Carbon Recycling: It's Procuring Hardened Cement Stupid

citation:  Nick Beckelman, Scientific American, February 2023

A number of articles are emphasizing that "recycled carbon content" cement has the potential to reduce greenhouse gases even more than electric vehicles does.  

Solving Cement’s Massive Carbon Problem

New techniques and novel ingredients can greatly reduce the immense carbon emissions from cement and concrete production

BY MARK FISCHETTI, NICK BOCKELMAN & WIL V. SRUBAR

In this blog I explore how Recycling Policy Organizations like MassRecycle.org, NERC.org, ReMA.org, EarthwormRecycling.org, NRRArecycles.org have the experience to look at "recycled content" rules of procurement to become important to putting "hardened cement" (the value-added by captured carbon ash in the cement) into the quiver of EPR and procurement law.

How do we get our memberships to think about cement manufacturing as an important "recycled content" story, as we did with recycled content paper procurement in the 1990s?  I guess we need to write complicated blogs hoping to get the interests of academics who we can then get to make the "recycled content cement" case, invite them as conference speakers. Part of this "fishing for swordfish" strategy will involve incorporating keywords that keep the Tilapia and Perch of the press interested in our press releases.

If recycling advocates currently consider glass aggregate / daily cover in our recycling rates (never an obvious call to raw material originalists, but that referee's call has sailed), I was wondering about some forms of carbon sequestration, especially cement and concrete.  See article in Nature below.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43246-024-00546-9

The process described captures carbon and re-infuses it in cement kilns.  Now I note 2 reasons not to claim this, but no reason not to make it part of our message even if it's outside our silo (similar to GMA1872 being outside the silo but in direct competition with recycling markets)..

1. Carbon at the point it's captured in the process is not "solid" waste - though it becomes solid, in the cement, after the process.

2. Cement manufacturing processes are outside our silo/focus at organizations like MassRecycle.

(I will later try to link all of the authors names so they find this eventually)

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Draft 2021 Environmentalism 4.0 DRAFT OPEN LETTER. Add your suggestion or comment, live.

As a fan of Harper Magazine's "A Letter On Justice and Open Debate", and as a career professional Environmentalist on "active duty", I humbly ask whether a similar letter may be overdue in 2021 for the Environmental Community.

Professionals are now more aware of systemic bias, cognitive dissonance, wasteful responses, externalization and circular definitions, and outright collateral damage by politically conservative and progressive "environmental causes".  The "easy" press coverage is to interview the person who represents someone most impassioned for and against the proposal. This further creates cognitive dissonance in the democracy. People become "for or against" things like "plastic", or "carbon", or "waste", without considering realistically that society must regulate its expenditures to achieve the most bang for the buck. That consideration is especially sharp in emerging and developing markets, which can now widely afford devices like cars, computers, and consumption of "fast food", but which lack the disposable income for waste collection.

This has at times resulted in First World "grabbing control" of vehicles of export, e.g. investments in equipment to "shred" devices Emerging Markets wish to purchase, in an attempt to assuage the First World's own "liability" system.  As Carbon and Climate community has long acknowledged, the sky which receives climate-changing carbon does not recognize political sovereignty.  And we need to acknowledge the same in disasters such as mining coral islands for tin, or plastic pollution which is not coming from western recycling operations, but from consumption and disposal owing to rising standards of living in the 1960s-labelled "third world".

I'm not sure this is a good idea, but I suspect that if it is, it would take someone headstrong to suggest it. Might as well be me. (Jack Straw, Greatful Dead, Europe '72)

Draft OPEN LETTER: ENVIRONMENTALISM 4.0

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