Carbon dioxide removal is finding its way into the built environment faster than most people expected. Today’s stories converge on a single theme: concrete and construction materials are becoming a serious vector for permanent carbon storage, and the policy and capital signals are finally catching up.

Concrete Is Becoming a Carbon Sink

Three of today’s five stories point to the same place: the stuff we build with.

CarbonCure just won the 2026 Climate Technology Company of the Year award. The company injects captured CO₂ into fresh concrete, where it mineralizes permanently. That is not a lab demo. CarbonCure’s technology is deployed across hundreds of concrete plants. The award signals that the broader climate-tech community now sees mineralization in building materials as a proven pathway, not a speculative one.

Meanwhile, ETH Zurich published work on a living building material that captures CO₂ and can self-repair. The material uses biological processes embedded in its structure to pull carbon from the air and store it in mineral form. It is early-stage research, but it points toward a future where buildings are not just low-carbon but actively carbon-negative over their lifetimes.

These developments sit alongside what we explored in Captain’s CDR Log #104: the enormous, underappreciated opportunity to use concrete as a permanent carbon store. Concrete is the most consumed material on Earth after water. Even modest CO₂ uptake per cubic meter, multiplied across global production volumes, adds up to meaningful removal at scale.

Policy Could Unlock 60 Million Tonnes a Year

Scale requires more than technology. It requires markets. A new analysis shows that if CDR is formally integrated into the EU carbon market, removals could reach 60 million tonnes of CO₂ per year by 2050. That is a significant number. For context, the entire global volume of CDR purchased through voluntary markets today is a tiny fraction of that figure.

The mechanism matters here. Inclusion in the EU Emissions Trading System would give durable CDR a compliance-grade price signal, not just a voluntary one. That changes the economics for every company making investment decisions about mineralization, direct air capture, and other permanent removal methods. It would also create demand certainty that voluntary markets have struggled to provide.

This is not a foregone conclusion. The policy design details, including how removals are verified, what counts as permanent, and how credits interact with existing allowances, will determine whether the 60 Mt figure stays aspirational or becomes a planning target.

Capital Is Moving, With Strings Attached

A new €300 million fund is tying manager compensation directly to biodiversity outcomes. While biodiversity is not the same as carbon removal, this fund structure matters for CDR because it demonstrates a growing willingness among investors to link financial returns to measurable environmental performance.

For CDR-relevant nature-based approaches like soil carbon and afforestation, this kind of accountability mechanism could help address one of the sector’s persistent credibility problems: the gap between what projects promise and what they deliver. If fund managers only get paid when ecological outcomes are verified, the incentive to overstate results drops sharply.

The model could be adapted for CDR-specific funds. Imagine a vehicle where manager pay depends on tonnes of CO₂ durably removed, verified through rigorous measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV). That would be a meaningful step beyond the current norm, where carbon credit quality varies widely and accountability is uneven.

What’s Next

Two things to watch. First, the EU carbon market integration debate. If CDR gets a formal role in the ETS, expect a rush of capital into mineralization and other permanent removal technologies. The 60 Mt target would become a benchmark that shapes investment decisions across the continent. Second, keep an eye on construction-sector adoption of CO₂ mineralization. CarbonCure’s award and ETH Zurich’s research suggest the building materials industry is approaching a tipping point where carbon storage becomes a standard feature, not a premium add-on. The companies and jurisdictions that move first will set the terms.

Today’s Stories