New Carbon Injected Concrete Blocks

Building Green the publisher of Environmental Building News has announced its annual list of the 10 most innovative products being used in residential and commercial construction. The 11th annual Top Ten Green Building Products awards, announced at the Greenbuild conference in San Francisco, were selected from product reviews on the online GreenSpec guide and the magazine Environmental Building News.

As many of you well know, concrete is on the forefront in green building, being a recyclable and renewable material. So it’s not a surprise that one of the top 10 products selected as being most innovative is a new carbon injected concrete block. This product is called the Atlas CMU Block with CarbonCure. The CarbonCure system injects carbon dioxide from local industrial sources into the concrete masonry units (CMUs). This occurs during production using an innovative and specially designed mold.

The primary purpose behind the carbon mold is to reduce the carbon footprint of Atlas’ products but it has secondary and tertiary benefits as well. Injecting carbon dioxide into the CMUs also increases their strength and reduces the amount of Portland cement needed to make the blocks. Finally the carbon dioxide injection speeds the curing time of the concrete. All around it seems that the benefits to carbon curing CMUs are pretty great. One day hopefully all concrete blocks are made in this way to reduce the carbon footprint and increase the building strength of the materials.

Though Van Midde and Son builds only solid concrete walls and does not use concrete blocks, we feel this innovation highlights well how green concrete is and the potential for making it even more environmentally friendly in the future.