UK-based Material Evolution, an advanced materials company producing low-carbon cement from industrial waste streams, has secured GBP15m (US$18.9m) in funding to scale up production of its low carbon cement, which offers an 85 per cent lower carbon footprint than ordinary Portland cement.
The company has developed an innovative, low-energy, low-capex manufacturing process that uses zero heat and solves the high CO2 emission problem in conventional cement production, explains Business Cloud. The process replaces the need for energy-intensive kilns with an alkali-fusion process, which produces cement at ambient temperatures from a variety of industrial wastes and feedstocks.
Dr Elizabeth Gilligan, co-founder and CEO of Material Evolution, said, “What makes Material Evolution different is that we don’t believe it will be one material that saves the world. We believe that to rapidly scale across the industry we need to have localised material sources. We have created a product that not only produces lower emissions but is also lower in cost and has a higher performance. There is no silver bullet solution, but we believe that by decentralising cement production and using previously inaccessible waste we can scale our solution on a global level and truly change the cement industry.”
“Since closing our seed round in September 2021, Material Evolution has achieved significant market traction from advanced offtake agreements amounting to over 35,000t of our product now entering the market after selling out our first year of production,” added Sam Clark, co–founder and COO at Material Evolution. “The investment will primarily be used to scale up production facilities and invest into further R&D to develop additional products for different construction use cases. The funding will also allow us to create blueprints for scaling and licensing our technology across the UK, Europe and beyond.”
