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NEU: An ACI Center of Excellence for Carbon Neutral Concrete recently launched its Validation/Verification Program to assess and validate/verify the environmental claims of innovative and new products/technologies associated with low-carbon cement and concrete production. The end result of this program is to issue an independent third-party verification or validation statement, which is aimed at securing the trust of customers, investors, and consumers in the long term, and by using reliable methods, to separate plausible statements from insubstantial marketing promises. This presentation by Mahmut Ekenel, PhD, PE, FACI, Validation Director for NEU, aims to introduce the program, identify the difference between verification and validation statements, and introduce the ISO/IEC 17029 standard under which the program is set to operate.

Speaker biography
Mahmut Ekenel, PhD, PE, FACI, is Validation Director for NEU: An ACI Center of Excellence for Carbon Neutral Concrete. Ekenel has extensive experience in developing acceptance criteria for the evaluation of building materials in accordance with the model building codes, building code development, and a working knowledge of International Standards Organization (ISO) standards and quality control inspections. Ekenel received his PhD from the Missouri University of Science and Technology and became a Fellow of ACI in 2020. Prior to joining the ACI Staff, Ekenel served as Senior Staff Engineer for the International Code Council Evaluation Service (ICC-ES) and was employed by ICC-ES for 17-plus years. He is a licensed civil engineer in the State of California and a licensed professional engineer (PE) in the states of Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

As the pressure shifts to the concrete industry to deliver cost-effective, efficient low-carbon solutions, it can feel that the options are limited, the risks are high and the margins tight. However, there are options that can reduce carbon in concrete and cement industry at scale and without excessive cost and demand on limited power sources stretched thin by increased demand from economic growth and the implementation of AI and a multitude of decarbonizing technology solutions. Steve Bryan, Managing Director of Ecocem Americas, and John Reddy, Director of Concrete Technology Deployment at Ecocem, will discuss how Ecocem’s ACT—a next-generation low-carbon cement technology—offers the greatest potential to decarbonize the global cement and concrete industry cost-efficiently and at speed.

Presenters:
Steve Bryan, Managing Director, Ecocem Americas
Bryan joined Ecocem in 2013, bringing with him over 35 years of experience in cement operations, technology, global trading, strategic planning, and business development. He is responsible for Ecocem business development outside of Western Europe.

John Reddy, Director of Concrete Technology Deployment, Ecocem and Vice President, Institute of Concrete Technology
Reddy joined Ecocem in 2004 when the environment was only beginning to become a focus for the construction industry and over the past 20 years has seen the business evolve from a startup to become Europe’s low-carbon cement technology business.

In this webinar, Jake Homiller, CEO of CarbiCrete, walks through the company’s technology, describes how it can easily be implemented at any concrete plant, and explains how the company plans to carry out its mission of being the leading deployed technology to deliver decarbonized concrete products at market scale.

CarbiCrete is a Montreal-based carbon removal technology company whose patented process enables the production of cement-free concrete, avoiding 100% of cement-related emissions by replacing cement with a steelmaking byproduct and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by mineralizing CO2 into the concrete for permanent storage.

Concrete is the world's most widely used construction material due to its versatility, resilience and low cost. The scale of concrete production means that even modest improvements to the sustainability of concrete have the potential to provide significant environmental impacts. A more sustainable concrete mix can be made by considering all of the components (binders, aggregates, water and admixtures) and understanding the ways in which each can contribute to a more sustainable concrete. The attention to concrete sustainability means that known advancements are being widely employed and new approaches are continually being developed.

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The last couple of decades have been characterized by a global awareness on rising greenhouse gas emissions, with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change calling for 50-85% reductions in these emissions by 2050 to prevent threatening climate changes. The building and construction industries have been among the leading consumers of material by mass for almost 100 years, with approximately 5% of all anthropogenic global CO2 emissions being originated from Portland cement manufacture. With global population growth and rapid development of third world countries, it is very unlikely that advancements in the process efficiency of material manufacture will occur fast enough to meet emission reduction needs. Thus, new metrics that account for material performance and environmental impact concurrently during design and material selection stages is of great importance and represents a great opportunity for game-changing methods to reduce emissions. This study presents an innovative approach to design and characterize concrete materials with strengths up to UHPC levels, using a framework that allows one to efficiently design concrete mixtures considering multi-objective performance levels. A strategic framework of experimental data collection is coupled with machine learning models to generate performance and emission density diagrams (PDDs and EDDs, respectively). These diagrams intend to provide a flexible tool to evaluate performance, durability, and environmental impacts concurrently, without adding exhausting experimental campaigns. Addressing this issue is critical for public education and industry engagement on next-gen concrete materials such as UHPC, considering the very high cement content often required to achieve the outstanding properties of this material.