Unfortunately, concrete production is a pollution problem.
Cement industry accounts for about 8% of CO2 emissions
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cement-industry-co2-emissions-c...
Cement industry accounts for about 8% of CO2 emissions
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cement-industry-co2-emissions-c...
It's a point source of carbon, which is the best case for capture. Some of the carbon could be made into plastic (particularly polyoxymethylene would be easy) although you might find that demand is saturated well before you have used up all of the capture.
Bigger problem is that due to the extreme temperatures required (the essential crystal structure, called alite, can only form above 1250 C) the facilities are large, expensive to construct and difficult to modify. Because the reaction produces a dust plume, they are often sited in less regulated jurisdictions, which compounds the problem. But capturing the carbon and capturing the dust likely require some common components.
This is arguably an opportunity for Latin America, which has historically had low local cement production due to tighter environmental regulations vs Asia. Its road and rail infrastructure lags as a result. (The durability of PC is also highly desirable in tropical environments!) But a proper implementation of clean cement is not yet well understood, and economic incentives for cleaner imports are merely theoretical at this point.
This is what I remember from working for a start up that was helping make low carbon cement, the numbers could be wrong, but it's more complicated than just the energy to reach the high temps.
Then after grind them up as mulch abd fertilizer.
We can outfit the bacteria with a natural inhibitor. Maybe a lack of lysine.
Yeah. That'll work.
The obvious economic quirk about capturing carbon in concrete is that given time and pressure you can convince carbon to harden. Concrete that continues to pull in carbon in its process in theory has good chances to be stronger and hardier. If it continues past the initial set, you get "self-healing" concrete.
You joke about plants, but yes plants have been doing variations on that for epochs now, there is probably some more lessons to apply from them if we want to build a "diamond age" with all the excess carbon we've spewed as a culture.
The reason I diverged from vines, is because multi-cellular is too slow. I think what we'd need to do, is create some sort of thin mat you lay over the concrete, just unroll it, and it has dormant bacteria along with whatever input(food) it requires to consume CO2.
So it then, much like yeast in bread, multiplies quickly, and you're left with a thicker mat to roll up and dispose of, grind up, say for fertilizer.
I envision the mat to be thin, akin to plastic rolls you get to keep insulation in place. They could be comprised of entirely organic materials, food for the bacteria. You know, such a thing should be possible, but would the bacteria multiple quickly enough? And likely water would be required as an additional.