Recycling Innovation of the Day: Blasting Concrete With Lightning

Since I praised concrete for its beauty and versatility last month, it seems only fair that I deliver the bad news as well. Concrete has a rather poor environmental record: eight to 15 percent of global CO2 emissions can be attributed to concrete production, and when concrete buildings are destroyed, the material is virtually unrecyclable.

Currently, the composite can be what researcher Volker Thome calls "downcycled", meaning crushed into a dusty pile of rubble used as a base for roads or other junk applications. But in this press release from the Fraunhofer Institute (the same German engineering behemoth that invented the world's longest bus), Thome explains that researchers have come up with a way to effectively break down the components.