Rick Fox has spent a lot of time in Hollywood, so naturally he has multiple origin stories. Born in Canada and raised in the Bahamas, Fox played professional basketball in the NBA in the 1990s and 2000s, playing for the Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Lakers. After retiring from the sport in 2004, he became a full-time actor and appeared in all of the following productions: ugly betty and big bang theory to Sharknado 3: Oh no! In 2015, he league of legends Esports team, ended venture in a very bitter state 4 years later. Then the pandemic hit and everything stalled.
“The world shut down,” Fox says. “All we were allowed to do was walk to the store.” There, as he walked, he reunited with his children, reflected on the shape of his life, and how he felt in the months before the pandemic that killed dozens of people. I thought about the Bahamas, which was hit by Hurricane Dorian, a once-in-a-century cyclone. People and destroyed homes all over the country. Fox returned to the Bahamas to support relief efforts and saw firsthand the human and economic costs of climate change. “We noticed that these events were increasing on a regular basis. So the future was a little bleaker than people in landlocked countries imagined,” he says.
Looking for a way to help with the rebuild, he went through his manager to architect Sam Marshall in Venice Beach, 11 miles from where Fox lived. Marshall was on his own journey, wondering how he could accomplish the construction projects he had built his career on without having such a huge impact on the environment. By the time he and Fox met, he had settled into fixing concrete.
Concrete is responsible for around 8% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, as it requires enormous amounts of energy to fire its components in kilns and gases are released during the resulting chemical reactions. Marshall, along with several materials scientists, has developed a new type of concrete made from byproducts of steel manufacturing and desalination plants that cures at ambient temperatures and actually consumes carbon dioxide.2 Doing so effectively makes you carbon positive. By 2019, the product was ready for testing. Marshall was looking for a partner to help with large-scale manufacturing and was traveling to China. Then the pandemic hit and, like Fox, he settled down. “So we had a void in the world and time for next year,” Fox says.
For weeks, Fox would walk into Marshall’s studio to talk about concrete. Soon, the two went into business together through their startup company, Partanna Global, and were working in the Bahamas, using their materials to build affordable housing in areas hit hard by Hurricane Dorian. We built 1,000 homes.
Because the material sequesters carbon, Partanna can use it to generate carbon credits, which could be a way to finance low-income housing in developing countries across the Caribbean. There is, says Fox. But their customers also come from the other end of the spectrum. They have orders from casinos in Las Vegas and are working with Saudi Arabian real estate developer Red Sea Global on a luxury development project in the Gulf.
