Roman concrete would cure by reacting with the carbon dioxide in the air, fixing it into the concrete. It doesn’t sound like that’s how this concrete works, but I wonder if a methodology like that would be carbon negative.
For obvious reasons, I imagine that would only react on the surface level, and I’m willing to bet the CO2 generated in mining the materials, creating the concrete, and transporting the concrete outweigh some surface-level reactions with CO2.
Carbon-negative is a long stretch, it’s just using waste material that is usually used as fuel. It’s at best low-carbon compared to concrete, which honestly is already a good thing.
At around the same time, Meyer learned about the large amount of waste lignin that is produced every year, primarily from pulp and paper processes, which is also expected to be produced from biorefineries in the future.
[…] During the production of pulp and paper products, roughly 100 million tons of lignin are produced annually as a waste byproduct and subsequently burned as low-value fuel.
Meyer saw lignin as a polymer that could be used as a material instead of a fuel and sought to crosslink it like an epoxy resin. Using lignin allowed Meyer to sequester CO2 captured from the air in the form of biomass that would otherwise be burned.
Oh yes, if it ends up replacing concrete that would definitely be a win. It never was my intention to dunk on the invention, I just felt that the title was misleading and had an urge to correct it.
nrel.gov
Active