"...the world will add 2 trillion square feet of
buildings by 2060—the equivalent of putting up another New York City every
month for the next 40 years"
I'm glad to see Bill Gates so concerned about building
materials, thus recognizing that not only computers (which made him a
billionaire) constitute promising areas and that the building industry is
crucial to the future of this Planet. As long that we can have billionaires
willing to fund startups that can bring radical innovations into the
market.
Still the first two startups that are mentioned in the post (Boston Metal
and CarbonCure) are not what leapfrog innovation is about because they bring
only innovation of the incremental type. The only that truly stands out in terms of radical
innovation with high sales and environmental impact (as there are
also those who are very environmentally friendly but a sales disaster) that he
funded is the startup
75 F https://www.75f.io/about/our-story/building-energy-management-system-awards
There are several other things in his post that
deserve to be pointed out, such as the importance of carbon sequestration in
concrete (forgetting that there are other ways to sequester carbon dioxide in
building construction https://www.elsevier.com/books/bio-based-materials-and-biotechnologies-for-eco-efficient-construction/pacheco-torgal/978-0-12-819481-2 ) or the rampant increase of A/C units that will grow 300% by 2050
reaching 5 billion units. Not coincidentally this is the topic addressed in the
second edition of an upcoming book to be published next year:
Pacheco-Torgal, F.; Czarnecki, L.; Pisello, A.L.;
Cabeza, L.F.; Granqvist, C-G.. Eds. 2020. Eco-efficient Materials for
Mitigating Building Cooling Needs-Second Edition, Elsevier
hat covers pavements, façade and roofing materials,
with particular emphasis on PCMs, where Highly Cited Researcher Luisa F. Cabeza
(h-index = 59 https://www.scopus.com/authid
/detail.uri?authorId=7004085845)
is a world renowned expert and also the so-called "smart" glazing
(electrochromic and thermochromic) that were the life´s work of professor
Claes Goran Granqvist (h-index = 85 https://www.scopus.com/authid/detail.uri?authorId=36045018800)
