It’s a concrete world, and we’re just living in it—or so Texas cities feel to many residents. Some uses of that omnipresent building material seem questionable, like fueling the seemingly endless expansion of state highways. But others, like building more housing and businesses, help accommodate a growing population.
The industry touts concrete as “the most abundant resource in the world” after water. Of course, that’s not counting intangible resources like the air we breathe and rely on to keep our planet habitable.
Concrete’s ubiquity poses major air quality problems. The end product itself isn’t the biggest issue. Making cement, an underlying ingredient in concrete, requires burning massive amounts of fossil fuels and releasing additional greenhouse gasses as a byproduct of the chemical process. New research shows greenhouse gasses released from cement production have doubled in the last 20 years and currently account for 7 percent of global carbon emissions.
