Ian Mitchell engineered concrete that sequesters CO₂, cutting emissions by 32% compared to standard concrete. The material costs the same, stays durable over a year, and looks like black onyx. He's offering it to listeners for beta testing on projects like sidewalks.
Bulletproof radio. A state of high performance. But first, we haven't talked in a while and you're like, oh, Dave, I'm working on concrete. That's why, guys, I'm telling you, he's one of those what you call a polyglot. If different forms of science were languages, he'd be a scientific polyglot. I love that word. That means someone who speaks lots of languages. But he literally goes from chemistry to electrical stuff like that. So concrete, Carbon neutral concrete?
Yeah, actually carbon negative concrete. It started out as carbon neutral, and then, as I typically do, I wanted to see if I could take it a couple notches further. So the idea was to come up with concrete that would actually leach carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. So typically, in a year, carbon accounts for 8% of global CO2, or rather concrete accounts for 8% of global CO 2 emissions. And in this case, I negated that pretty quickly, but then went a few steps further and was able to get about a 24% reduction. So net change of about 32%. Of course, everybody's not going to transition to this immediately. That would be amazing and fantastic if it happened. But the idea is just to do things that move the needle. And that's a big problem. You know, I've got. Literally since I opened my lab, I've had the same things on my board as problems that I wanted to solve. Aging, cancer, clean water, global warming, superluminal travel, the easy stuff.
Yeah, the teleportation thing definitely needs to be on there. Do you remember the biodome from the 90s?
Absolutely.
So for people who don't remember this, and there's a meaningful number of people who probably have already lost it in the sands of time, There was a group of sort of wannabe astronaut types who locked themselves in a sealed dome somewhere in the Southwest. And the deal was they were gonna grow all of their own food and air in a closed ecosystem to show we could do it in space. And over of about two years, they became exceptionally angry at each other. Very low on oxygen, way too much carbon dioxide, and their vegan diet trashed them. They were all gaunt with joint problems and teeth falling out and all sorts of stuff like that. And they finally had to open the thing and, well, it turns out, years later, they figured out it's because the concrete that they'd used to build the floor and the structure was sucking the air out of their air. Well, sucking the oxygen out of their air. And if that hadn't been going on, maybe they'd have been able to have the occasional bite of bunny or something to keep them. But anyhow, this is how I became aware of this problem of concrete. And you look at the amount of concrete out there, it matters. Probably not as much as container shipping, but it's a big deal. So have you done this? Is it ready to go?
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's, we've, we've done it. It's been tested. We've been doing strength testing for the past four or five months. You know, the thing with concrete is you want to make sure that there are no long term issues with it because the strength, the, you know, the modulus kind of changes over time. So you have to make sure that as you protract it out six months to a year, everything maintains its strength.
Is it more expensive than normal concrete?
No, actually it's about the same price you just had initially. Of course it was, but you just had to think about how to do it, you know, and the idea. And it's black, which is very awesome. So it goes back, it looks great. It really looks like onyx. It's really awesome.
Can I buy it? I mean, I'm actually working on my house in Victoria that was full of toxic mold. We had to tear it down. So I'm going to have to put sidewalks in. I mean, I want to.
Yeah, I would love to. Yeah, we'll do that.
I'll be a beta test site for you. This. I'm so stoked. I didn't even know we were going to go there. I just, I want people who are listening to just understand you. You create a ton of disparate, weird but world changing stuff.
