Less Cement, Stronger Concrete: An Early Win for AquiPor’s Material

Concrete is the most-used building material on Earth. Cement is the ingredient that holds it together, and cement comes with a big climate cost. Making it produces about 8% of global CO₂ emissions, more than the entire airline industry.

The fix sounds simple: use less cement. The hard part is finding ingredients that can replace it without weakening the concrete. That’s the question we set out to test.

The Test

Our team compared three batches of concrete side by side:

• Batch one used a standard recipe.
• Batch two used 10% less cement, with AquiPor’s material added in instead.
• Batch three used 20% less cement, with AquiPor’s material added in instead.

We then tested the compressive strength of each batch, measured at several points over 28 days. Twenty-eight days is the industry’s standard checkpoint for full strength.

The Result

At 28 days, the 10% replacement batch made with AquiPor’s material was 13% stronger than the standard recipe.

We then tried cutting the cement by 20%. Those batches came out weaker than the standard recipe, but they kept getting stronger faster over time, which shows the material has room to improve and where to focus next.

Why This Matters

The industry already uses cement replacements. The most common is fly ash, a leftover from burning coal. As coal plants close, fly ash supply has dropped by more than half in the past decade. Meanwhile, demand for cement replacements keeps growing: the U.S. market is about $3.5 billion a year and is expected to roughly double by 2030.

The industry needs new options, and AquiPor’s material has two advantages:

1. It’s engineered. Supply doesn’t depend on coal plants or steel mills.
2. It does something other replacements can’t. Our material lets stormwater drain through the surface and filters out pollutants along the way.

So it’s a single material that can potentially lower the embodied carbon footprint of concrete, and also help it manage water.

What’s Next

These are exciting results, but more testing is needed. We plan to rerun the tests with even tighter controls and work on bringing the 20% replacement up to full strength. We’ll share what we learn as we go.

Interested in testing AquiPor’s material in your mixes? Get in touch.