One of the most powerful tools for mitigating the impact of climate change could be a material that is so common we tend not to think about it very much — concrete.

Burying Carbon in Buildings: Advancing Carbon Capture and Utilization in Cementitious Building Materials is a new collaboration between a team of researchers led by Professor Daman Panesar (CivMin) and the Canada Green Building Council. It is funded by a recently-announced $1.7 million contribution by the Government of Canada.

Concrete is the world’s most widely used building material, and it can impact carbon emissions both as a burden and also a benefit. Firstly, the production of cement — one of the key components of concrete — produces relatively large amounts of carbon emissions, so mitigating these could make a big difference. But over its lifetime, concrete also has the ability to uptake carbon from the air.

“Currently, several low-carbon concrete framework documents have been produced worldwide and most of these roadmaps have set 2050 carbon reduction targets related to several levers, such as clinker-cement ratio, alternative fuel use, and carbon capture, storage and sequestration,” says Panesar.

While there has been preliminary work on several carbon utilization approaches, few have been implemented on a large scale. Panesar and her team will examine the challenges associated with scale-up of these strategies, and explore new technologies that can effectively turn built infrastructure into a carbon sink.

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