Concrete's dirty secret
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 17 October 2019
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Cement and concrete have one of the biggest carbon footprints of any industry, and eliminating it is no easy task.
By volume concrete is the most heavily used resource by humanity apart from water. Our houses, offices, dams, roads, airports and so on all depend on pouring vast quantities of this magical, versatile material. But not only does making cement - the glue that binds concrete - involve huge amounts of energy. The chemical process itself also produces carbon dioxide as a bi-product, and nobody yet knows how to avoid that.
Manuela Saragosa speaks to three people who offer partial solutions. Architect Simon Sturgis of pressure group Targeting Zero wants to design most of the concrete out of buildings, and recycle what's left. Benjamin Sporton, chief executive of the Global Cement and Concrete Association, is trying to coordinate global research efforts. Meanwhile Professor Mohamed Saafi of Lancaster University says the answer may lie in carrots and sugar beet.
Producer: Laurence Knight
(Picture: A shoe print in the cement of a sidewalk; Credit: Morgan Frith/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. I'm Manuela Saragossa. Coming up, the problem with concrete. |
| 0:08.9 | It's transformed our world, but it's done nothing for the environment. People who are investing in buildings |
| 0:15.0 | will start to really be looking over their shoulder with respect to, is my building climate clean? |
| 0:20.6 | And I think also that |
| 0:21.8 | occupiers are going to start being concerned. Are they in a building that they're happy to stand |
| 0:25.5 | up in front of their shareholders and say, we're in a good building? Concrete is one of the |
| 0:29.5 | world's biggest CO2 emitters. What are the alternatives? Well, how about a building made with |
| 0:35.6 | carrots or even sugar beet? |
| 0:38.1 | It's really highly compatible with the cement. It reacts really nicely with the cement material. |
| 0:43.9 | That's coming up here in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 1:01.7 | It's an absolutely beautiful lunchtime here on the banks of the River Thames. |
| 1:06.0 | People are sitting around me, drinking their coffees, eating their sandwiches. |
| 1:11.6 | And this is a part of the city that's renowned for its concrete structures. |
| 1:16.6 | Behind me I've got the National Theatre, which is a very large concrete building. |
| 1:20.3 | In front of me is Waterloo Bridge, another big concrete and cement structure, |
| 1:23.6 | and all the pavements around here are concrete and cement. |
| 1:30.7 | The point is civilisation has been pretty much built with concrete. It's the most widely used man-made material in existence, second only to water as the most consumed resource on the planet. |
| 1:37.2 | But where does concrete actually come from? And what does our dependence on it mean for the world's |
| 1:42.3 | climate change problem? Well, the BBC's chief environment correspondent, Justin Rowlett, got a crash course, courtesy of |
| 1:49.7 | Andrea Sella, Professor of Chemistry at University College London. |
| 1:53.6 | It all starts with a chemical called calcium carbonate, better known as limestone or marble. |
| 2:00.7 | So we have a little bit of acid here in a bottle. |
... |
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