastructure affects all of our lives and our shared environment in a profound way, yet there are too few advocates who concentrate on materials science, which is critical to driving real change at global scale.

Please join us in supporting revolutionary green technology at Zirconia that will preserve our infrastructure, as well as our health, quality of life, and the quality of our shared environment.

Benjamin Cook, CEO, Zirconia Inc.