Founder · CEO · Board Chairman
Benjamin
Cook.
He brushes a coat of ceramic onto a crumbling bridge and walks away. The concrete underneath stops aging. This is the green technologist trying to make infrastructure immortal.
He brushes a coat of ceramic onto a crumbling bridge and walks away. The concrete underneath stops aging. This is the green technologist trying to make infrastructure immortal.
The product is called CeramycGuard, and the easiest way to understand it is also the most ridiculous: it is liquid granite. You stir it, you dip a roller, and you coat a corroding slab of concrete the way you would paint a fence. Then the chemistry does something granite usually takes a volcano to do - it bonds, hardens, and refuses to leave. No flaking. No peeling. No kiln. It sets at room temperature because the particles inside are ground so fine that the reaction barely needs any heat to fire.
That is the business Benjamin Cook runs from a building in Tukwila, Washington. Zirconia Inc. makes water-borne ceramic coatings that chemically bond to concrete and steel and lock them inside an inert, ultra-durable shell. The pitch is not faster repair or cheaper repair. The pitch is that the surface, once treated, can shrug off salt, UV, freeze-thaw and corrosion more or less indefinitely. Cook is not in the business of fixing infrastructure. He is in the business of ending the need to fix it again.
It sounds like overreach until you notice the man saying it has done a version of this before - and sold it for five times what his investors put in.
One summer, Cook volunteered in the emergency room at Oakland Children's Hospital. He watched kids come in poisoned by lead - many of them poor, many of them children of color. The plan had been pediatric medicine: heal the sick child in front of you. The ER rearranged the plan.
Because the child in the ER was already poisoned. By the time medicine arrived, the toxin had already won. Cook decided the more useful job was upstream - keeping the poison out of the building, the paint, the pipe, the soil, before it ever reached a small body. He stopped studying to treat and started engineering to prevent.
As a student he worked on antibody tests to protect migrant women and children from the pesticides sprayed across the fields they worked. The throughline of an entire career was already visible: find the toxin, design it out, repeat.
Prevention beat the white coat. He became a green technologist instead - someone who removes the hazard before anyone needs a hospital.
A degree in Conservation and Resource Studies from UC Berkeley (1993), then an MBA in Sustainable Business from Pinchot University - home to the first program of its kind in the country.
Cook does not collect industries. He collects toxins to eliminate. An environmental lab here, a green-materials import business there, the largest green building program at a Seattle-area hardware chain - each one a different angle on the same idea. Then came the company that proved the model could pay.
GeoTree Technologies rebuilt water and sewer pipes underground - without digging up the road. The green chemistry let crews reline storm, sewer and fresh-water lines in place, generating roughly half the CO2 of a conventional dig at about a tenth of the cost. It was sold for a 5x return to investors, acquired by Milliken. Proof, banked.
Zirconia is the next, bigger swing: not just pipes, but the entire corroding mass of the world's concrete and steel.
The Romans mixed alumina-silicate cements that have stood for two thousand years. The chemistry was real; the resolution was crude. Zirconia's coating is a high-tech rebirth of that geopolymer idea - micronized Roman cement laced with nano-scale ceramic particles that chemically bond with the concrete and form a granite-like, corrosion-proof barrier. The base technology was first developed in 1998 under Rutgers professor Dr. P. Balaguru, backed by more than $2 million in grants. His son, Muralee Balaguru, is now Zirconia's CTO.
FIG. 1 — Behavior of CeramycGuard ceramic surface treatment. Directional, per company claims.
A brush-and-roll ceramic surface treatment that heals and seals concrete, eliminates porosity, and fills cracks - transforming the surface into a chemically bonded geopolymer composite.
The structural side of the house - composite systems built on the same inorganic chemistry, aimed at strengthening and protecting infrastructure rather than just coating it.
Replace toxic epoxies and the demolish-and-rebuild cycle with coatings that cut carbon, kill volatile organics, and keep concrete standing. The tagline is not decoration; it is the thesis.
The greenest ton of concrete is the one nobody has to pour. Cook's whole argument is downstream of that single line. If a bridge, a dam, a parking deck or a pipe can be coated once and last, you skip the demolition, the rebuild, the diesel, the dust and the carbon. You also skip the epoxies and volatile organics that drift back toward the lungs of workers and, eventually, children.
It is a long, unglamorous bet - the kind that takes thirty years of labs and exits and grant-funded chemistry to even attempt. Cook has spent those thirty years rehearsing for it. The man who once stood in an ER, too late to help, now spends his days trying to make sure the damage never starts.
He doesn't repair the bridge. He encases it in ceramic and bets it outlives everyone arguing about the budget.