OpenConcrete: a tool for estimating the environmental impacts from concrete production

Abstract

As the increasing global consumption of concrete drives notable environmental burdens from its production, particularly greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, interest in mitigation efforts is increasing. Yet current environmental impact quantification tools rely on user decision-making to select data for each concrete constituent, have inconsistent scopes and system boundaries, and often utilize third-party life cycle inventories. These factors limit customization or tracking of data and hinder the ability to draw robust comparisons among concrete mixtures to mitigate its environmental burdens. To address these issues, we introduce an open access environmental impact assessment tool with a cohesive, unified dataset of material, energy, and emission inventories to quantify the environmental impacts of concrete. Models can be customized to be region specific, expanded to varying concrete mixtures, and support data visualization throughout each production stage. We perform a scenario analysis of impacts to produce a representative concrete mixture across the United States, with results ranging from 189 kg CO2-eq/m3 of concrete (California) to 266 kg CO2-eq/m3 of concrete (West Virginia). The largest driver of GHG, nitrogen oxide, sulfur oxide, and volatile organic compound emissions as well as energy demand is cement production, but aggregate production is the largest driver of water consumption and particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns (PM2.5) emissions.

Meeting industrial decarbonization goals: a case study of and roadmap to a net-zero emissions cement industry in California

“…Noting pressing legislation in California, we conduct measurements using current cement production in California as our baseline. We use environmental inventories and impact assessment models from OpenConcrete (see supplementary materials for model details), an open data environmental quantification tool [20], which reports GHG emissions (modeled using 100a global warming potentials for CO 2 -eq from the IPCC [21]) as well as 10 other environmental impacts. Here we examine emissions of nitrogen oxide (NO X ), sulfur oxide (SO X ), particulate matter (PM) with diameter less than 10 µm (PM 10 ), PM 2.5 , VOCs, carbon monoxide (CO), and lead (Pb), as well as water consumption and energy demand.…”

“…In California, all plants have already adopted the use of efficient dry kilns with preheaters and precalciners [12,13]. In this work, this mitigation strategy switches the electricity mix used in California (from the US EPA [22]) to one with 100% wind power (modeled as zero GHG-emitting electricity sources, based on emissions factors in OpenConcrete [20]). 2.…”

“…natural gas, biomass). Natural gas as a kiln fuel generates less GHG emissions to produce 1 kg of cement than coal (environmental impacts of fuel types are based on values in OpenConcrete [20]), while biomass and certain waste fuels are frequently considered to have neutral (net-zero) GHG emissions [19]. However, it must be noted that the carbon accounting of such energy resources as netzero is not consistently accurate.…”

Multi-criteria comparison tools to evaluate cost- and eco-efficiency of ultra-high-performance concrete

“…To facilitate the calculation of volumetric environmental impacts associated with concrete production, several life-cycle assessment (LCA) tools have been developed throughout the years [30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38]. Yet, there is still no consistent analysis or reporting method used at a global scale to quantify and compare emissions generated in construction based on constituent proportioning in mixtures and the resulting performance of the final product.…”

“…Several LCA tools have been developed in the last few years [30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38] to calculate the environmental impacts associated with concrete manufacture. Given that LCA analyses are out of the scope of this work, the environmental impact factors used herein were derived from a study by Celik et al [43].…”