Building Zero-Carbon Cities with Limestone-Based Cement
Learn how the Living Materials Laboratory at CU Boulder is working to create and scale up building materials that have negative carbon footprints.
“This is a really exciting moment for our team,” said Wil Srubar , lead principal investigator on the project and associate professor in Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering and CU Boulder’s Materials Science and Engineering Program. “For the industry, now is the time to solve this very wicked problem. We believe that we have one of the best solutions, if not the best solution, for the cement and concrete industry to address its carbon problem.”
Transcript
00:00:02 We will be adding a New York City to the planet every 30 days for the next 40 years. We produce more concrete on the planet than any other material. It touches every single person's life on a daily basis. The production of building materials involves industrial processes that have a lot of carbon emissions, yes, but also other types of particulate emissions that can really negatively impact air quality. What we're doing in the laboratory is not only making things lower carbon, we're actually making building materials that have negative carbon footprints. We've demonstrated that we can create or really grow concrete-like alternatives that look and feel and behave exactly like concrete.
00:00:47 The difference is, is that they're grown and they exhibit low to zero carbon emissions. Nature, I believe, has figured out solutions to all of our problems, and we just have to pay a little bit more attention. Many of our current projects really focus on utilizing algae as a resource. We're really taking a look at algae, in different––of a wide variety of different algal species–– and asking ourselves the question: "What materials can be made from algae?" Algae are incredible at sucking up CO2 and storing CO2 in their biomass. If we're innovating new materials solutions that are designed to supplant concrete that may have really good environmental benefits. It's important for us to really make sure that this material is affordable, that it's available everywhere in the world.
00:01:49 Right now, it's really, really important for everyone to do what they possibly can and ask themselves the question, What can I do to reduce global CO2 emissions, and reverse these detrimental effects of climate change? The clean technologies we're working on in my lab are not only able to address the health of the planet, but also the health of humans and non-humans alike.