The Story of Cambium Carbon: Building a Climate-Smart Materials Marketplace

Sometimes the biggest opportunities are hiding in plain sight. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Ben Christensen shared how growing up in New Mexico’s forestry industry led him to discover a massive overlooked problem that could help reshape both climate action and local economies.

From Forest to Founder

Born and raised in New Mexico, Ben spent his childhood immersed in forestry and wood products. “Really grew up in forestry and in wood products. Spent a ton of time in the shop with my dad, and also have been really focused on addressing climate change for my whole life,” he recalls. “Never really thought that the two would come together, but they have.”

Finding the Hidden Opportunity

While working on federal carbon policy in 2018-2019, Ben noticed a curious gap in the climate tech landscape. While companies rushed to build carbon trading platforms and data solutions, few were tackling the physical challenges of carbon removal. That’s when he discovered an astounding fact: “It’s 46 million tons a year in the US. There’s more wood that comes down in our cities every year that’s salvageable than our national forests.”

This urban wood waste represented not just an environmental problem, but a massive economic opportunity. Cities were spending over a billion dollars annually to dispose of wood that could potentially generate $50 billion in value.

Early Struggles and the Power of Commitment

Despite the clear opportunity, Ben’s initial attempts to build a team met with crushing rejection. After pitching to ten close friends in grad school, all of them walked away. “I felt totally demoralized,” he remembers. This rejection hit particularly hard as Ben was already struggling with impostor syndrome as the youngest person in his graduate program.

The turning point came when he made a deeper commitment to seeing the idea through: “I want to actually commit to something and commit to something until you have to truly pull it out of my hands.” This mindset shift, combined with finding his first true believer in an old friend who joined without hesitation, kept the company alive through its early days.

Building the Solution

Cambium Carbon developed technology to help large material buyers like Patagonia, National Geographic, and Microsoft source materials locally and use waste-to-value materials. Their approach focuses on radical transparency: “You need a certifier when you have a third party coming in, because you don’t actually know what’s happening in the supply chain. For us, we’re able to help them see with total transparency, each step of the process, down to every single board.”

The Vision for the Future

Ben’s vision extends far beyond just creating a more efficient marketplace. Looking ahead, Cambium Carbon aims to fundamentally transform how materials are sourced and valued. “Our vision is to make it easy for any large company that uses materials to be able to source them in a way that is carbon smart,” he explains.

This transformation has three key components:

• Creating true carbon storage in materials
• Facilitating local economies while maintaining global reach
• Reimagining how we value uniqueness in products

“We just live in this world where so many things are optimized to be the same,” Ben reflects. “We really believe in sort of rethinking that and rethinking the uniqueness of products, the stories behind products… We believe that there is an opportunity to scale that sort of fascination with story and with uniqueness, to utilize waste streams in a totally different way.”

For B2B founders tackling complex industry transformations, Cambium Carbon’s journey shows how combining deep industry knowledge with unwavering commitment can help reshape entire markets. Sometimes the biggest opportunities aren’t in creating new technologies, but in finding new ways to connect and value what already exists.