What if companies that are capturing and storing carbon have it all wrong? What if, instead of finding a place to store carbon—at a cost—they could profit from it by using it in the manufacture of marketable and environmentally safe products? Researchers at a variety of companies are working on using carbon as an ingredient…
When it comes to making the building trade more environmentally friendly…
This is the latest in a regular series exploring early-stage technologies and scientific developments that could play a role in corporate solutions to climate change. (The previous installments are here.) Email ideas and pitches to heather@greenbiz.com. Some sources of carbon dioxide emissions are set in stone, somewhat literally. Click here to read more…
Humans worldwide produce between 35 and 40 billion metric tons of carbon air emissions each year, a big chunk of which comes from fossil fuel-burning power plants. Efforts to reduce emissions only go so far and getting rid of smokestacks is nearly impossible, but there is an alternative on the horizon. Let’s transform some of…
Take a deep breath and exhale. Your breath produced about .0001 pounds of carbon dioxide, a colorless gas, that is essential to life on earth. CO2 is formed when one atom of carbon combines with two atoms of oxygen and is produced by a wide variety of natural and man-made sources. We use it in…
A Montreal-based startup, Carbicrete, is helping is helping to deflect CO2 emissions by developing a technology that can cheaply capture a byproduct from steel manufacturing and recycle it into usable concrete, making a sturdy, carbon-neutral product. “Concrete blocks, commonly used in basement and foundation walls, are a staple of the construction industry. Unfortunately, producing cement,…
Concrete is everywhere. Our cities are built with it, and it’s the most abundant substance on earth after water. But concrete poses an environmental problem. It is made with cement—the production of which accounts for 5% of the world’s CO2 emissions. The demand for concrete remains high, and with the commitments that both the Canadian…
What if carbon-dioxide emissions could be transformed from a liability into an asset? That’s the $20-million question behind the NRG COSIA Carbon XPrize, a global competition to create technology that converts CO2 into valuable products. “In energy and climate, few ideas are as potentially transformative as the idea of turning the economics of CO2 and…
There are efforts underway today across Canada to reduce the climate impact of heavy industrial products, while also developing new markets and seizing economic opportunities. The technology that gets us there is CO2 conversion, and Canada is currently the world leader. But Canada needs to continue to invest in this exciting and growing sector, as…
Remarkably, the material that built the first modern civilization remains key to building today’s global economy. The cement we use in 2017 is not so different from the stuff used to build the concrete dome of the Roman Pantheon in 125 AD. What has changed is that today we use vastly greater quantities of the…