Look around you. Chances are, when you step back and look critically, you’ll see just how tired our local and national infrastructure really is. Pock marked highways, weathered bridges, well worn public buildings, neglected municipal parking lots. It’s not pretty. And, given these trying economic times, it doesn’t seem relief is nearby, and certainly not a sustainable or green one.
But visionaries like Dr. Jeffrey Volz, a researcher at Missouri University of Science & Technology, and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla of Kholsa Ventures see a promising answer – green concrete!
We generally think of our nation as hooked on oil. Those in the building and construction business would tell you we’re just as hooked on concrete. It is used 10 times more frequently than any other building material, and is without question used more than any other man made building material in the world. As of 2006, about 7.5 cubic kilometers of concrete were made each year – more than one cubic meter for every person on Earth. And, it’s wildly unkind to our environment – on average, for every unit of concrete produced an equivalent unit of CO2 is released into our atmosphere!
The promising news is green concrete can mitigate much of this problem. People like Dr. Volz and venture investor Kholsa and the people at Calera (www.calera.com), a green concrete company funded by Kholsa Ventures and others, are developing novel new processes. They are using fly ash and flue gas recovered from exiting power generation facilities and coal plants to make new forms of cement and concrete that actually sequester CO2.
“No one has figured out how to mitigate all the CO2 emitted from a coal plant,” said David Gottfried, Founder of the US Green Building Council and the LEED certification. “But with Calera, we possibly could have clean coal. The potential is huge. It’s like planting a forest of trees through the pouring of concrete or bricks.”
To provide some scale and scope: Concrete is a $35 billion industry in the US. It employs more than two million workers. And, more than 55,000 miles of our highways are paved with it.