Low-Carbon Cement is a Game-Changer. Its Inventor Explains Why.

As a child, Karen Scrivener loved to build houses with Lego. At the tender age of 10, she helped her father build the family home in the outer suburbs of London.  

"We had these big concrete blocks. To level them, we had to make these little round patties of concrete and then put the slab down. He paid me 10 pence an hour," Scrivener laughs.

After studies at the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London, and stints working in the cement industry, Scrivener settled into a professorship at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. There, she has channeled her childhood passion for construction materials to revolutionize a way to make low-carbon cement. Her invention, LC3 cement, may be a game changer in sustainable construction, especially in emerging markets where more than 90 percent of cement is used.  

By replacing traditional Portland cement with a combination of calcined clay and limestone, Scrivener has created a low- carbon cement that is as strong and durable as regular cement. A huge advantage to the LC3 technology is that it uses the same equipment and processes as traditional cement, a massive advantage to emerging markets.  

In India, where rising heat is a pressing issue, 25 million people will need new homes by 2030. This is the ideal market for LC3 cement, Scrivener says. “Concrete is essential to this housing demand.”

Near Jhansi, India, where LC3 cement has been tested and piloted, Scrivener and her team have built a demonstration house made of LC3 that saved 15 tons of CO2 emissions. She is now working with the Swiss development agency and local partners in India to bring LC3 to scale there.  

At 97, Scrivener’s father still lives in the house that he built with his daughter back in the 1960s. The home is a testament to the permanence of a material that, over forty years, Scrivener has chemically engineered to potentially provide sustainable homes for millions of deserving families in some of the world’s poorest countries.  

"We can't do without concrete but we can do without a very significant amount of CO2 it produces," Scrivener says. "Which means that we can house everyone, and no one is left without a roof."