What is it about?
We've looked at the factors used to produce low carbon concrete then looked at how the imposition of a carbon tax on the various constituents would affect the price of concrete. By modelling different levels of carbon tax, we could find the tipping point where the greenest concrete would also be the cheapest. This tipping point was about £160/tonne.
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Why is it important?
With growing concern over climate change, the drive to low carbon materials is imperative. However, we must also recognise that Portland cement concrete underpins modern life like no other material. Therefore, we need to look into how to make more environmentally-friendly concrete. This paper has examined how a carbon tax could help to drive the use of low carbon concrete. The key conclusion was that the current "price" of CO2 emissions on the EU Emissions Trading System are too low to drive the use of green concrete.
Perspectives
This paper came out of a conversation between the two authors over a coffee. We started by modelling the effect on carbon footprint of various mix design parameters. From there it was a reasonably straightforward step to do the same to find the optimum for low cost concrete, and then on to looking at how carbon pricing may affect things. What was interesting to me was that our findings gave a similar tipping point, i.e. ~£160/tonne as had recently been suggested in a paper in Nature.
Leon Black
University of Leeds
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Is carbon dioxide pricing a driver in concrete mix design?, Magazine of Concrete Research, June 2016, ICE Publishing,
DOI: 10.1680/jmacr.15.00018.
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