Franz-Josef Ulm
Professor at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge (MA), USA
Breaking the Wall of Concrete Pollution. How Green Concrete Can Reduce the Giant Carbon Footprint of Construction.
Concrete may be grey, but it should soon be green. Today, concrete production is a leading cause for climate change: it generates many times more CO2 pollution than all air travel globally, leaving a footprint on our environment that is as giant and grey as our city’s skylines. Franz-Josef Ulm’s (1964) nano-engineering of materials sets out to eradicate it. Ulm investigates how to replace calcium carbonate, the active ingredient in lime, and how to reduce the massive carbon dioxide emissions created by the production of concrete.
An academic as well as an experienced civil engineer, Ulm, who was educated at universities in Germany and in France, has always worked at building bridges – not only did he built actual bridges, as the head of Compositive Materials Research at the central civil engineering research center of the French Department of Transportation and Public Works, but metaphorical ones, too: currently as the director of the Concrete Sustainability Hub, a partnership between academia and industry with the cement and concrete industry for the developing of the next generation of green concrete.
