“The History of Concrete” Highlights a Material We Depend Upon But Rarely Think About

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

It’s the second-most used material on Earth, it’s an environmental disaster, and it’s falling apart all around us. Meet concrete, the subject of a new feature-length documentary by John Wilson, a filmmaker with a knack for finding laugh-out-loud absurdity in the mundane.

It would be a stretch to call the documentary a climate film. (In fact, it’s explicitly styled like a Hallmark movie.) But with each turn of the lens, Wilson sheds light on an unfolding environmental disaster. After all, he points out, concrete is the third biggest contributor to global warming. And although concrete is an indispensable part of modern life, its short, crumbling lifespan makes it a hazard on an increasingly disaster-prone planet. (Reader beware, there are more grim facts about concrete—and spoilers— ahead.)

The History of Concrete stitches together quick cuts of handheld footage and deadpan narration in the same style as “How To with John Wilson,” the HBO show that made the filmmaker’s career. As in his episodes on “how to make small talk” and “how to put up scaffolding,” the titular subject of the film isn’t really the point. Instead, Wilson uses the theme of concrete as a kind of connective tissue, taking the viewer on a sprawling exploration of the overlooked corners of our world. Concrete’s pervasiveness allows this film to venture anywhere—a family-run mortuary that specializes in tattoo preservation, a patriotic brick-laying competition in Las Vegas, and a 3,100-mile spiritual race in which runners circle a single block in Queens for weeks on end.

Wilson’s fascination with concrete started when the basement of his apartment building in Queens began intermittently flooding. He tried to patch the repair himself with a store-bought concrete mix, but the leak kept coming back. His frustration is widely shared: As climate change intensifies storms and raises sea levels, New Yorkers are dealing with more extreme rainfall and coastal flooding than ever before. The abundance of concrete worsens flooding by preventing stormwater from seeping into the soil—and when it cracks, it fails to block the water from filling subway stations and buildings for dozens of days a year.

Wilson goes on to discover our concrete-smothered world is full of hazards, owing to the material’s surprisingly short lifespan. Structures like the Brooklyn Promenade, which makes up the uppermost deck of a four-layered expressway, aren’t supposed to last more than 40 years according to Sam Schwartz, a former New York City traffic commissioner who Wilson interviews. Today, the 1,800-foot-long artery is covered in patch jobs. Schwartz tells Wilson that a mass catastrophe could be just a few years away.

With these facts in mind, any city starts to look like a morass of potential disasters. It’s no wonder that Wilson spent at least a year filming the cracks around New York. Some places, such as a public swimming pool sanitation facility that is inundated with leaks, are given a few minutes of screen time. Others, including the architecturally famous Spring Street Salt Shed, which is patched with packing tape, and a 10-year-old skyscraper in midtown Manhattan that may already need to be demolished, are presented in a quick, jaw-dropping montage. As Wilson says, it feels as though “we’re all in danger somehow.”  

Perversely, climate change is making this problem even worse. Studies show that extreme weather hastens the deterioration of concrete structures around the world. And while Wilson doesn’t say this, it’s worth noting that even structurally sound concrete is a hazard as the planet warms. The material creates an “urban heat island” effect that can cause local air temperatures to rise as much as 7 degrees Fahrenheit, turning the pavement into a scalding 140 F griddle and killing hundreds of people in places like Arizona every year.

But, as a contractor tells Wilson, “We’d be up a creek without concrete. It is used for everything.” Places like New York require vast amounts of the material to build new housing and maintain urban areas. Unfortunately, sand—the key ingredient in concrete—is vanishing as coastlines erode and humans use up some 50 billion tons of the stuff per year. While most people remain blissfully unaware, Wilson says, experts have been trying to warn us of an impending global sand shortage. 

Near the end of the film, Wilson takes a peek at a concrete recycling plant, one of the few existing solutions to these problems. These facilities exist to stop debris from demolitions going to landfills, and, ideally, to make newly usable material with fewer emissions. But the one that Wilson found near Brooklyn’s marine terminal was also filling nearby neighborhoods with dangerous amounts of airborne dust, prompting protests and the plant’s eventual closure in 2025.

For now, our dependency on concrete seems as intractable as its pitfalls. “Once you’re used to something, it becomes hard to change your lifestyle without external pressure,” Wilson says.

I was already aware of the environmental costs of concrete when I first moved to New York City as an early-career climate reporter, but I wasn’t prepared for what it would feel like to be surrounded by so much of it. I found myself questioning the commonly cited statistic that urban lifestyles have a smaller carbon footprint than suburban ones. After all, these studies generally account for the energy and materials residents consume directly, while leaving out the emissions embodied in the buildings, sewers, and other parts of the built-up environment that make city life possible.

Although my own back-of-the-envelope calculations support the idea that living here is probably the greener choice, I still rush through my commutes to spend less time amid the chaos. But walking out of the Manhattan theater where I saw The History of Concrete, my gray surroundings came into sharper focus—almost like the film had never stopped.

There’s a kind of poetry in Wilson’s work: the banal becomes beautiful, the bizarre becomes delightful, and the heartbreaks become unguardedly funny. His curiosity, bordering at times on voyeurism, is an invitation to join him in the simple act of paying attention.

And so I noticed the toddler lying on her belly outside of the gum-plastered entrance to the subway station. A dumpling food truck, seemingly stuck in a pothole. Groups of women in ballgowns rushing past, their long skirts dragging into puddles—all of it part of a concrete world worth noticing.