Storing carbon in building construction materials has the potential to lock away billions of tons of carbon dioxide.
A study by civil engineers and earth systems scientists at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) and Stanford University has shown that, combined with steps to decarbonize the economy, storing CO2 in buildings could help the world achieve goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
UC Davis study lead Elisabeth Van Roijen said the goal of carbon sequestration was to take carbon dioxide, either from where it was being produced or from the atmosphere, convert it into a stable form and store it away from the atmosphere where it couldn’t contribute to climate change.
Ms Van Roijen said proposed schemes had involved, for example, injecting carbon underground or storing it in the deep ocean.
“These approaches pose both practical challenges and environmental risks,” she said.
“What if, instead, we can leverage materials that we already produce in large quantities to store carbon? The potential is pretty large.”
Ms Van Roijen said the study calculated the potential to store carbon in a wide range of common building materials including concrete, asphalt, plastics, wood and brick.
She said more than 30 billion tons of conventional versions of these materials were produced worldwide every year.
Study co-author UC Davis Associate Professor Sabbie Miller said researchers found that while bio-based plastics could take up the largest amount of carbon by weight, by far the largest potential for carbon storage was in using carbonated aggregates to make concrete.
Associate Professor Miller said that was because concrete was by far the world’s most popular building material, with over 20 billion tonnes produced every year.
“If feasible, a little bit of storage in concrete could go a long way,” she said.
“The team calculated that if 10 percent of the world’s concrete aggregate production were carbonateable, it could absorb a gigaton of CO2.”
Read the full study: Building materials could store more than 16 billion tonnes of CO2 annually.
