Erin Glabets of Sublime Systems on how to tell a compelling story about cement
Glabets, who leads comms at Boston-based Sublime Systems, determined to showcase the impact sustainability—and science—can have in our built environment.
Five years ago, Jonathan Watts published his eye-opening article “Concrete: The Most Destructive Material on Earth”. In the piece, Watts outlines the sheer breadth of our reliance on the material (“After water, concrete is the most widely used substance on Earth.”) and its negative impact on the environment—specifically in terms of its emissions. At the time of publication, Watts cited a study that concrete amounts to 4-8% of the world's CO2 emissions. Five years later, that estimate is closer to 9%.
For all of the appropriate discourse around the impact of plastics on our environment, the unsung issue in many circles is cement. It is part of the makeup of our building foundations, our floors, our roads, the grout and putty we use to build walls and ceilings. It’s all at once a spectacular scientific feat—the burning of limestone and clay dates back 12,000 years—and a massive emissions problem. The current approach to cement requires burning fossil fuels in high heat. Boston-based Sublime Systems is hoping to upend this process with electrochemistry.
On the surface, it seems like an easy story to tell—the process is different but the product is the same. Erin Glabets, head of communications at Sublime, has found there is important nuance and many different audiences who all require different types of stories for ultimate buy-in. Glabets told The Cooler she’s found success in a mixture of science, public policy, humility and pragmatism. And it’s working: Sublime was recently awarded $87 million in federal funding from the Department of Energy and has created partnerships with industry stalwarts like Boston Sand and Gravel.
Like a lot of comms professionals, you studied journalism. You worked as a reporter at a tech publication for a bit before joining a few different startups, a biotech VC and eventually focusing on climate comms at Sublime. Tell us a bit about that journey.
After a few years of working at a tech publication called Xconomy after college, I ended up joining the mobile fitness app Runkeeper. I shaped the content and comms role there and then joined another tiny, early-stage startup. After that, I ended up at a venture capital firm that was mostly a healthcare and biotech investor. I was intrigued by VCs because they are such a powerful force in startup value creation, so I thought it would be hugely valuable to get first-person access to their thinking. That season of life gave me a good sharpening of the ability to tell scientific, technical stories, but in a way that was digestible and connected with people—translating deep science into human-speak.
I felt like that was a good skill set, and I wondered where I could apply this skill of scientific communications, but in human-speak, in an area that I'm excited about and that felt deeply urgent. Climate emerged as a natural choice, both because of the urgency of the problem, and because it’s an industry that feels like it's ratcheting up every day. Once I started poking, I was fascinated to learn there's a pretty interesting policy overlay with a lot of climate comms, too, because it does need that public sector push. Finding the opportunity at Sublime, I felt like it brought all of those things together: deep, meaningful purpose in the stories you're telling, urgency, policy intersection, and then also taking cool sophisticated science, but making it make sense for people. So that's what drew me here.
Where has your focus been from a communications perspective since joining Sublime in late August? Where has the focus been in terms of how you're talking about cement?
I think half the job in cement and concrete is getting people to care—or to notice it. Something I think our CEO Leah excels at—and I've really enjoyed amplifying—is that we all have a deep relationship and association with cement, we just don't realize it. We're literally encased in it all day and don't even appreciate that. So part of the job, I think, is to get people to just appreciate the magic of the material and the fact that it's gone from ancient Roman t
imes to today. But also that we are at this moment ripe for innovation. We can't be making cement the way we have for the last 200 years because we've been burning fossil fuels into the air. So we’ve been setting the stage that it's time for a shift, and we need the technologies that will make the cement the world needs, but without the emissions.
We’re curious to hear your thoughts on how you communicate the importance of the material as a replacement for something that already exists and how you break down the science of it.
It's something I think about all day long. I think about it a lot in terms of the audiences that we have and what each of them needs. It's actually one of the major tensions in my particular job. As a startup, we're always talking to investors and particularly venture capitalists. Eventually, it will be public markets or debt financiers but, right now, the thing that startups have always wanted to show VC firms is that they're innovative and groundbreaking and lightyears ahead of where things are.
So that part of the story is important, but in the industries where our product is used—construction and infrastructure—that community has very different needs than the investor audience. They need to know that the product works the way the other option works on time, on budget, and that it’s not going to upset their contractors on the ground. So there's this —inertia's not the right word — but a very steady, cautious, careful approach. I think a lot about how to weave those problems together and make sure we're still true to ourselves and true to the story.
In terms of the science, we like to talk about the magic of the process and chemistry. Finding simple constructs has helped. Our cement arrives at that same destination as other cement. The way it's been done for 200 years is to combust fossil fuels in a very high-heat process to arrive at that destination. With what we're doing, we're using electrochemistry to get there. Electrochemistry is turning electrical energy into chemical energy and kicking off a reaction. So we are using a chemical reaction to break down rocks into reactive ingredients, whereas the other process uses a fossil-fueled kiln that decomposes the CO2 part of the rock to get reactive ingredients. If you tell us it's ordinary and run-of-the-mill, that's the best compliment we can get.
What is top of mind for you in terms of how we communicate about climate change moving forward?
One thing I think about in the context of climate change and comms is it can be a lot of doom and gloom. And some people are motivated by that. Some people say, "I am motivated by the fact that I don't want my seacoast to just fall into the ocean in 30 years.” And that is motivating, but I also think there is a lot of magic to consider.
We talk a lot about the post-carbon future: One day we will be past a point where we're all living in abject terror of rising CO2 and trying to outrace fossil fuels and everything. Right now we are inventing the technologies we need to cross that gulf. I've heard Leah identify it as the great call of our generation, the way that World War II was for our grandparents. I identify with that because I think all the time about wanting my kids to be in a better position than I was. And I think in some ways that's a real threat for our generation in the way that it hasn't been for generations prior.
I know I said I wasn't a doom and gloom, and I brought some doom and gloom into that narrative, but I think there's also an element of hope that's important to project, in that great science and inventive thinkers and enterprising creativity have gotten us out of a lot of problems.
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