In this second installment of OpenAir Weekly Adam chats with superstar collector/OpenAir technical director Chris Chung about VIOLET – what it means, where the idea came from, and where it’s all headed as of October 2020. VIOLET, OpenAir’s founding mission which got us rolling last year, will be the world’s first and only miniature open source direct air carbon capture (DACC) machine.
Chris is one of the key contributors to the project and his energy, creativity, leadership and general commitment to getting sh*t done are keeping us on track and moving us forward to our goal. In this conversation Chris and Adam get into the origins of VIOLET, and discuss the significance of the project within the broader context of both open source/maker culture and Direct Air Carbon Capture (DACC) R&D.
In our very first episode Adam chats with OpenAir co-founder Chris Neidl (@neidl_c) about our inaugural policy advocacy efforts related to low carbon concrete in New York – where it came from, why it’s relevant to carbon removal and DACC, where things currently stand, and how its starting to spread to other places.
1:50 – Why OpenAir is involved in low carbon concrete
4:48 – Origins of New York State LECCLA legislation
Are the corporate sponsors of the Sochi Winter Olympics missing a big opportunity to advance sustainability globally? Photograph: Alexander Nemenov/AFP/Getty Images
Beyond Dow’s commitment to offset the games’ carbon footprint, big sponsors are doing too little to advance sustainability |
The Sochi Winter Olympics, which opens 7 February, was meant to be the greenest Olympics ever. The budget was certainly there: Russia has doled out more than $51bn, an all-time record, to make the event happen.
Yet reports of serious environmental problems have been piling up for months. The UN and World Wildlife Fund have called out Russia over construction practices that damaged the region’s pristine natural ecosystems.
Yet I wondered if there might be a silver lining to be found amid the sustainability commitments made by the game’s corporate sponsors.
After all, while the credibility of the Russian organizers’ on these issues has all but melted away, the corps of 10 worldwide sponsors includes major global brands, many of which have made deep, long-standing commitments to sustainability.
My findings? With one dramatic exception, the games’ deep-pocketed sponsors have done too little to promote sustainability as an element of their efforts at Sochi.
The games’ worldwide sponsors are a familiar lot, including six iconic US brands, Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical, General Electric, McDonald’s, Procter & Gamble and Visa; two Asian electronics giants, Japan’s Panasonic and South Korea’s Samsung; and two European companies, France’s Atos and Omega from Switzerland.
This top-tier level of sponsorship, rumored to cost at least $100m per four-year cycle, is far from trivial. And given the International Olympic Committee’s growing emphasis on sustainability – the past two games in London 2012 and Vancouver 2010 are considered the greenest ever – these sponsorships seem an ideal platform in which to mix a high-profile sustainability push.
Yet that doesn’t seem to be happening. For this exercise, I mined online press material and related documentation and emailed each company. Only Dow replied with detailed information. Here’s what I found:
Dow: Sochi’s “official carbon partner”
In a first for the games, chemicals giant Dow has pledged to offset the organizing committee’s entire direct carbon footprint – including greenhouse gas emissions from operating the games’ venues, as well as from travel and lodging for all athletes, staff and volunteers – as well as the estimated travel footprint of all spectators and media attending the Olympic events and the Paralympic Games, scheduled for March.
Dow estimates it will offset emissions equivalent to 360,000 metric tons of carbon-dioxide for the organizing committee, plus 160,000 metric tons for spectators and media. For perspective, the total estimated 520,000 metric tons is equivalent to removing approximately 102,000 cars from US roads, or neutralizing a year’s worth of direct and indirect emissions from 10,800 US homes.
Dow is offsetting these emissions with a mix of completed and ongoing projects, principally in Russia, but also in Brazil and South Korea, which will host the next two Olympics, and other regions. These include farming enhancements, such as low-till farming methods; building efficiency gains via better insulation and other technologies; and industrial upgrades. In the US, Dow is deploying a share of the verified offsets generated from capturing and recycling methane at a waste dump in Georgia.
The broad portfolio of projects, Dow claims, meets international standards and the International Carbon Offset and Reduction Alliance Code of Practice, the global benchmark for offsets. “Dow’s initiative represents a significant step forward in terms of sustainability for one of the world’s main sporting event,” according to a company statement.
GE and turbine power
The only other sponsor with a clear environmental angle to its Olympics pledge is GE. The conglomerate is supplying two very high efficiency “aero-derivative” gas turbines to help power the games. The units, which will provide both base load and peak load power to the Olympics village and venues, feature GE’s latest emissions technology.
Evolved from airplane jet engines, the model is designed to ramp up and down in less than 10 minutes, which makes it well suited to pair with the variable output of wind turbines, solar panels and other renewable energy systems.
From there, evidence of sustainability efforts by other corporate sponsors tapers off sharply. For their part, Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, both long-time Olympic sponsors, have focused on health – but details are scant. Coca-Cola Russia said it plans to launch a traveling showcase of activities promoting an active, healthy lifestyle during the Winter Olympics.
A survey of news and press materials of the remaining half dozen top-tier sponsors (Atos, Omega, Panasonic, P&G, Samsung, and Visa) turned up no explicit sustainability goals in their Sochi commitments.
To be sure, I hope there are other sustainability efforts afoot that I missed. I welcome information on other programs in the comments below.
Big platform, big responsibility
But the overall direction of the Sochi games is discouraging. It’s a pity that more companies aren’t using the Olympics to up their sustainability efforts, not least because the event offers such far-reaching visibility.
As the Natural Resource Defense Council’s eco-sports guru Allen Herskowitz says, only about a tenth of the public follow sciences, but nearly two-thirds follow sports. This means that sustainability actions in sporting arenas have supersized potential to normalize greener practices.
And, lest we forget, lurking beneath the immediate question of sustainability is a deeper worry about climate change, particularly as it impacts the viability of future winter sports.
In winter playgrounds around the world, climate change is already degrading the seasonal conditions that skiers, boarders and others depend on. In Vancouver 2010, unseasonably warm weather forced the games to resort to extreme measures, such as hauling in stored snow.
Sochi 2014 also has been stashing snow, and is ready to deploy an army of energy-intensive earth-movers and snow-making systems to make ready for the games. It’s good to know Sochi is prepared for a potential shortage of the white stuff.
Still, it would be better to know the games and their partners are working today to avoid climate troubles and warmer winters tomorrow.
Injecting CO2 into concrete as it hardens is helping slash its towering toll on the climate
Concrete is a conundrum. It’s the world’s most heavily consumed manmade material, with nearly three tonnes used per person, every year. Yet for the climate, baking limestone into cement does more harm than practically any other industrial process.
To help cut cement’s supersized carbon footprint, Halifax, Nova Scotia-based startup CarbonCure Technologies is tinkering with the age-old recipe for how cement cures into concrete, its final rock-like form. The company’s answer: carbonated cement.
“Every day millions of tonnes of concrete is produced globally,” says Robert Niven, chief executive and founder. “Every tonne is a lost opportunity to sequester carbon dioxide.”
Devising greener concrete is no easy task, in part because the recipe is deceptively simple and has proven to be such a remarkably good building material for so long.
It is, quite literally, the stuff from which civilization has been built. Today’s cement traces back to formulations first used 7,000 years ago. Some Roman-era structures, such as the domed Pantheon, are as sturdy today as when they were erected two millennia ago.
Today’s megastructures are likewise possible only because of concrete’s peculiar mix of performance and affordability, from the biggest dams to our tallest towers.
The problem? The manufacturing of cement emits 5 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gases, on par with about half of all emissions from car, truck and other road transport. Among industrial sources of CO2, the industry trails only the much larger petrochemicals sector.
Making cement emits roughly equal shares of CO2 at two stages: first, from the fuel used to heat a mix of limestone and traces of other minerals to 1,450 degrees Celsius; and second, from the resulting chemical reaction, where limestone breaks down into lime, giving up nearly half its mass as CO2.
Unless better recipes are devised, emissions will keep growing. A building binge across the developing world is expected to more than double global cement production this decade, according to the Carbon War Room, a London-based think tank.
CarbonCure is tackling that problem by focusing on how cement cures into concrete. The company’s proprietary process injects anthropogenic CO2 – captured from big industrial sources such as natural gas reformers – into the mix as concrete is being formed into an array of masonry products, including blocks and pavers.
As the CO2 percolates through the mix, it triggers a chemical reaction, remaking microscopic bits of limestone in the concrete matrix, permanently locking the gas into a rock-like structure. The resulting concrete block is not only greener; it turns out stronger than the standard stuff.
The carbon savings can stack up quickly. As a rule of thumb, every standard concrete block made using CarbonCure’s recipe sequesters around 30 grams of CO2. Thus, some 3,000 of them can lock up as much CO2 as a mature tree does in a single year.
The first U.S. structure to be built with CarbonCure’s green blocks was completed at the University of California, Davis in the spring. Exterior walls of the Jess S. Jackson Sustainable Winery Building, a one-storey, 8,500-square-foot research facility, were built with more than 2,500 specially manufactured blocks made by Basalite Concrete Products, based in Dixon, California. The result, says Niven, is the lowest-carbon concrete-block wall ever built in the U.S.
CarbonCure is currently working with four partners in North America that are producing its low-carbon blocks, pavers and other masonry products. Atlas Block, a major Canadian concrete manufacturer, is in negotiation to supply the low-carbon blocks for several sports complexes being built for the 2015 Pan Am Games in Toronto. “This is easily the most exciting technological improvement I’ve seen in years,” says Atlas chief executive Don Gordon.
Another dozen partners are in the pipeline, says Niven. In time, he hopes to expand the company’s reach to China – where more than half of the world’s concrete is currently being produced – and other global markets.
He also hopes to see CarbonCure move beyond masonry to apply its process to larger precast structures and ready-mix, the wet slurry of concrete and aggregate delivered in big mixing trucks.
Given that roughly 12 billion tonnes of concrete is produced every year around the world, if CarbonCure can adapt its technology to all concrete types, “the potential to reduce carbon is huge,” Niven says.
Indeed, green efforts are advancing in other aspects of concrete production. Industrial waste, such as fly ash or slag, offers a low-carbon alternative to cement. And major manufacturers such as Lafarge and Holcim are using more low-carbon or carbon-neutral fuels, such as biomass, to replace fossil fuels used in cement kilns.
Taken together, these green steps suggest that concrete could someday be “carbon neutral, or even carbon negative,” says Niven.
