Sebastien Malo -
Hawaiian officials have taken a concrete step to fight climate change: They plan to lock planet-warming carbon dioxide up in the concrete they use for road construction.
Hawaii’s Department of Transportation will use carbon-injected concrete from now on when it constructs concrete projects — including a new structure to protect a highway tunnel from rockfalls, said the government body’s spokeswoman Shelly Kunishige.
“It allows us to use less cement in our mixes. So we reduce the carbon footprint of our building,” Kunishige said.
Honolulu city council members, meanwhile, in April adopted a resolution paving the way for the city to use the greener concrete, which locks up carbon dioxide captured from industrial emitters and uses it to replace some of the cement needed in concrete.
The state capital’s resolution requests that city administrators “consider” using CO2-injected concrete in city and county infrastructure where concrete is used. For now, bids put out by Honolulu won’t call for the material, but won’t restrict its use either, said Robert Kroning, head of the city’s Department of Design and Construction.
“If it’s much better then maybe we will start making it requirement,” he said.
Cement, a key ingredient of concrete, releases 5 per cent to 8 per cent of global greenhouse gas during its manufacturing, according to the Global Cement and Concrete Association, a non-profit. As governments and companies look to cut their planet-warming emissions, in line with Paris Agreement goals to limit global temperature rise to “well under” 2 degrees Celsius, finding ways to make construction greener is key.
Companies have been experimenting with lower-carbon concrete - but now some, such as CarbonCure Technologies, are starting to make headway with public buyers. The Canada-based company, which leads the field with 150 concrete producers supplying its product, sells carbon-injected concrete for the same price as traditional concrete, company officials said.
Chief executive Robert Niven said his company is in talks with half-a-dozen US departments of transportation to use the material, as well as 10 countries in Asia and Europe and his home country, Canada. Progress depends in part on more resolutions like that in Honolulu that pave the way for use of the new material, he said.
Government market signals “are so incredibly important,” Niven said.
“That’s what’s going to get us to those climate-scale solutions. It’s not more time in the laboratory,” he added.
The US market of people willing to pay for concrete combined with carbon dioxide was about $65 million in 2017, according to an estimate by Oakland-based Carbon180, a non-profit.
For the same year, the market size of ready-mix concrete manufacturing in the United States totalled nearly $33 billion, according to industry research firm IBIS World. In Austin, Texas, sustainability officer Tom Ennis, after looking at Hawaii’s example and crunching numbers to “vet the technology”, began encouraging his city to purchase carbon-injected concrete as well.
The high-tech, low-carbon concrete “is a piece of the puzzle” toward reducing the city’s emissions, Ennis said.
Last month, Austin’s environmental commission approved a motion that recommends “supporting the development of pilot programmes” to use the greener concrete. — Reuters
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