Blue Earth Summit

Concrete and asphalt are everywhere, which makes their hidden carbon impossible to ignore. Dr Natasha Boulding co-founded Low Carbon Materials to reduce that footprint without asking the construction industry to abandon familiar production systems. A chemist by training, she launched the County Durham company with fellow university researchers in 2019, turning industrial waste and by-products into carbon-negative aggregates. Its products include OSTO®, a lightweight aggregate for concrete, and ACLA®, developed for lower-carbon asphalt and trialled in infrastructure projects. Natasha has led the company from laboratory research through investment, manufacturing and commercial deployment. Low Carbon Materials was a finalist for the 2022 Earthshot Prize and a 2025 BE100 winner. Natasha offers a practical case for circular materials by taking a major source of waste, engineering it into something useful and making lower embodied carbon easier for industry to adopt.