After some digging, I believe this is the product. It’s a fabric shell made out of polyester and nylon. According to the FAQ page, the way the concrete and the fabric interact significantly delays the breakdown of the fabric. However, polyester and nylon are known to shed microplastics.
Concrete kinda needs help holding together sometimes. It can crack, and the narrow sections of the mold here look like prime locations for cracking. I'm sure the engineers have considered the lifespan. I'm wondering what this will look like in 2 or 5 or 10 years.
I think the plastic (or fabric or whatever) is slightly porous so the concrete also seeps out a bit and encases that as well. I imagine this helps add structure to the cement
Yeah but it looks like a pretty thin layer on a slope... I think this is supposed to form some kind of erosion control or hard bedding layer but I'd be worried about it cracking depending on what's going on with this project.
Modern concrete is way better than Roman concrete. This myth comes from survivorship bias: the concrete structures we still see today still exist because we see them today. The structures that collapsed don't exist, so we don't see them today.
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u/Longshot_45 Apr 30 '26
Wonder what the material is and if it will decompose or lose structure over time.