Concrete may have found it's killer app in graphene! A new form of concrete is just as strong as steel yet lighter and more environmentally friendly. You may not have known it but concrete is a very strong material. It’s just that the use of steel, a common ingredient, means that concrete isn’t all that heavy, comparatively. Steel makes up 25 percent of a concrete building, making it much more sustainable. However, concrete is still quite heavy compared to its use of steel. While it is stronger than steel, concrete is heavy and hard to transport because of its weight. Graphene could have found its killer app in concrete! Graphene is a material that is made of pure carbon, which means that it is just as strong as steel yet weighs only one hundredth as much. While it is made of carbon, this form of carbon is a one-atom thick layer of graphite. If you have ever played football with a friend or tried to put weight on your head, you will know how strong concrete is. However, concrete is still very heavy and hard to move around. Graphene is the key to making concrete a truly sustainable form of construction material. Graphene has found its killer app in concrete! An architect once told me that the perfect building is a diamond. They are impervious to most of the elements that threaten a building, they are strong and light weight. In theory, this architect meant that anything made of diamond will be the best building material that we could use. While we would be hard pressed to use diamond to construct buildings, we have a diamond in the shape of graphene. When we are talking about concrete, we are talking about a mixture of cement and sand. Sand is a mix of silicates that give concrete its strength. When we mix cement with sand, we get the concrete we know and love. However, graphene is so light weight that you could create a concrete that is strong enough to take concrete blocks and make them into a single unit. A construction company in China has begun work to create a graphene concrete and graphene-based concrete will become a much lighter building material. Graphene allows us to make concrete a much better building material. According to a report in Quartz, a company called Jiaxing Graphene Materials Co. has began to make concrete made from graphene. Graphene is just one atom thick, allowing us to make concrete much lighter while keeping its strength. The construction company is aiming to use this lighter building material on buildings up to 10 stories tall. This means that buildings will now be able to be transported, put together on site and in a much shorter time than if it were using current concrete and steel. It’s no secret that concrete is one of the heaviest and most inefficient materials we could use. We use cement to make concrete. Cement is inorganic in nature