Hurricane Dorian struck the Bahamas in 2019, wrecking 75 percent of homes on the worst hit island of Abaco and displacing thousands of people.

Soon after, he met California-based architect Sam Marshall, whose home had sustained damage in the 2018 Woolsey fire, one of the most destructive blazes in the state’s history.

Making cement produces a lot of climate pollution because it has to be heated to high temperatures in a kiln and because it triggers a chemical reaction that releases additional CO2 from limestone.

“It’s good that they’re making use of waste,” says Dwarak Ravikumar, an assistant professor at the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment at Arizona State University.

Even so, Ravikumar says, “We need to conduct a robust analysis of this from a systems perspective to understand what is the overall climate impact.” It’s important for the company to share its data so that researchers can assess Partanna’s entire environmental footprint and how scalable its strategy is, he says.

It’s actually supposed to get stronger with exposure to seawater — an attractive trait to a country made up of many low-lying islands exposed to worsening storms and sea level rise.

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