February 10, 2025

Architectural Concepts Guide

Elevating Home Design Standards

Scientists Think That Billions of Tons of Carbon Dioxide Can Be Stored in Construction Materials

Scientists Think That Billions of Tons of Carbon Dioxide Can Be Stored in Construction Materials
  • Carbon capture is a front-running technology for removing CO2 from the atmosphere, but finding sustainable ways to store that carbon can be a challenge.
  • A new study examines ways that carbon could be used as a key ingredient in building materials—particularly biomass plastics and cement.
  • Obstacles still remain, as some of these technologies are still in the development stage and many of these carbon-based materials have yet to be introduced into building codes and standards.

The number one method for combating climate change is lowering emissions—after all, the best way to remove carbon from the atmosphere is to make sure it never gets there in the first place. But even if the world miraculously turned off the CO2 tap tomorrow, the planet would still need a way to suck the other greenhouse gasses already present in the atmosphere (courtesy of 150 years of unchecked industrialization) back out.

One of the primary methods for undoing more than a century of gas guzzling is carbon capture technology, and scientists have been steadily improving both the tech and materials needed to make this technique as efficient as possible. However, that carbon doesn’t magically disappear—it needs to go somewhere. Current technologies pump the carbon underground or even deep into the ocean, but a new study from scientists at University of California, Davis and Stanford University analyzes the potential of storing carbon in certain ubiquitous materials found across the planet. In other words: what if we stored carbon in buildings? The results of the study were published in the journal Science.

“The potential is pretty large,” Elisabeth Van Roijen, a graduate student at UC Davis who led the study, said in a press statement. “What if, instead, we can leverage materials that we already produce in large quantities to store carbon?”

Van Roijen and her team looked at different materials (including concrete, asphalt, plastics, wood, and brick) to see which materials could be best suited and most efficient for storing captured carbon. They also looked at a variety of methods for storing the carbon, such as adding biochar to concrete, loading artificial rocks with carbon, using biomass-based asphalt binders, or baking biomass fibers into bricks. The authors admit that these techniques are at varying stages of readiness—some are already commercially available, while others are still in a lab—but the study outlines a broad selection of what’s possible.

The team found that the world could store roughly 16 billion tonnes of CO2 annually—a significant amount, considering the fact that humanity produced 37.4 billion tonnes of CO2 in 2023. The study highlights a few standout materials, including bio-based plastics, which stored the most carbon by weight. But the material with the greatest potential proved to be concrete.

Although not as efficient as bio-based plastics, concrete is the world’s most popular building material, and around 18 billion tonnes of the stuff are produced every year. That means that even “a little bit of storage in concrete could go a long way,” UC Davis’s Sabbie Miller, a co-author of the study, said in a press statement. The added bonus is that these methods could increase the value of biomass, which could actually improve economic development.

Apart from some of these ideas still being in the development phase, the authors note that the building industry can be risk averse. And while many of these materials appear to perform as well as—or even better than—their non-carbon counterparts, they have yet to be incorporated into building codes and standards. However, states like California are pushing hard for the cement industry to reach net-zero emissions as soon as possible, and carbon-captured materials could be a major boon for what is already daunting-yet-necessary effort.

Headshot of Darren Orf

Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough. 

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