On the strength of the initial testing outcomes of Brimstone's lower-carbon ordinary Portland cement (OPC) for use in concrete construction, Amazon has signed a commercial agreement to reserve annual volumes of Brimstone’s OPC and supplementary cementitious materials (SCM) from its forthcoming plant.
"Because Brimstone makes ASTM C150 Ordinary Portland Cement, the most widely used cement in the world, at competitive prices, our path to commercialisation is well-defined with existing regulation, know-how, and material safety protocols."
The third-party tests were designed in collaboration with Amazon’s concrete consultants to evaluate the workability, compressive strength, and other key properties of Brimstone’s concrete materials based on Amazon slab mix designs. The successful test results demonstrated that Brimstone's OPC performed in accordance with ASTM C150 requirements and worked comparably well with the conventional materials currently used in Amazon buildings.
"These initial results are encouraging and demonstrate the potential for Brimstone's innovative materials to scale across our buildings portfolio and reduce the carbon footprint of concrete," said Asad Jafry, director of global energy, sustainability and automation at Amazon.
Building on these results, the two companies plan to conduct more extensive concrete tests to evaluate durability, sulphate resistance, aggregate reactivity potential, and other key properties across a broader range of concrete mix designs and applications. This expanded testing programme will use larger volumes of material produced from Brimstone’s facility in Oakland, California.
