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In the midst of a failed experiment, inventor David Stone realized he may have accidentally created a new environmentally friendly material to replace cement.
Ferrock is a material made from iron and several recycled products. “The whole process is green,” Stone said.
Cement, which has been called “the foundation of modern civilization,” is used to create buildings, bridges and roads. But its production requires high heat from burning coal, a fossil fuel that releases carbon into the atmosphere. Currently, cement production accounts for about 5 percent of the world’s carbon emissions, playing a role in warming the earth’s atmosphere.
In contrast, Ferrock uses a combination of steel dust, a waste material that is normally discarded, and silica, which comes from recycled glass. The process is “carbon-negative,” trapping greenhouse gases instead of releasing them.
The Environmental Protection Agency gave a grant of over $200,000 to test the process on the Tohono O’odham Nation reservation in Arizona, employing local tribe members.
They discovered that the material is also five times stronger than regular concrete, said Narayanan Neithalath, a civil engineer who is testing Ferrock. This makes it blast-resistant, meaning that it would collapse less easily in the event of a disaster like a tornado or explosion, he said.
But the material would be hard to produce on a large scale, according to Steve Regis, senior vice president at cement producer CalPortland. It works for small projects like non-structural walkways and benches, but “consider the scale of that compared to a 200-mile six-lane freeway eight inches thick or a runaway,” Regis said.
Stone responded to that criticism. “When the time comes and the world wants to build with new materials that are carbon-neutral or carbon-negative, I will be able to step forward and say, yes, I have such a material,” he said.
Warm up questions
- What is cement? What is it used for?
- Can you name some things you see every day that are made of cement and concrete?
- What do inventors do?
Critical thinking questions
- Why is it important to develop sustainable alternatives to cement production?
- How could developers use Ferrock?
- What would it take for Ferrock to become widely used?
- What does David Stone’s story tell you about the process of invention?
