By some measurements, cement production alone is responsible for about 8% of human-caused carbon dioxide emissions every year. And so there is an imperative to find suitable low-carbon alternatives. Here is what is currently happening in the US (via Grist):

On Tuesday, Terra CO2 Technology was picked to receive a $52.6 million federal grant to build a new manufacturing plant just west of Salt Lake City. The company has devised a method that turns common minerals into additives that can help replace Portland cement — a key component in concrete, and one of the most carbon-intensive materials in the world.

In addition to this new facility, the company is set to start construction on its first plant in the Dallas-Fort Worth area:

The project is expected to break ground in January 2025 and begin shipping out materials by late summer 2026, Yearsley said. The facility will be capable of producing up to 240,000 metric tons of SCM [supplementary cementitious materials] per year when completed, or enough to serve roughly half of the local metropolitan market.

And all of this is part of a broader initiative by the US Department of Energy:

The Utah facility is one of 14 projects provisionally selected this week to receive $428 million in total awards from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. The initiative, which is funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, aims to accelerate clean energy manufacturing in U.S. communities with decommissioned coal facilities. Officials said the projects are expected to create over 1,900 high-quality jobs across a dozen states.

For the rest of the article, click here.

This is an interesting map to play around with. It allows you to see how many 15-minute neighborhoods and cities there are around the world. And it works by calculating the average time it takes to walk or bike to the closest 20 points of interest in 10,000 cities. These points include all of the usual suspects like places of work, schools, healthcare institutions, grocery stores, and so on. A blue cell indicates an average walk time < 15 minutes, and a red cell indicates an average walk time > 15 minutes. The darker the color, the shorter or longer the average time in minutes.

By this measure, it's hard to beat many/most European cities. Here are Paris and Barcelona:

The city propers are completely blue, and you have to go pretty far out (or up into mountains) to find areas that don't have 15-minute conveniences.

Toronto has a strong core and isn't terrible overall, but expectedly, we aren't as uniform and as deep blue as Paris and Barcelona:

Where things get really interesting, though, is when you look at cities like Dallas and Houston:

It's clear where these cities stand on walkability.

Last month, I wrote a post called, More people, fewer new homes. And in it, was a chart showing that for the 12 months ending July 1, 2023, Toronto grew by approximately 126,000 people, and the Greater Toronto Area grew by about 233,000 people. Big numbers. At the end of the post, I also mentioned that this is more growth than the city has seen over the six preceding years.

But how does this compare to other cities in Canada and the US? If we look at only central cities (not metro areas), Toronto is, in fact, first. Canadian central cities, in general, also seem to be growing more quickly than their US counterparts. After Toronto is Calgary, which added nearly 87,000 people for the same time period.

Looking at metro areas, Toronto is still first. I don't know why the ~222k figure, here, doesn't reconcile with the ~233k figure from last month's post, but presumably it's some sort of boundary difference. In any event, Toronto is first. But now, once you include metro areas, US cities do much better in this list. Number two is Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington.

This difference between central cities and metro areas likely tells us something about the way in which these city regions are growing. Still, it would be interesting to see how much of this population growth is being accommodated through infill development vs. greenfield development. One way to measure that might be to look at changes in the footprint of their built up areas.

For more about the above two charts, check out this recent post from TMU's Center for Urban Research and Land Development.