Lakers legend Rick Fox built a house that could suck CO2 out of the atmosphere

A new house in the Bahamas is built with an alternative concrete that sucks CO2 from the air. It’s a house meant to help combat climate change, and there are plans to build 999 more.

It’s the slam dunk that NBA Lakers legend turned actor Rick Fox is currently working on in the small island nation where he grew up. Fox is the CEO and co-founder of sustainable building materials startup Partanna which unveiled its first home today. If they succeed in the Bahamas, the goal is to make its alternative concrete an everyday building material that could reduce construction-related pollution.

“I ended my entire career in Hollywood to pursue and create [climate] solutions,” says Fox The edge. “I had to move into an industry that was new to me and meet people who looked at me and said, ‘What are you doing in concrete?’ »

Concrete turns out to be a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, causing more intense storms, wildfires, and other disasters due to climate change. The culprit is actually cement, a key ingredient in concrete that alone is responsible for more than 8% of global carbon dioxide emissions.

“My entry into the world of concrete was motivated by simple survival and the need to innovate in my own country,” explains Fox. Hurricane Dorian hit the Bahamas in 2019, destroying 75% of homes on the worst-hit island of Abaco and displacing thousands of people. Fox was in Los Angeles at the time. “The closest thing I could do was run to CNN and shout from the rooftops that we needed to do something better,” he says.

Soon after, he met California architect Sam Marshall, whose home had been damaged in the 2018 Woolsey Fire, one of the most destructive fires in state history. Marshall had already “caught lightning in a bottle,” according to Fox. Working with materials scientists, they developed a way to make concrete without using carbon-intensive cement. Together they co-founded Partanna.

The two men are fairly tight-lipped about the process, but the main ingredients are brine from desalination plants and a byproduct of steel production called slag. By getting rid of cement as an ingredient, Partanna can avoid the carbon dioxide emissions that come with it. Cement manufacturing produces a lot of climate pollution because it must be heated to high temperatures in a kiln and because it triggers a chemical reaction that releases additional CO2 from limestone.

Partanna says her mixture can harden at room temperature, so it doesn’t need to use as much energy. It also states that the binder ingredients in the mixture absorb CO2 from the air and trap it in the material. In a house or building, the material continues to absorb CO2. Even if this structure is demolished, the material retains CO2 and can be reused as aggregate to make more alternative concrete.

This is how the startup can qualify its equipment and the newly built house as “carbon negative”. The 1,250 square foot structure is believed to have captured as much CO2 as 5,200 mature trees per year.

Of course, counting carbon with trees is tricky. A Guardian A survey earlier this year found that 90 percent of rainforest offsets certified by one of the world’s leading carbon credit certification bodies, Verra, are “worthless” because they are unlikely to have leads to real reductions in pollution. Verra also certifies carbon credits for Partanna. Fox says the CO2 captured by Partanna is easier to quantify than forest offsets and is not as vulnerable as forests which must be protected from deforestation in order to store carbon.

It’s also worth noting that Partanna’s key ingredients, slag and brine, come from energy-intensive steelmaking and desalination facilities that can produce large CO2 emissions on their own. Partanna does not count these emissions in its carbon footprint. “It’s not up to us… It’s waste that we collect and put to good use,” Fox says.

“It’s good that they’re using waste,” says Dwarak Ravikumar, an assistant professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment at Arizona State University. Nonetheless, Ravikumar says: “We need to do a robust analysis of this from a systemic perspective to understand what the overall climate impact is. » It’s important for the company to share its data so researchers can assess Partanna’s full environmental footprint and the scalability of its strategy, he says.

Fox isn’t alone in its mission to make a building material more durable than traditional concrete. Microsoft announced last month that it was testing low-carbon concrete for its data centers. And other startups are working to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and trap it in concrete.

Partanna says he has an advantage since his material is made from brine. It is actually believed to strengthen with exposure to seawater – an attractive trait for a country made up of many low-lying islands exposed to worsening storms and rising sea levels.

“We are not only on the front lines of climate change; we are on the front lines of solutions,” said Philip Davis, Prime Minister and Minister of Finance of the Bahamas, in a Partanna press release.

The Bahamas government is partnering with Partanna to build 1,000 homes, starting with a community of 29 additional homes expected to be built by next year. No one lives in the first one in Nassau yet; it’s a prototype. But the next ones should be part of a program to help new owners.