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Building a Better World With Green Cement
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- Published on Thursday, 20 September 2012 20:17
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With an eye on climate change, a British startup creates a new form of the ancient building material
By Michael Rosenwald
Smithsonian magazine, December 2011
“You know, cement is everywhere,” Nikolaos Vlasopoulos, an environmental engineer at Imperial College in London, says while sitting in a brightly lit college conference room in a hulking seven-story building held up by the topic of conversation. “It’s all around us.”
Last year, the world produced 3.6 billion tons of cement—the mineral mixture that solidifies into concrete when added to water, sand and other materials—and that amount could increase by a billion tons by 2050. Globally, the only substance people use more of than concrete, in total volume, is water.