These guys are full of beans.
Portland cement is produced by heating massive amounts of raw material into something called clink, this clink undergoes a chemical reaction which gives it binding powers.
It’s crushed into a fine powder and that is Portland cement that when combined with water and aggregate form concrete.
You could never get seashells and bones in the massive amounts necessary to produce enough clink to meet the demand for concrete.
Modern cement plants have been steadily reducing the amount of energy they use to produce clink as new plants come online using preheat and other methods.
These guys are just hunting for Grant money, their ideas are impractical.
Ah, that raw material you’re talking about is limestone, i.e., seashells.
When the Greenies got DDT outlawed, the market for insect protection became flooded with dozens of “new” replacement products that were and are absolutely worthless. Watch for Portland cement to be “outlawed” and then the construction industry will be flooded with useless alternatives that will cause major structural failure. Also remember the O-rings on the Challenger disaster. Made of chemicals that were environmentally “sound”. Goddamn these meddling liberal bastards.
Partially digested bean gasses is what they are full of!!!
This "sustainability" hokum is about as real as Michael Jackson's "Never never land!" Along with "alternative" energy and "alternative" medicine and especially the making of villains out of mining and drilling people by calling them evil "Resource Extractors!"
These whackos are infesting our so-called "institutions of higher learning" with stupid pussey thinking and government "grant writing" exercises in waste and futility!!!
The National Socialists had industrial plants that produced huge amounts of bone as a byproduct.
Slogging through through the buzz words, I came to the same conclusion,
“You could never get seashells and bones in the massive amounts necessary to produce enough clink to meet the demand for concrete.”
In FL the limestone is composed of crushed sea shells. The upper level of the rock is a mass of compacted shells. So you’re saying if that was heated and reduced to clink it could be used to form a new type of cement? Would be nice. Local concrete using sand and shell aggregate isn’t particularly durable, uniform or appealing.
the article uses the generic term cement when as you have pointed out is Portland cement as opposed to say asphalt cement or epoxy cement
For those journqalists that don’t know the difference between cement and concrete, this article might be quite confusing.
lastly, the term “a random assemblage” is used by the authors when in truth Portland cement concrete for engineering structures is a carefully engineered product for a specific task.
The main ingredients are Portland cement and aggregate of various sizes that include rock (aka stone) and sand. Some would say the rock is aggregate. The size and amounts of the rock and sand particles are designed for the specific purpose of the concrete.
Additionally there are lots of various additives that are included by the engineering design to suit the need.
There are female engineers working on grants at more than MIT making a difference by checking out obsolete concrete formulations