It's Forest Whitaker, guest hosting today, if you want to learn how to take real lasting climate action like I do, I want to invite you to join Countdown to its new global initiative to accelerate solutions to the climate crisis.

Here's a talk from the countdown global launch event given by some entrepreneur, Tom Schueler Thomas, known for saying that his goal is to turn CO2 from problem to solution. I definitely want to hear about it, to hear more of these ideas and get involved. Check out Countdown. Dotcom has just got to Countdown's podcast wherever you listening to this? Concrete is all around us, but most of us don't even notice that it's there, we use concrete to build our roads, buildings, bridges, airports, it's everywhere.

The only resource we use more than concrete is water. And with population growth and urbanization, we're going to need concrete more than ever. But there's a problem cement's the glue that holds concrete together. And to make cement, you burn limestone with other ingredients in a kiln at very high temperatures. One of the byproducts of that process is carbon dioxide or CO2. For every ton of cement that's manufactured, almost a ton of CO2 is emitted into the atmosphere.

As a result, the cement industry is the second largest industrial emitter of CO2, responsible for almost eight percent of total global emissions. If we're going to solve global warming, innovation in both cement production and carbon utilization is absolutely necessary. Now to make concrete, you mix cement with stone, sand and other ingredients, throw in a bunch of water and then wait for it to harden or cure. With precast products like pavers and blocks, you might shoot steam into the curing chamber to try to accelerate the curing process for buildings, roads and bridges.

We pour what's called ready mix concrete into a mold on the job site and wait for it to cure over time now for over 50 years, scientists believe that if they cured concrete with CO2 instead of water, it would be more durable. But they were hamstrung by Portland. Cement chemistry is see, it likes to react with both water and CO2 and those conflicting chemistries just don't make for very good concrete. So we came up with a new cement chemistry. We use the same equipment and raw materials, but we use less limestone and we fire the kiln at a lower temperature, resulting in up to a 30 percent reduction in CO2 emissions.

Our cement doesn't react with water. We cure our concrete with CO2 and we get that CO2 by capturing waste gas from industrial facilities like ammonia plants or ethanol plants that otherwise would have been released into the atmosphere during curing the chemical reaction with our cement breaks apart, the CO2 capturing the carbon to make limestone and that limestone is used to bind the concrete together now of a bridge made out of our concrete were ever demolished. There's no fear of the CO2 being emitted because it doesn't exist any longer.

When you combine the emissions reduction during cement production with the CO2 consumption, during concrete curing, we reduce its carbon footprint by up to 70 percent. And because we don't consume water, we also save trillions of litres of water. Now, convincing a two thousand year old industry that hasn't evolved much over the last two hundred years is not easy. But there are lots of new and existing industry players that are attacking that challenge. Our strategy is to ease adoption by seeking solutions that go beyond just sustainability.

We use the same processes, raw material and equipment that's used to make traditional concrete. But our new cement makes concrete cured with CO2 that is stronger, more durable, lighter in color, and it cures in twenty four hours instead of twenty eight days. Our new technology for ready mix is in testing and infrastructure applications, and we've pushed our research even further to develop a concrete that may become a carbon sink. That means that we will consume more CO2 that is emitted during cement production since we can't use CO2 gas at a construction site, we knew we had to deliver it to our concrete and either solid or liquid form.

So we've been partnering with companies that are taking waste CO2 and transforming it into a useful family of chemicals like acrylic acid or citric acid. The same when you use an orange juice. When that acid reacts with our cement, we can pack in as much as four times more carbon into the concrete, making it carbon negative. That means that for a one kilometre road section, we would consume more CO2 than almost one hundred thousand trees do during one year.

So thanks to chemistry and waste CO2, we're trying to convert the concrete industry, the second most used material on the planet into a carbon sink for the planet. PR ex.