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The cement and concrete industries are coming under more and more pressure to reduce the Global Warming Potential (GWP) for their products. The greatest contributor of CO2 and greenhouse gases in concrete is the portland cement. This presentation is a general review of the strategies being used today, and possibly in the future, by managers of cement plants to lower greenhouse gas emissions at manufacturing sites. These strategies include: improving plant efficiency and fuel utilization, using lower CO2 fuels, using more waste fuels, manufacturing more blended cements, and carbon capture, utilization, and storage.

Buildings alone account for 40% of the global greenhouse gas emissions. Two thirds of that total impact is from operational emissions while the remainder is from embodied emissions. Embodied emissions include all the emissions required to produce everything that goes into our buildings – the structure, enclosure and all the materials inside. Between now and 2050, half of the new construction emissions between now and then will be from embodied carbon. Therefore, the industry has begun to take action and groups like AIA 2030, Architecture 2030, SE2050, and USGBC have shifted their focus to include embodied carbon. In order to address this issue, we need to take steps to quantify and then reduce our impact. We can do this using a process called Whole Building Lifecycle Assessment (WBLCA). More and more project teams are using WBLCA as a design tool and are discussing decarbonizations strategies. As such, design professionals are actively and looking for low carbon material alternatives. Since cement is such a ubiquitous and carbon-intensive material, it is definitely at the center of these discussions. It’s important that the concrete industry be aware of what is being discussed in the market and how this will affect our industry in the future as this trend grows. This presentation will also look at examples of how this translates to the design documents, the specifications and ultimately the concrete mix designs.

The benefits of binders produced with significantly reduced, little, or no process energy that have a small carbon footprint, are composed of recycled and/or renewable resources, and have minimal environmental impact will be discussed.

This course examines the use of multiple blends of cementitious materials for designing durable concrete structures. The use of ternary and quaternary blends to improve sustainability by designing for a long service life will be discussed.

Multiple recent initiatives advocate for reducing embodied carbon, i.e., greenhouse gas emissions, associated with concrete production. Even though readily implementable strategies exist, practitioners are concerned that embodied carbon reductions may adversely affect concrete performance and durability, resulting in detrimental effects from a life cycle perspective. To address such concerns, this study investigates the correlations between embodied carbon of concrete mixtures, mixture design parameters, and experimentally measured mechanical and durability properties. The analyzed dataset included 145 mixtures, featuring a variety of mixture designs from laboratory and field studies. The results indicate that the cement content is the most significant predictor of GWP and that considerable savings can be achieved with cement reduction and replacement without compromising performance. Clear correlations of GWP with compressive strength were not identified, while the results demonstrated that reduced GWP and increased surface electrical resistivity (the utilized durability indicator) often occur in synergy. The study also provides the tie between Performance Engineered Mixtures and embodied carbon and thereby provides practical insights into mixture design optimization that includes both sustainability and durability.