The new production facility for Remy Wines looks like some 900 other wine-making operations throughout Oregon’s wine country.
But this 5,000-square-foot repurposed pole barn hides a distinction that could be a milestone in the Architecture 2030 Challenge: the facility’s concrete floor. Or, more accurately, the carbon-negative concrete floor. This otherwise unremarkable concrete slab holds the sequestered equivalent of 10,230 pounds (more than five tons) of atmospheric CO2. The floor is believed to be the first carbon-negative concrete placement in North America.
It’s a sustainability breakthrough of incalculable importance. As the world’s most popular building material, concrete accounts for about 7% of the world’s annual greenhouse gas emissions. Any process that reduces this figure could be transformative to the built environment.
“If we are going to pull back from the brink of climate change, then we have start actively sequestering carbon. It can’t be minor offsets. We need high impact applications. Concrete is high impact,” says Remy Drabkin, owner and operator of Remy Wines, near Dayton, Ore. Her vision and insistence on a carbon-trapping concrete solution was the catalyst for a concrete formulation that now bears her name: the Drabkin-Mead Formula. Mead is John Mead, the owner of Solid Carbon in nearby McMinnville. An ardent environmentalist, he has a sophisticated understanding of ready-mix concrete science. “We broke hundreds of test cylinders before arriving at a formulation that exceeded our expectations,” Mead explains.
Expectations Exceeded
The persistence was rewarded with a concrete that reduced global warming potential to 90 kg CO2 equivalent per cubic yard. Compare that to an expected GWP of 242 kg equivalent per cubic yard for standard concrete in a slab pour.
One of the keys to the Drabkin-Mead Formula is an admixture made from biosolids, a material extracted from the waste streams of municipal wastewater treatment plants. The biosolids are converted into OurCarbon—a carbonized organic material created by pyrolysis, an oxygen-free heating process. The concrete also incorporates a cement with a significantly lower carbon footprint than Type 1L cement, the current sustainability gold standard.
Decarbonized Concrete
The net effect? “The Remy Wine project may be the first commercial use of carbon-negative ready-mix concrete in the U.S.,” Mead reports, taking into account the methane emissions that the Drabkin-Mead Formula also prevents by diverting biosolids from landfills.
Drabkin views her project as a proof of concept, emphatically demonstrating the here-and-now reality of decarbonized concrete.
“Imagine if everything from our homes, streets, and sidewalks included sequestered carbon,” she reflects. “It is time for every architect, engineer, and municipality to make this happen.” Look no further than Dayton, Ore. for the way forward.
Learn more about how to reduce concrete’s carbon footprint.
