The process involves crushing the glass in a wet environment while injecting a stream of carbon dioxide glass. The grinding, Harpur said, releases sodium and the CO2 removes the sodium and turns it into sodium carbonate, which sequesters the carbon.
Their hope is to have the pilot plant, which will cost in the order of $10 million to build, in operation by 2024 for a four-year test.Article content “What we don’t know is whether the economics are solid for us to produce this at an industrial scale,” Harpur said. But there is a premium on finding good sources of supplementary materials because “more and more as climate change comes to the forefront for the construction industry, we get asked for these things,” Voysey said.
From a national perspective, reducing that carbon impact “is one of the industry’s top priorities,” said Adam Auer, CEO of the Cement Association of Canada. His association recently published its own road map to making “net-zero” concrete by 2050.
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