It takes a lot of heat to make Portland cement, and the material releases carbon dioxide as part of a chemical reaction that occurs during the manufacturing process. Since concrete is mostly rock and sand bound together by Portland cement, the latter gives the global concrete industry a carbon footprint larger than that of the entire country of India.
A number of innovators are working to clean up the world’s leading building material by pumping it full of CO2. One such process—from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia–based CarbonCure—has already caught on with project teams, and a California-based competitor is hot on its heels with a complementary approach. Combined with some more established lower-tech tricks, these processes could trim concrete’s embodied carbon by over 80 percent.
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