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The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded $39 million to 18 projects dedicated to developing technologies that can transform buildings into net carbon storage structures. The initiative titled the Harnessing Emissions into Structures Taking Inputs from the Atmosphere (HESTIA) program... View full entry
A project by researchers at Texas A&M University has received a $3.74 million grant for the development of resilient, 3D-printed building designs using a new green material called hempcrete. Its usage has the potential to lower the environmental impact of traditional construction methods and make... View full entry
Scientists from round the world are meeting in Germany to improve ways of making money from carbon dioxide.
They want to transform some of the CO2 that’s overheating the planet into products to benefit humanity.
They don’t claim the technology will solve climate change, but they say it will help.
Carbon dioxide is already being used in novel ways to create fuels, polymers, fertilisers, proteins, foams and building blocks.
— BBC
BBC environmental analyst, Roger Harrabin, details three novel ways to turn excess carbon dioxide into potentially profitable carbon-negative products: high-grade fertilizer from agricultural waste products; food-grade beverage carbonation and biogas from horse manure; and most interesting for the... View full entry
[Mark Herrema] and Kenton Kimmel, a high school classmate, founded the Irvine, California-based company Newlight Technologies in 2003. After years of research, the team unveiled a way to produce plastic from carbon emissions that is actually more affordably priced than oil-based plastics.
The "secret sauce" is a biocatalyst that combines air and methane, and reassembles all of the carbon, hydrogen and oxygen molecules into a thermoplastic the makers call AirCarbon.
— Smithsonian
Newlight's work appears really interesting, addressing two separate but related issues: "first, oil dependency, by replacing oil with captured carbon emissions, and second, climate change, by creating a market-driven carbon capture platform." Basically, the technology comprises using a biocatalyst... View full entry
Perhaps the most important and widely-used building material, concrete also has an enormous environmental impact. This is largely because in order to produce one ton of cement – the material that binds together rock aggregate in concrete – about 900 kg of C02 are emitted. In fact, the concrete... View full entry