The largest issue with concrete is that we misuse it. As a building material it has great thermal mass ( aiding temperature stability ) and longevity. But all too often buildings are poorly designed for renovation, and hence end up being torn down after a couple of decades. A small fraction of the useful lifetime of the structure. Any building using concrete for a structure should be aiming to last at least 100 years.

For those who didn't read the article: the chemistry of Portland cement works against it. Production requires heating the calcium carbonate to a high temperature to extract carbon dioxide from it. Which obviously produces large amounts of CO2 proportional to concrete production. However, concrete also absorbs carbon dioxide from the air over its lifetime. So the measured emissions aren't the entire story.

Perhaps in future we will consider this an excellent source of carbon dioxide for the production of various hydrocarbons. I've heard of several efforts to create octane using carbon dioxide from the air, but you need a large amount of energy to extract a useful amount of CO2. Well this would be a good source of high concentration CO2. Perhaps not for octane ( we should really be moving away from combustion engines ) but perhaps plastics and other products that are currently derived from crude oil.