Hey, guess what... I know how to eliminate 6 Billion tons of CO2 being added to the air, every year. That's 6,000,000,000 tons... every year.
Over 20 years ago, Joseph Davidovits, Director of the Geopolymer Institute in St. Quentin, France, claimed that the stones of the pyramids were actually made of a very early form of concrete created using a mixture of limestone, clay, lime, and water. Everyone had a good laugh and life went on.
When
Michel Barsoum, professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Drexel University, heard Davidovits claim he laughed too. But when he was told nobody ever checked it out, he decided to disprove it with a few hours of electron microscopy.
Egyptian born Barsoum's daily routine consists mainly of teaching students about ceramics, or performing research on a new class of materials, the so-called MAX Phases, that he and his colleagues discovered in the 1990s, so he's no amateur.
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"What started as a two-hour project turned into a five-year odyssey that I undertook with one of my graduate students, Adrish Ganguly, and a colleague in France, Gilles Hug," Barsoum says.
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At the end of their most recent paper reporting these findings, the researchers reflect that it is "ironic, sublime and truly humbling" that this 4,500-year-old limestone is so true to the original that it has misled generations of Egyptologists and geologists and, "because the ancient Egyptians were the original-albeit unknowing-nanotechnologists."
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"How energy intensive and/or complicated can a 4,500 year old technology really be? The answer to both questions is not very," Barsoum explains. "The basic raw materials used for this early form of concrete-limestone, lime, and diatomaceous earth-can be found virtually anywhere in the world," he adds. "Replicating this method of construction would be cost effective, long lasting, and much more environmentally friendly than the current building material of choice: Portland cement that alone pumps roughly 6 billion tons of CO2 annually into the atmosphere when it's manufactured."
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Wow, if we could eliminate Portland cement for everything not poured underwater, what a tremendous energy savings and CO2 reduction.