Construction materials are a product of their time and the environment that people inhabit. While a house may look the same now as it did one hundred years ago, materials will not be anything alike and it shows. Lately, there has been a push to go back to more natural and ecofriendly materials that work with the climate the house is located in order to both save costs and the environment. One researcher doing precisely that in the Arizona desert has discovered a great alternative to concrete that could revolutionize the building industry.
A joke about climate change is that we need to focus our efforts on concrete problems, like, well, concrete itself. Although it is a natural material, it is manmade and not exactly the most efficient to use in every climate. It has poor insulating value and does not allow water to pass through, it is almost impossible to patch and it takes a very long time to cure and set. Of course it has a lot of advantages, otherwise we would not use it, it is durable and strong, and if done correctly, houses and condo buildings can last for centuries without issues, but that does not make it ideal or sustainable in every climate.
The new material that will dethrone concrete as a building standard material
Enter David Stone, who, ten years ago was a doctoral student at the University of Arizona. As part of his studies, he created a cement substitute that used waste steel dust amongst other materials in order to use things that no one else found useful. His experiment was a success, and he won the contest he presented this new material to as well as the right to the patent in 2013. From them on, he commercialized this new material, which he called Ferrock through his company Iron Shell.
Ferrock has proven to be a tougher and more planet-friendly material than concrete, but its discovery was anything but expected. As Stone explains, “This all started from an accidental discovery in a lab, which is actually the way it usually goes.”
Stone is not the only one looking for ways to make construction a lot more sustainable, and it is not about inventing new materials, after all civilizations have built impressive structures that have withstood the test of time with a lot less resources than we have now, but using what many considers waste is not often a concept that is understood or implemented.
The advantages of this new Ferrock material are evident. First and foremost, it is stronger than concrete by several metrics: 13.5% for compressive strength; 20% for split tensile strength; and 18% for flexural strength, all at 28 days. Secondly it uses 95% of recycled materials (discarded steel dust and silica from pulverized glass), making it budget friendly and ecofriendly at the same time and as it hardens, it pulls carbon dioxide from the air, reducing pollution.
After he won the patent in 2013, Stone made comments in 2014 about his approach to the new business venture he was beginning, “I am into this for the long haul,” he said. “Time is on our side, since in this era of global warming unsustainable processes like cement manufacture will have to give way to greener alternatives.”
And he was not wrong. Cement production exceeds 4 billion tons globally each year, and the process contributes heavily to environmental damage. Reuters reports that it accounts for up to 8% of the world’s air pollution, highlighting the significant ecological cost of this essential building material.
Even now a decade later, this product is still not widely commercialized, but it might be better as a smaller scale project material, as part of the appeal is to source discarded materials to be recycled into it, so turning it into a huge scale operation without knowing where the materials came from might defeat the purpose.