A full 5% of all the CO2 emitted into the atmosphere today comes from the manufacturing of cement and concrete.  In the cement manufacturing process, about a ton of carbon dioxide goes into the atmosphere for every ton of cement that’s made.  Liv Haselbach, an Environmental Engineering professor at Washington State University, thinks that can be changed.  She is working on a process to develop concrete that will reabsorb the CO2 back into the concrete.  And then, the CO2 will be captured, or sequestered in carbon emissions terminology, and taken out of the atmosphere permanently. 

Mary, writing at The Left Coaster, heard a program on a radio program called "Sustainability" that discussed this possibility with Haselbach.  The interview also included Brent Constantz, an entrepreneur who is already sequestering carbon in cement.  After making money off an invention of his that developed a new type of concrete for orthopedic surgeons, Brent started a new company called Calera with another game-changing invention that grabs CO2 out of the air from polluters and captures it in cement.  He set up a cement plant next to a major GHG polluter, the Moss Landing power plant on the California coast.   His process takes the carbon dioxide being emitted from the power plant and converts that carbon dioxide into a solid, carbonate mineral, which then essentially becomes limestone.  The carbon dioxide never reaches the atmosphere. 

Moss Landing produces about 3.4 million tons of CO2 a year, which is now being sequestered rather than sent into the atmosphere.  If Calera's process was used widely across the world, that would be 4 billion tons of CO2 that never reaches the atmosphere.