Concrete has become synonymous with urban development and progress. It’s responsible for creating shelters, protecting manmade infrastructures from natural disasters, making transportation easy, and more.
However, the environmental cost of creating concrete is often understated. It’s a convoluted process with plenty of extraction involved. As a finished product, concrete also makes cities hotter because it absorbs the heat of the sun, and traps gases from car exhausts and air conditioning units.
In addition, it separates us from our natural environment without providing an alternative for so many important ecological functions. The cost of creating concrete jungles is the loss of fertile soil, animal habitats, river systems, and lush greenery.
Is it time to reinvent the concrete wheel?
One solution that is currently in the works is using concrete to store greenhouse gases back in the bedrock.
“If it's getting released from the ice, earth naturally in its own chemistry and set up, has these pockets. So if we put it back in the porous nature of the bedrock, we can store that and prevent it from being up in the atmosphere; so send it back down where it needs to go,” Alex explained.
Historical records indicate that the Romans were the first to deal with concrete. Despite the test of time, plenty of infrastructures remain standing today. One notable achievement was the creation of concrete that could withstand the test of coastal regions, where saltwater speeds up the process of degradation.
This wasn’t the case for Roman concrete, which even benefited from the microorganisms carried by the seawater. Alex described it as “a symbiotic relationship between the saltwater, the organisms, and the concrete itself.”
Is concrete worth the environmental trade-off? The process of manufacturing and maintaining it makes up around eight percent of the world’s annual carbon emissions. Components that go into the creation of concrete include silica, alumina, iron, limestone, and gypsum —- materials that are extracted from the Earth’s crust by diesel-powered machines and then processed in kilns that generate heat by burning coal or fossil fuels.
The current strategy for producing concrete is incredibly complex and involves plenty of anaerobic processes. Convincing corporations to make changes to the way they create concrete will be a challenge because these entities are already accustomed to this traditional method. This means that they have invested time, money, labor, and effort into maintaining all the machinery and manpower needed to keep these environmentally degrading practices alive.
It’s commodifying inefficiency, normalized and understated to avoid public clamor.
Some companies are already looking into making concrete a more environmentally friendly substance. A company based in Halifax, Canada named CarbonCure discovered a process that takes liquified CO2 from ammonia and ethanol plants, and injects it into wet concrete while it is being mixed. This increases the concrete’s compressive strength and replaces some of the cement used in the process.
It’s an opportunity to repurpose the waste product of other industrial plants while minimizing the amount of time used to form concrete in a kiln, which requires high amounts of heat and pressure — around 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit.
Since the system is simple and easy to deploy, CarbonCure has a strong selling point. Concrete manufacturers do not need to implement massive shifts in their processes just to become more eco-friendly; this strategy only requires a little extra hardware.
Convincing the concrete industry to clean itself up won’t be easy work. Alexander and Jason brush on how concrete plays a pivotal role in funding and facilitating criminal activity, pointing out the challenges in convincing malicious actors to invest in ecologically friendly alternatives; but the problem runs deeper than that as well.
Prominent websites such as Taylor & Francis Online, The Guardian, the World Economic Forum have released stories on the seedy underbelly of concrete and construction, labeling the material as “the most destructive material on earth” and “the dirtiest business.”
It’s disheartening to think that even after this podcast, concrete isn’t a standalone villain we can all gang up against. We’ve got an entire industry to hold accountable and demand transparency from.
Climate stability is one of TARTLE’s Big 7. While calling for action won’t be an easy feat, every small act we can generate towards this cause is a small step forward in the right direction. With the TARTLE platform, you have the opportunity to support groups, not-for-profits, or charitable organizations that work towards scientific research and development in this niche.
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