Excerpt
SUMMARY: Cement has been called the foundation of modern civilization, the stuff of highways, bridges, sidewalks and buildings of all sizes. But its production comes with a huge carbon footprint. Environmental chemist David Stone was seeking a way to keep iron from rusting when he stumbled upon a possible substitute that requires significantly less energy. Special correspondent Kathleen McCleery reports.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): Climate change has prompted scientists to search for new ways to reduce greenhouse gases in all kinds of fields.
Now an Arizona inventor has discovered an alternative to the unlikely cause of fully 5 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions.
Special correspondent Kathleen McCleery has the story, part of our Breakthroughs series on invention and innovation.
DAVID STONE, Inventor: I have here the last surviving bit of an experiment that went wrong.
KATHLEEN MCCLEERY (NewsHour): Thirteen years ago, David Stone was a Ph.D. student studying environmental chemistry.
DAVID STONE: It was the corner lab right up here.
KATHLEEN MCCLEERY: In a lab at the University of Arizona in Tucson, he hunted for a way to keep iron from rusting and hardening up.
DAVID STONE: It got hot. It started to steam. It was bubbling and spitting. And I thought, well, that — that didn’t work. The next day, when I came in and I found it and rescued it from the garbage, I realized, this just didn’t get hard. It got very hard, glassy hard.
This one was cast by hand.
KATHLEEN MCCLEERY: Stone — that’s his real name — began to think his discarded rock just might be a substitute for a very common product, cement.
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