New 'Green' Concrete Delivers Win-Win for Industry and the Planet

Concrete is the most prevalent building material on the planet, but it does come at a price – around 5-8 percent of all human-generated atmospheric CO2 comes from the concrete industry. A culprit is Portland cement, the binding agent in concrete. Production of Portland cement is currently exceeding 2.6 billion tons per year worldwide and growing at 5 percent annually.

A greener alternative, inorganic polymer concrete (geopolymer), utilizes ‘fly ash’, one of the most abundant industrial by-products on earth, as a substitute for Portland cement.

Geopolymer concrete has a number of benefits. It has the potential to substantially curb CO2 emissions. It can also produce a more durable infrastructure capable of lasting hundreds of years, instead of tens. And by utilizing the fly ash, it can conserve hundreds of thousands of acres currently used for disposal of coal combustion products, and protect our water ways from fly ash ‘contamination’, too.

Read more here.

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