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Bay Area cement plants and global warming
Funded by and produced for Spot.us. See other places this story has been published here. For production notes, read below.
Can California’s cement industry walk the fine line between regulation and innovation to fight global warming?
CUPERTINO, California–From the lip of the quarry at Hanson Permanente cement, all of Santa Clara stretches out in panorama. (Photos here).
Few plants in California are this close to this many people. Most of the state’s 11 kilns are well away from population centers, close enough for workers to commute, but otherwise out of sight.
Here, houses reach right up to the edges the Permanente land, where suburban homes suddenly give way to an industrial road leading up to the expansive plant and the limestone mining operation behind it.
Here, engineers and executives will have to figure out how to make an essentially dirty process clean, or at least cleaner.
As California tries to fight global warming–with or without the rest of the country–cement manufacturing remains one of the trickiest industries to regulate.
“I don’t think there’s anybody quite like cement,” said Mike Tollstrup, one of the state officials overseeing California’s effort to fight global warming on its own. “There are not a lot of facilities. Cement is used everywhere. There are significant issues of leakage. If we don’t do it right, the potential for increasing emissions is a real concern.” Read the rest of this entry »