PMI applauded for making green use of coal ash

[ccharles000]

http://www.newsobserver.com/2010/03/11/381525/pmi-applauded-for-making-green.html

As the state and its utilities grapple with what to do with coal ash - the residue left when coal is burned to make electricity - a Cary company is quietly doing something about it.

PMI Ash Technologies pipes the residue, fly ash, out of the coal plants, extracts the residual energy and then produces a material that can be used to make concrete. That product is considered an ecofriendly building material because it reduces the amount of ash that is put in coal ash ponds and landfills.

"Concrete is like banana bread: Everyone has their own recipe," saysLisa Cooper, PMI's senior vice president. "Within concrete there is a binder called portland cement (like the eggs in your recipe). The fly ash can replace that binder."

Using ash in this way is popular with environmental groups because it reduces the amount of ash that can leach into groundwater. Concrete makers like it because it's durable and less expensive than portland cement.

[gateley]

1. Good for them! I hope they're very successful and other companies follow in

their lead! :7 Thanks for posting this! :hi:

[Statistical]

2. Wonderful it you want lethal cement.

Would anyone here want there house built out of arsenic, beryllium, boron, cadmium, chromium, chromium VI, cobalt, lead, manganese, mercury, molybdenum, selenium, strontium, thallium, and vanadium, dioxins, and PAH compounds?

Throw in a nice concentration radioactive thorium and uranium.


Yummy. Just what I want my house made out of.

Coal is death. Coal isn't green. Coal will never be green.