Dusting farms with waste concrete could boost yields and lock up CO2

Ground-up concrete can remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in a similar way to ground-up rocks, according to a field study in Ireland.

Grinding up the vast amounts of waste concrete around the world and spreading it on fields could remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and potentially boost crop yields, with no harmful effects, according to a field trial in Ireland.

Doing so could partially compensate for the huge emissions from cement production. “It’s sort of recapturing the CO2 that was lost in the first place,” says Ruadhan Magee at University College Dublin in Ireland, who presented his team’s initial findings at a meeting of the European Geosciences…