Abstract
Population growth and urbanization over the coming decades are anticipated to drive unprecedented demand for infrastructure materials and energy resources. Unfortunately, factors such as the degree of resource consumption, the energy-intensive nature of production, and the chemical-reaction driven emissions make infrastructure materials production industries among the greatest contributors to anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Yet there is an often-overlooked potential environmental benefit to infrastructure materials: most remain in use for decades and their long service lives can facilitate extended storage of carbon. In this perspective, we present an overview of recent technological advancements that can support infrastructure materials acting as a global, distributed carbon sink and discuss areas for further research and development. We present mechanisms to quantify the extent to which the embodied carbon will be removed from the carbon cycle for a long enough period of time to provide carbon sequestration and climate benefit. We conclude that it is possible to unlock the vast potential to engineer a carbon sequestration system that simultaneously meets societal need for expanding infrastructure systems; however, complexities in how these systems are engineered must be systematically and quantitatively incorporated into materials design.
Highlights
Infrastructure materials production and their accumulation in the built environment directly affects our demand for natural resources, energy consumption, and climate impacts [1,2]
The world population is currently estimated to reach 11 billion by 2100 [4]. This growth will continue to strain the environment [5,6]: anthropogenic material-output has resulted in an accumulated mass output that nearly equates the mass of all living biomass on Earth [7]
Demand for construction materials is high: between 1900 – 2015 their demand has been estimated to be 80% of the magnitude of all food, animal feed, and energy resources combined [8]. This growing demand presents a challenge for curbing environmental impacts from materials production, but it presents an opportunity if this growing body of mass can be used to sequester greenhouse gases (GHG)
Summary
Infrastructure materials production and their accumulation in the built environment directly affects our demand for natural resources, energy consumption, and climate impacts [1,2]. The large mass and long-lived nature of infrastructure materials could provide means for sequestering GHGs over sufficient time periods to be relevant for climate change mitigation In this perspective, we argue that storage of CO2 within construction materials will be a critical route for meeting netzero emissions goals. Construction materials result in an excess of 15% of annual anthropogenic GHG emissions (see Figure 1, woods are included in "Other materials") In this subsequent section, we present several classes of building materials that have been discussed as routes for carbon-uptake, which account for a significant engineered mass entering our civil systems annually (see Table 1). Fibers plant-based fibers – flooring, note: many of these are composites used in textiles)
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