Engineers at the University of Cambridge have developed a process for producing recycled cement that has zero emissions and can be rapidly scaled.

Concrete is the most widely used manufactured material on earth. It has quite literally created the foundations of our built environment, but it comes with a massive environmental cost.

The production of cement, the key ingredient of concrete, generates around 2.5 billion tonnes of CO2 every year – about 8% of the global total.

Finding a scalable, cost-effective way of reducing these emissions while still meeting global demand for concrete poses a huge challenge.

However, researchers at the University of Cambridge think they have cracked it with a recycling method that uses the electrically-powered arc furnaces used for steel recycling to simultaneously recycle cement.

“We’ve already identified the low-hanging fruit that helps us use less cement by careful mixing and blending, but to get all the way to zero emissions we need to start thinking...