Crypto News: Bw Reads: Curing concrete

Welcome to Bw Reads, our weekend newsletter featuring one great magazine story from Bloomberg Businessweek. Today, Ted C. Fishman explains how concrete is wrecking the planet at the same time it’s defending it from climate change. You can find the whole story online (free) here. You can also listen to it here.

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I first learned about the legal challenge that would become Asmania et al. v. Holcim in 2022. I’d been reporting on Holcim Ltd. at the company’s headquarters in Zug, Switzerland. Holcim, one of the world’s biggest cement makers, is both an industry innovator and a major emitter of atmospheric carbon dioxide, the gas responsible for roughly two-thirds of human-caused climate change. It had been facing aggressive confrontations with climate activists. Protesters had occupied a quarry, blocked company trucks, commandeered cement silos, vandalized plants and hurled Molotov cocktails at police. When I asked Holcim’s head of corporate communications who the culprits were, she winced. Rather than uttering the names of the bomb throwers, she steered me to a group called HEKS.

It was in the tidy, quiet Zurich office of HEKS that I heard about the suit that would soon be filed in Switzerland by four struggling Indonesians — fishers, farmers and hostel operators — from tiny Pari Island. HEKS, despite the witchy ring to its name, is a church-based, decidedly nonviolent aid organization funded largely by Swiss taxpayers. It’s a crucial partner in the international coalition that conceived and backed the lawsuit. Pari Island sits low in the Java Sea about 24 miles from Jakarta, the overstuffed, sinking capital of Indonesia. Home to a single rural village, the island is 3 miles long and a third as wide. Small though it is, it’s one of the biggest islets among the cluster of 342 constituting Indonesia’s Thousand Islands.

The islanders argue Holcim played a part in warming the air and water around their homes — and thus in stirring storms, shifting currents that once routed fish to their nets, killing sea crops they once farmed, flooding homes and robbing their children of a future on the island. The changes, they say, are driving them to desperation. About 11% of Pari Island has disappeared in recent years. Most of the rest is no more than 5 feet above sea level and will likely be gone by 2060.

The islanders’ case involves what might be called a perversion of the natural carbon cycle. Around the globe, carbon is trapped in carbonate rock, particularly limestone, which is by far the planet’s single greatest store of the element. Absent human intervention, this carbon is released slowly, over geological time. This process regulates the distribution of atmospheric carbon and, in turn, the temperature of the Earth.

The industrialized economy has sped this up. In the past 150 years, hundreds of thousands of years’ worth of atmospheric carbon has been released. Cement manufacture isn’t the most heat-intensive industrial practice, but it’s one of them. It uses primarily fossil fuels to heat giant furnaces to 2,700F, hot enough to cook the carbon out of 4.5 billion tons of limestone annually. About 40% of the cement industry’s emissions result from its prodigious use of fuels. The bigger share comes from the fugitive carbon released by the chemical change that transforms limestone into the main ingredient in cement. The cement industry produces 7% to 8% of all human-caused carbon emissions.

So far six of the Thousand Islands are no more. Twenty will likely drown over the next few years.

II: The Legal Climate

Asmania et al. v. Holcim was filed in 2023, and on Dec. 17, 2025, a cantonal court ruled that the bold legal theories behind the case were sound and that a trial was warranted.

The ruling was a bombshell, for a number of reasons. Most significantly, the Swiss court accepted that individuals harmed by climate change deserve compensation. Defendants in similar cases have, in the past, argued successfully that individuals who suffer harm from climate change don’t warrant special consideration, because everyone in the world deals with the same climate reality, so it’s a political issue at best. The court, however, ruled that because Swiss law protects individuals’ physical integrity, health and personal freedom, the islanders deserved compensation for any direct harm they suffered. The court accepted that climate policy is a matter for politics, but it ruled that private lawsuits complement legislation. And though Holcim hasn’t operated in Indonesia since 2019, the court is allowing the argument that the harms of Holcim’s cumulative worldwide emissions were unbounded by geography and that even distant sufferers were entitled to compensation from the company.

Asmania, one of the plaintiffs in the suit against the cement giant Holcim, is a fisher, shopkeeper and homestay operator — and now a community organizer — on Pari Island. Photographer: Muhammad Fadli — Asmania, one of the plaintiffs in the suit against the cement giant Holcim, is a fisher, shopkeeper and homestay operator — and now a community organizer — on Pari Island.

When the case is finally heard, the court will weigh the science that connects Holcim’s emissions to climate change around Pari Island. At that stage things may not go the islanders’ way. But the progress already made suggests the courts may wring changes from industry where political action has faltered. Following the December ruling, 39 Pakistani farmers filed a lawsuit in Germany against two companies — including Holcim’s chief European rival, Heidelberg Materials AG — seeking partial compensation for the loss of homes and livelihoods caused by devastating floods. The Holcim case in effect puts the whole world’s production and use of cement and concrete on trial.

The vast majority of the world’s cement is Portland cement, a manufactured chemical powder that’s the crucial binding ingredient in most modern concrete. Cement usually makes up 10% to 15% of the volume in a basic concrete mix. The rest includes hard bits called aggregate, usually stones of various sizes, and sand. And, the ingredient that kicks off the binding of it all together: water. Portland cement was patented by Joseph Aspdin in England in 1824. Aspdin took dubious credit for its invention, but he gave the smoky-gray material its durable name, meant to invoke a posh, similarly colored stone quarried on the Isle of Portland. Today cement and the concrete made with it are the world’s most widely used human-made materials, amounting to a $1.4 trillion global market. They enable modern living; they’re deployed to address almost every major human and natural challenge and deliver immeasurable benefits, including a healthier, longer life for people almost everywhere.

But this progress has come at a cost to the climate. At Holcim’s peak (the company has bought, sold and merged divisions often) it operated in 90 countries and was the market leader in 40. The Pari Islanders and their backers assert that the company has produced 0.42% of all industrial CO₂ emissions since 1750, so they’re asking it to pay 0.42% of the damages caused to them and their families. The requested sum, around $20,000, would be a pittance to a company with a market capitalization of $51 billion. But Holcim’s lawyers have argued, using an apt metaphor, that a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs would “open the floodgates” to an endless queue of claimants.

The islanders’ nonfinancial demands could be far more onerous for Holcim. The suit asks the court to require the company, which has committed to eliminating all its carbon emissions by 2050, to roughly double the speed of its decarbonization by cutting emissions 43% by 2030 and 69% by 2040. (Those figures match the global reduction targets established by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.) It also asks the court to compel Holcim to cap not only per-volume emissions but also overall emissions. Holcim, like other cement makers, measures its success at cutting emissions by counting the CO₂ released for a given volume of cement produced. That leaves room for overall emissions to climb if sales of cement outpace the per-volume reductions. The suit could impede the company’s efforts to sell more cement and grab market share amid its industry’s ongoing consolidation.

Prior to the December ruling, Holcim argued that mandating limits on its output would be meaningless for the islanders and the climate because other companies would provide the market with what Holcim couldn’t. The court reasoned that the opposite would be true — rather, it said, “other CO₂ emitters would probably also have to expect to be held accountable for their emissions. … The threat of an injunction may cause other actors in the cement and concrete industry to reduce their emissions.”

Holcim is a bellwether in its industry. It wields formidable influence in the trade associations and with governmental and other bodies that set standards for cement and concrete. A final judgment in favor of the islanders would likely set in motion a test of whether the cement industry can decarbonize far faster than it claims is possible. Some of this could be accomplished through new methods of building with less material. Some could entail accelerating the development of carbon-negative materials, which absorb or sequester CO₂ rather than emit it. That would change how the world uses its favorite material. Because of the unrivaled scale of its use and the pace of innovation in the sector, concrete may prove to be the most essential material for dialing back carbon dioxide emissions of all kinds.

In a twist, the Pari Islanders are suing one of the cement companies that’s pushed the hardest to decarbonize and spoken the loudest about the economic sense of doing so. Over the past five years, Holcim has been remaking its business in service of governmental and corporate sustainability goals. The optimistic case for the climate is that, rather than handcuffing the company, the four Indonesian islanders could end up propelling its business into a new phase — and igniting a profound change for the planet.

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On the Podcast

It seems as if investors have fewer safe places to turn now that fears about the business models underpinning AI have made the phrase “Magnificent Seven” sound kind of sarcastic. This week on Everybody’s Business from Bloomberg Businessweek, hosts Stacey Vanek Smith and Max Chafkin discuss the state of markets and the economy. Plus, as businesses reckon with the latest wave of US tariffs, we hear from a company battling the Trump administration in court. And lastly, prediction markets are becoming far more entwined with politics. What will this mean for elections in the fall?

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