Rotterdam-based startup Paebbl is developing road construction materials that absorb CO2, aiming to turn concrete cities into carbon sinks. The company’s innovative approach could help reduce emissions in construction and promote more sustainable urban development.

Rotterdam

Pebble, a technology startup based in Rotterdam, is developing a process to produce construction materials that absorb and store carbon dioxide, rather than emitting it. Their method accelerates the natural process of rock weathering, which already removes significant amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere, by using chemical reactors to create cementitious materials suitable for the construction industry.

Since its launch, Pebble has significantly increased its production capacity and opened a demonstration plant capable of processing hundreds of tons of CO2 annually. The company is now working towards building a full-scale commercial plant and aims to achieve cost parity with traditional cement products. Pebble's technology has already been used in various European projects, and the company sees its approach as a potential solution to the construction industry's substantial carbon footprint.

The tech startup on a mission to decarbonise concrete

Imagine a world where all the buildings around us help us absorb carbon dioxide, instead of pumping more of it into the atmosphere. A world where we use technology to accelerate the processes nature has already mastered. Well, it's already here. This is Pebble, a Rotterdam startup making raw construction material out of CO2. But how does this work? And can it be deployed at scale? The method that we're using, which is actually running nature's chemistry on steroids. So the basic chemistry that we're working with is based on the phenomenon called rock weathering, which is part of the Earth's carbon cycle. And it's actually already today pulling out roughly a billion tons of CO2 out of the air every single year. When rainwater mixes with rock dust, it dissolves carbon dioxide and converts it into minerals that essentially lock it away in solid form, which can last for thousands to millions of years. It's one of Earth's long-term carbon sinks. But as you can imagine, it's a very slow process. We can take that same chemistry, take those same kinds of minerals that you find on all continents, break them up, put them into a chemical reactor, increase the pressure and temperature and add a few catalysts. And that gives us a valuable material for the construction industry, where you can even use this material to substitute cementitious materials, which currently are causing six to eight percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The core of the problem is that the raw material for traditional cement is limestone. That's the main component. Limestone is calcium carbonate. And calcium carbonate is calcium oxide and CO2 bound together in a mineral form. But they are dissociated from each other at the high temperature, which causes the emission. Which also tells you that even if you electrify cement production, you're still going to be left with 40 to 50 percent of the emissions because of the material you're working with. In contrast, if you make cementitious materials, and bear in mind, we're not a one-to-one cement replacement, but we have cementitious properties in our product. You start with two tons of minerals, again, slightly different type of mineral. But instead of burning them at a high temperature and losing a lot of CO2 in the air, add one ton of CO2 to those two tons of rocks. You generate heat and you're left with three tons of output product at the end. But how much of this carbon storing material can really be produced? Since launching in 2020, Bebo has increased their production capacities by 100 percent. From producing around two kilograms of material per day, to two or three hundred kilograms in November 2024. Since then, we've been mostly focusing on scaling up the technology further. And the big technical jump that you have to make, is to move from a batch process to a continuous process. So to make that jump, we built a demonstration scale plant, which we opened up in Rotterdam earlier this year. We started it up in March, and that is a plant with a design capacity to process roughly 900 tons of CO2 per year, which then turns into between two and a half and four thousand tons of product per year. It's a significant scale upjump, but it's still very small on the scale of the construction industry. And our next step, of course, is to build a full commercial scale unit. And we're just in the process of selecting where that will be. The company has already been involved in various projects across Europe. From keyhole anchors in Rotterdam, to surface level concrete floors in a Parisian boutique. To be deployed at large scale and compete with traditional concrete, the project will also have to be economically viable. So what we are doing is approaching cost parity with cement and other supplementary cementitious materials with our first commercial scale plants. We may be there or may not quite be there with the first commercial scale plant, but once we start building bigger commercial scale plants, we are absolutely projecting to be competitive with traditional products in this industry. The construction industry isn't going anywhere. In fact, Andreas says whether an economy is flourishing or struggling, construction, the largest industry on the planet, is always on the rise. We actually typically build more when the economy is doing worse. And of course, when the economy is doing well, we're also building quite a bit because then people are investing into new projects and so on and so forth. So it's rather so that when the economy is doing really well, the private sector is investing a lot into construction. When the economy is doing not so well, many governments may invest in construction and infrastructure works to maintain the economic engine. Humans make more concrete than anything else. We produce just above 30 billion tons every single year. And at the same time, we pump out 30 to 50 billion tons of CO2 up into the air. And very importantly, we're not going to stop using concrete. With the current rate of urbanization, we need roughly one Manhattan's worth of concrete every single month from now on until 2050. And roughly three quarters of all the infrastructure that we need by that year has yet to be built. And much of it is built or will be built out of concrete because there are no viable alternatives. So if we could turn concrete from a net emitter to a net zero or even a net carbon sink, we have a very interesting solution on a societal level at our hands. Do you think carbon storing construction can become the new normal? Let us know in the comments.

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