PAUL: Concrete is the most abundant man-made material on earth, but the essentially ingredient, cement, has a huge carbon footprint. In this week's Mission Ahead, a Canadian startup has invented a remedy.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Concrete is a mixture of rocks, sand, water and most importantly, cement to bind it all together. But cement has a huge carbon footprint. One pound of cement releases one pound of CO2 emissions. But without cement, concrete doesn't hold up skyscrapers. But a company called Carbon Cure has developed technology to reduce cement's carbon footprint by using CO2 in the concrete mixing process. So this is what's different about your operation here?</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is the brains of it here.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: After capturing CO2 off site, it is brought to companies like Thomas Concrete. The carbon dioxide is directly injected into the concrete as it is being mixed, which actually makes the concrete stronger. When the concrete hardens, those otherwise harmful emissions are sequestered forever before they even reach our atmosphere. This building behind us is all built using carbon cure concrete.</s>CHRISTIE GAMBLE, DIRECTOR OF SUSTAINABILITY, CARBON CURE: That's right. It's 48,000 cubic yards of Thomas Concrete made with Carbon Cure Technology.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This 12-story, $200 million development in Atlanta is the largest structure Carbon Cure has ever worked on. And every inch of concrete you see is infused with CO2. So how many pounds of CO2 savings are we talking about here?</s>GAMBLE: In this building right here, it's going to over 1.5 million pounds of CO2. If we can pretend that these were trees, it would be the same as 800 acres of forest sequestering CO2 for a year.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Wow.
New Technology Reduces Carbon Footprint of Cement Mixing