What would you think is the most plentiful man-made material on earth? Steel, plastic, glass? The answer is concrete.
And while it's an incredibly useful material existing everywhere, the energy intensive process of making concrete releases massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, and its main component, which is a mixture of rocks, sand, water and most importantly, cement (水泥) to glue it altogether, is responsible for 7 percent of global CO2 emissions, leaving a huge carbon footprint. But without cement, concrete doesn't hold up skyscrapers.
What if there was a way that instead of releasing carbon dioxide, concrete could trap it forever? Carbon Cure is kind of the brains of the technology. This innovation puts carbon dioxide into the concrete as it's being mixed. When the concrete hardens, those otherwise harmful emissions are trapped forever, before they even reach our atmosphere. Christie Gamble, part of the team behind Carbon Cure's technology, explained ," We actually transform the CO2 into a mineral, and the real selling point is that the mineral itself improves the compressive (压缩的) strength for the concrete, which means producers like Thomas Concrete can use less cement in their mixtures and still achieve the same strength with fewer emissions.
Compression tests prove that the concrete made with Carbon Cure is just as hardy as the traditional stuff. If we can reduce 5 percent of the carbon footprint of the concrete industry, that's a significant change from where we're right now. Ultimately, if this technology was employed across the globe, we could reduce about 700 megatons of CO2 every year, which is the same as taking 150 million cars off the road every year.
It's going to change the way the concrete industry does things. Though companies pay to use Carbon Cure and buy CO2 from a factory, they save money by using less of their most expensive cement.
