Building Green with Concrete

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Building Green with Concrete
Abdol Chini Rinker School of Building
Construction
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Impact of buildings on our natural environment

• In the U.S. alone, buildings account for    
  70 of electricity consumption,    39 of
  energy use,    39 of all carbon dioxide
  emissions,    40 of raw materials use,  
   30 of waste output (136 MT annually),
•     12 of potable water consumption.

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Green Building

• Green building is the practice of increasing the
  efficiency with which buildings use resources
  energy, water, and materials while reducing
  building impacts on human health and the
  environment during the building's lifecycle,
  through better siting, design, construction,
  operation, maintenance, and removal.

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Ready-Mix Concrete Manufacturing
(www.ibisworld.com)
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MAJOR MARKET SEGMENTS (www.ibisworld.com)
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Sustainable Concrete

• Five ways concrete helps building green
• Concrete creates sustainable sites
• Storm water management (pervious concrete)
• Reduce heat islands (reflectance of 0.35 to 0.5
  compared to 0.05 to 0.15 for asphalt)
• Concrete enhances energy performance
• Heat storage capacity (thermal mass)
• Concrete contains recycled materials
• Supplementary cementitious materials (fly ash,
  silica fume, and slag)
• Concrete is manufactured locally (reduced
  transportation)
• Concrete builds durable structures

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Horizontal Construction

• Concrete is durable, light in color, can be
  pervious, and does not pollute its final
  environments.
• Research in this cluster will focus on
• initial vs. life cycle costs
• heat island effects
• facilitating navigation among populations with
  limited visual acuity
• the development of LEED criteria for Portland
  Cement Concrete Pavements

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Pervious Surfaces

• Water infiltrated through paved surfaces rather
  than captured in stormwater basins minimizes the
  use of retention ponds and reduces pollutant
  loads.
• Potential studies
• measure runoff quantity and quality from pervious
  concrete or semi-pervious paver systems and
  compare their performances with asphalt paving
  and other surfaces.

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Embodied energy for one m3 of a 28 MPa
compressive strength concrete
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Solar reflectance and Solar Reflective Index
(SRI) of select material surfaces
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CO2 Absorption

• The carbonation of concrete is a chemical process
  where atmospheric CO2 reacts with CaO in the
  concrete to form calcium carbonate (CaCO3).
• The carbonation process is relatively slow
  process and depends on the diffusion rate of CO2
  into the concrete.
• A Canadian company named Carbon Sense Solutions
  based in Halifax claims that it has found a
  technique to accelerate precast concrete curing
  using CO2 within the combustion flue gases.

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Summary

• Embodied energy and CO2 emission of concrete can
  be reduced by using industrial by-products with
  cementitious and/or pozzolanic properties.
• Use of concretes durability and thermal
  efficiency, and application of pervious concrete
  in stormwater management are becoming more
  commonplace.
• A technique to accelerate precast concrete curing
  using CO2 within the combustion flue gases is
  promising