Where the Future is Being Built

We were recently invited by the incredible Elena Doms, one of the world’s leading environmental advocates to appear on her brilliant podcast Better Futures at Earth+. Their work is focused on cleaning and restoring polluted and marginal lands with nature-based solutions - so naturally, we had a huge amount to discuss! In the process, we were treated to a tour of where the future is being built!

Nestled in Temse, Belgium, lies an incredible epicentre of innovation and sustainability — C-Biotech alongside their technology and natural capital business Earth+. They are rapidly developing solutions to some of the biggest environmental problems, facing social with an innovative, experimental, and aspirational approach. C-Biotech embodies the spirit of solutioneering incrementally from base principles before scaling their breakthroughs at pace and with urgency to global levels.

Earth+ is a part of the Cordeel Group, where the future is literally being built. Cordeel is a leading Belgian construction company renowned for its comprehensive and innovative approach to building and infrastructure projects. Established over eighty years ago, Cordeel commitment to sustainability, technological advancement, and quality craftsmanship is evident in its extensive portfolio, which includes residential, commercial, industrial, and public sector projects. Cordeel’s ability to seamlessly integrate cutting-edge technology with environmentally conscious practices has positioned it at the very forefront of creating future-proof buildings that meet the evolving needs of communities and businesses.

The home of C-Biotech and Earth+ is found at Cordeel’s Belgium headquarters, itself is a marvel, seemingly floating over a restored former shipping yard. Picture Iron Man's Belgian base and you might come close. Vast glass corridors, open-plan collaboration theatres, experimental laboratories, underground tunnels, and hidden rooms contribute to this arena of alchemy. Yet, the most exciting aspect here is the incredible group of people assembled to build the future.

Visiting this team of innovators is a mind-altering experience, one I highly recommend. Elena and the team are champions of radical collaboration, a concept they live in every way every day. They attract and inspire people who can help them challenge their thinking, develop their understanding and build further and faster. Their commitment to this principle extends to partnerships with some of the biggest and most influential businesses globally, national and local governments, and the most innovative startups in the environmental, financial, and tech sectors.

One reason I love this concept is that it feels like the natural evolution of our own commitment to radical transparency. Sharing, learning, and working together opens up immense possibilities that couldn’t (and probably shouldn’t) be achieved in isolation – we spent a lot of time talking about some incredibly difficult landscape-level projects we could consider together because the simple ones wouldn’t be any fun, would they?!

Under the leadership of the maverick visionary Frederick Verstraete, the C-Biotech team comprises a remarkable array of experience, expertise, energy and imagination. Experts in finance, engineering, materials, biology, design and business work playfully in the margins of these disciplines, showcasing the power of diversity in genuinely impactful ways.

Frederick's incredible energy, vision, and relentless urgency have managed to assemble a cast of characters—each spellbinding in their own right but even more impressive together. They are committed to integrating circularity into everything they do, uncompromising in their quest to find better ways of working, building, and being.

We met people developing new natural materials that could replace and improve upon many building materials, potentially making built properties not just with lower carbon footprints but potentially even becoming carbon sinks. Their work on forever chemicals offers the potential to avert a catastrophic global health crisis, recovering huge areas of land destroyed by our historic obsession with increased efficiency and growth at all costs.

Social impact is woven (such an important word at C-Biotech) into every aspect of what they do, leveraging existing systems and processes for unique collaborations. Instead of building new enterprises in remote rural areas, they adapt existing local factories and facilities and collaborate with neighbouring farmers, determining it easier to adjust their requirements than to expect these people and places to change their ways of working or requirements.

These specialists are not only experts in their fields (another important word) but also critical thinkers and creatives, imagining a future and working to bring it to fruition. A future informed by past decisions and mistakes, evident in their work to reintroduce hemp growing to Flanders. Hemp offers a solution to heavily contaminated ground and degraded soils, reviving an area that once thrived on a hemp-based economy before the reform of paper mills. It’s a poignant reminder that today's solutions often lie in the rediscovery of lost practices, hindered by historical policies, politics, and self-interest.

The team asks themselves how things don't work, and why they're broken, before beginning to invent and iterate solutions to these problems. The applications of the tools and techniques they’re developing are almost limitless, offering not just a future worth living, but a future itself.

Visiting C-Biotech and Earth+ is like stepping into a portal of possibilities. Under Frederick and Elena’s leadership, this remarkable team is not just building new materials and structures but crafting a sustainable, innovative, and socially impactful future. Their dedication to radical collaboration and integration of circularity will set new standards for how we can approach and solve global challenges. It's a place where the future is indeed being built, one innovative solution at a time.