Council plans to switch to low-carbon concrete as part of its celebration of Earth Day.
Author: Kali Bramble
City Council joined environmentalists across the globe last week, celebrating the 53rd annual Earth Day with a pair of resolutions aimed at lowering the city’s carbon footprint.
Companies like CarbonCure work to offset this footprint by injecting recycled carbon dioxide into the concrete mix, leveraging a reverse calcination process that locks the greenhouse gas in mineral form even upon demolition. Local producers like Lauren Concrete say the technology has offered massive environmental returns with little upfront capital investment, estimating that its UT and Lake Austin HEB projects have cumulatively prevented nearly 104 tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere.
Council’s resolution hopes to bring these returns up to scale, mandating the use of low-embodied-carbon concrete by implementing a review and approval process for mixes used on all future building projects. In addition to carbon sequestration, the resolution highlights alternative supplementary cementitious materials and other cement-reduction technologies as potential frontiers.