The Sustainability Institute (SI) awarded two separate research grants to Brittany Multer Hopkins, PhD candidate in the School of Environment and Natural Resources, to help advance her research in discovering carbon sequestration capabilities in soil. That research was recently published in the journal, Science of the Total Environment.
Multer Hopkins worked with a team of driven researchers, including her graduate advisor, Rattan Lal, Distinguished University Professor of Soil Science and Laureate of 2019 Japan Prize, 2020 World Food Prize, and 2024 Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity, to publish their peer-reviewed article, “Carbon capture potential and environmental impact of concrete weathering in soil.” The innovative research investigated whether the carbonation of concrete in soil can be used to capture and sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide.
“During chemical weathering, concrete erodes in soil and reacts with atmospheric carbon dioxide which can be stored as dissolved inorganic carbon or, in some environments, form carbonates,” said Multer Hopkins. “Our research aimed to understand if this is a feasible method to capture and store atmospheric carbon dioxide in soil. With cement production accounting for over 8% of global carbon emissions, our findings show that chemical weathering is a viable path to offsetting some of those emissions.”
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