Building materials show huge carbon storage potential

Published in Science, the new study was carried out by civil engineers and Earth systems scientists at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) and Stanford University. It found that building materials had the potential to store more than 16 billion tonnes of CO2 annually, roughly half of the 35 billion tonnes emitted globally each year.

“The potential is pretty large,” said Elisabeth Van Roijen, a researcher at the US Department of Energy who led the study while a graduate student at UC Davis.

The researchers calculated the potential to store carbon in a wide range of common building materials including concrete, asphalt, plastics, wood and brick. Carbon-storing methods included adding biochar into concrete; using artificial rocks loaded with carbon as concrete and asphalt pavement aggregate; plastics and asphalt binders based on biomass rather than fossil petroleum sources; and including biomass fibre into bricks.