Concrete production currently accounts for 7% of all emissions. Veuer’s Tony Spitz has the details
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00:00Greenhouse gases are becoming more and more of an existential crisis for our planet.
00:04And construction, specifically the production of concrete, is a major contributor.
00:08In fact, according to the Cicero Center for International Climate Research and the Global Carbon Project,
00:13cement production accounts for 2.9 billion tons of CO2 every year.
00:18That's 7% of all emissions, and that number has more than doubled in the last two decades.
00:22What if the concrete itself could actually capture that carbon?
00:26Well, that's what California startup CarbonCure hopes to achieve,
00:29with a process they say produces concrete, which stores CO2 rather than releasing it.
00:33This is CarbonCure CEO Rob Niven to explain.
00:36So CO2 is actually a very powerful chemical when working with concrete.
00:42What you can do is you can actually react it with concrete to create a calcium carbonate nanomaterial.
00:48So we're turning CO2, this greenhouse gas, into a solid, a mineral format,
00:54that can never be released again for thousands and thousands of years.
00:58They do this by processing limestone, which naturally absorbs CO2 slowly,
01:02speeding up the process dramatically, with Niven adding that not only will the new concrete material
01:07help alleviate the toll greenhouse gases are wreaking on our planet,
01:10but that their product is actually stronger than conventional concrete as well.