![]() ![]() “For the last 10 years, we’ve taken that product and just piled it up on site. ![]() “We affectionately call that pile brown mountain,” says Alex Culpepper, corporate business development manager for The Sunrock Group. It gets mounded up in berms and into a big pile at the quarry. After rinsing the stone and wringing out the water, they’re left with a cakey residue that has no use. They sell stone for construction materials and asphalt. Sunrock was one of the few who called back. So they cold-called quarries across the country and asked for rock dust samples. Yap and her co-founders want to speed up that natural process by grinding up rocks that do this naturally, like basalt, to increase their surface area for reaction. “Without this one process on Earth, the planet would look like Venus with greenhouse gasses everywhere.” It removes about 1.1 billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere every year,” Yap says. ![]() When it erodes rock, it carries some carbon compounds downstream, slowly bleeding carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and into deep pockets of the Earth, where it’s stored for eons. The science is geology 101: Rainwater is slightly acidic. Lithos is one of several companies trying to hack a basic geochemical cycle known as weathering. “When we saw our first massive mountains of basalt dust,” she says, “we knew that this could actually be a meaningful solution.” 50,000 tons of stone are blown up at the Sunrock Quarry in Butner, North Carolina. Yap co-founded a company called Lithos Carbon that takes the leftovers from quarries like this one, a gray powder that she says could help fight climate change. Quarry workers begin to scoop up the rubble, an igneous stone called traprock, but Yap is after something else. The team high-fives - the natural consequence of witnessing a rock face the size of an apartment building explode - and it’s time to reap the rewards. After a countdown, she presses the button and 50,000 tons of stone crumble like gingerbread. It’s a blast day and Yap is a guest, so the demolition men hand her a detonator to do the honors. Mary Yap adjusts her hard hat and looks over the cavernous expanse of the Sunrock quarry in Butner, North Carolina. (Chris Bentley/Here & Now)įind out more about our Reverse Course series here. Facebook Email Mary Yap, co-founder of Lithos Carbon, at the Sunrock Quarry in Butner, North Carolina. ![]()
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