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Cement is the source of 8% of the world's CO2 emissions (2018)
- mehrdadn 6y agoBill Gates also mentioned he's now most worried about steel & cement in one of Mark Rober's videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k-V3ESHcfA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k-V3ESHcfA
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- aero-glide 6y agoVery interesting, didn't expect it to be that high. Another thing I came across recently : The fashion industry is responsible for 10 % of annual global carbon emissions. Source : https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2019/09/23/costo-moda-medio-ambiente https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2019/09/23/costo-m...
- ECA_stax 6y agothis is a much more depressing number. steel and cement are necessary to the development of all nations, designer clothes are not.
- teruakohatu 6y agoFashion refers to all clothing. "fast fashion" (cheap disposable clothing) probably produces a lot more emissions than designer clothing.
- cameldrv 6y agoThis seems unlikely. Clothing is about a $1.3 trillion market, against a world GDP of about $80 trillion. I doubt that an industry that's 1.6% of GDP is contributing 10% to carbon emissions. Also, as pointed out below, the "fashion industry" includes all clothing. Beyond food and water, I'm not sure what would be more necessary than clothing.
- darawk 6y agoThe overwhelming majority of clothing produced is totally unnecessary. The fast fashion industry produces an insane amount of clothing, way beyond what is necessary for utilitarian purposes. I don't doubt that it causes that much CO2 emission, especially if you factor in the shipping cost from the places that manufacture it.
- rowanG077 6y agoI believe this is generally true of any utility. We can all live of soylent or something instead of moving around foods that spoil easily for example. We could all also live in large concrete block where everyone has a small room and houses don't exist. All of that would be hugely more efficient but I doubt you or many other people would like that.
- minerjoe 6y agoA bit of an excluded middle - soylent or what we have now, a massivly wasteful and inneficient food system. I, and many others, would argue that localization and diversification of the food system is the missing middle here.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Pfhreak 6y agoGarments that are high quality are designed to last and be worn for a long time. High end selvedge jeans might run a couple hundred bucks, but they will last a decade. I suspect cheap, disposable clothing is driving much more emissions.
- BossingAround 6y ago> High end selvedge jeans might run a couple hundred bucks, but they will last a decade. Is there any data supporting this? Because while I think this is our intuition, i.e. "it's expensive therefore it's better quality," I wonder if there's any way we could verify this other than anecdotal evidence.
- teruakohatu 6y agoYou see the British aristocracy wearing 30+ year old shoes that look as good or better than they did when they were new. I think it is common sense that emissions are far lower for extreme-luxury clothing that can be repaired and is timeless verses disposable clothing that last one or two years.
- BossingAround 6y agoWe're not talking extreme-luxury clothing here though. We're talking Ralph Lauren vs H&M, or something similar. What the British aristocracy wears is probably hand-made stuff by world-class artisans. What Ralph Lauren makes is mass produced in either Europe or China, so it's a much closer comparison to H&M (not to mention still within the reach of an average person in a rich country)
- ValentineC 6y agoI'm not sure if jeans that are torn/blown out can be seamlessly mended the way shoes can be.
- Waterfall 6y agoLow end selvedge denim lasts longer than a decade and even low quality denim lasts. You don't wear stuff out of fashion though, it would be like wearing the best of the 90s. You're also assuming that the clothes get worn. The cheaper stuff may just be worn as much as the high quality stuff or that they continue to be used.
- Waterfall 6y agoClothes are discarded but can be turned into rags or donations. Don't feel bad, I bought some very nice stuff for cheap and I didn't hurt the environment more. I'll just drive these wonderful finds I got for $5 30 miles home in my Hummer.
- thinkloop 6y agoSo the biggest polluters are food, clothing and shelter - I'm seeing a pattern here...
- TeMPOraL 6y agoYes, but the question is, how much of these emissions come from the basics, and how much from extravagance?
- lotsofpulp 6y agoThe question is how do you define extravagance? Ask someone in a middle class suburb of the US and you will get a different answer than the most of the rest of the world. The biggest extravagance is space. Having space (I.e. detached houses) has a knock on effect of increased emissions of everything. Increased energy usage to transport mass increased distance.
- ant6n 6y agoTransportation and heating are in there as well
- burntoutfire 6y agoClothes industry has long stopped being about clothing and moved to stroking egos instead (infinite stream of money in that). It is even reflected in the name change ("clothing" -> "fashion").
- akira2501 6y agoThat was my biggest take away from the Biosphere documentary, as it was the concrete used in it's construction that eventually led to the abundance of CO2 and lack of O2 in that closed system. We'll clearly have to use something else for building moon bases.
- pmiller2 6y agoI don’t think it’s clear at all that concrete wouldn’t work for a moon base. I can definitely at least imagine that there might be some CO2-scrubbing technology that might be practical on the scale of a moon base that wouldn’t be if scaled up to the entire planet Earth.
- pjc50 6y agoThe good news is that there's very little calcium carbonate on the moon, so you'll have to build it out of something else. Probably thermally fused silicates.
- onion2k 6y agoWhy would a moonbase need to be a closed system? What would stop it scrubbing the CO2 and venting it in to space?
- vaccinator 6y agoEventually, you could convert all O2 to CO2 and be left with nothing?
- curryst 6y agoDoes the vacuum of space generally require a closed system? And venting the CO2 is bad for the same reason that the heat death of the universe is bad; at some point you have converted all of the usable stuff into useless stuff and have vented it somewhere that you will be unlikely or impossible to be able to recover it. If we do that, we will have to resupply the O2 in some way other than converting CO2 back to oxygen. Either shipping new gas to the moonbase, or having the moonbase convert organic material on the moon to O2 (which sounds a lot more expensive and difficult than having plants scrub CO2 into O2 for us). This is also not to mention the other valuable things were venting with the CO2 (heat for one; I assume keeping a moonbase at a livable temperature would be a struggle). Your scrubber also has to be able to replenish the gas while it's venting, or you risk having rapidly fluctuating pressures in the moonbase. Which is going to be uncomfortable for living things, and will require whatever the moonbase is made out of to be able to handle those changes in pressure (again, I imagine having pressure that fluctuates like a bounce house with a group of sugared up children in it is less than ideal). It's not hard to imagine a non-rigid structure like the base from The Martian bouncing off the surface of the moon when it rapidly constricts from venting CO2 and then rapidly inflates as the O2 replenisher kicks on. It would become a massive bouncy ball in 0G.
- manfredo 6y agoStatistics on how much CO2 something emits can vary wildly. For instance, meat consumption has high CO2 emissions when you include the CO2 emitted by transporting grain to feed animals. But most typical studies would include that under emissions due to transportation. Hence why you can have some studies claiming meat accounts for a double-digit percentage of emissions while others claim that all agriculture contributes to ~3% of emissions. The citation for this claim doesn't seem very robust. It links to the Ellen MacArthur foundation website, but just to the front page. After some of my own Googling it looks like it's coming from this publication [1]. This study drew up some estimates on the amount of textiles produced and discarded as well as a simple conversion of 4.7 Kg of CO2 for every Kg of textiles produced. The source for this ratio of CO2 to kilogram of textiles simply says "McKinsey Analysis"/ 1. https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/assets/downloads/publications/A-New-Textiles-Economy_Full-Report.pdf https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/assets/downloads/pu...
- austhrow743 6y agoI’ve always wondered how much standardisation there is in reporting these types of numbers, particularly with regard to countries, albeit not enough to actually look in to it. Say Australia digs up some coal, ships it to China, it’s used to power factories and smelters to produce goods, then those goods are shipped to and used by Americans. Is there consensus on who the pollution from burning coal gets tied to? Or does it vary per report and article?
- my123 6y agoIt gets tied to China, for better or worse.
- tinco 6y agoIt goes to China, because it is the one that can change it. But that's when you're looking at the output of countries. What you could also do is look at the output of individual persons, and then you could more easily attribute the CO2 to the American. Sustainable energy without the hot air does this, it's a great book though I've heard it's somewhat outdated now.
- Waterfall 6y agoDoesn't matter. The rags companies get clothing and Africa imports tons of clothing for free. The clothes aren't all just made and discarded, they often have a second life.
- dehrmann 6y agoMeanwhile, there's a sand shortage: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191108-why-the-world-is-running-out-of-sand https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191108-why-the-world-is... Concrete might look very different in 25-50 years.
- nix23 6y ago>Concrete might look very different in 25-50 years. True more like it looked in 150 BC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete
- ferros 6y agoThat’s an attention grabbing headline number, but what it doesn’t tell you is what would alternatives mean in terms of co2 emissions? Let’s say we take cement out or drastically reduce it. Where does co2 sit in increased consumption of viable alternatives.
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y agoI'm not quite understanding why the article should present alternatives. That's not what the article is really about. However, the article does present alternatives concerning the company BioMason.
- iTokio 6y agoIs there a serious source ranking all global CO2 emissions? Where percentages add up to 100%?
- treve 6y agoI don't have the answer, but I can imagine this is hard to compile because so many things emit CO2 all over their supply chain. So the question becomes, when do you consider something the 'final' product in the line. If it's cement, you presumably can't count 'construction' as it would be double-counted. Do you count an iPhone just during production? Or do you include shipping? If you include shipping, you can't have 'cargo ships' as it's own category.
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y agoWhy would it be hard to compile? Costs over supply chains are calculated all the time. And we don't have to look at IPhones, we just have to look at the subset of processes that emit non-neglible amounts of CO2 regardless of if they are the final product or not.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- josmala 6y agoThe problem is deciding categories, and what to account for what and duplicate accounting of same operation in different sources and differences in accounting and not everybody doing it the exact same way and lack of transparency for sub-components. Think about making steel for wind turbines, or transporting sand for base of wind turbines. Both actions should be accounted on wind turbines co2 emissions, but also they should be accounted for transportation/steel industry and construction. Everything is interdependent. But lets put things in perspective what is ineffective, in Finland home electricity use is 7% of all energy products used in the country, and still people concentrate on that you should make marginal reductions in your electricity usage to reduce CO2 emissions.
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- gogopuppygogo 6y agoI’ve been touting this fact for years. 90% of landfill debris is from demolition. We need more renovation instead of new construction.
- cranekam 6y agoDo you have a source for this?
- gogopuppygogo 6y ago“Demolition represents more than 90 percent of total C&D debris generation, while construction represents less than 10 percent.“ https://www.epa.gov/smm/sustainable-management-construction-and-demolition-materials https://www.epa.gov/smm/sustainable-management-construction-...
- eps 6y ago90% of construction and demolition debris is from demolition. Not quite the same as your opener that claimed that it's 90% of all debris.
- wcoenen 6y ago"About 13 percent of the solid waste in Missouri landfills is demolition waste." From page 128 of https://dnr.mo.gov/env/swmp/docs/wcs98constructionwaste.pdf https://dnr.mo.gov/env/swmp/docs/wcs98constructionwaste.pdf
- gogopuppygogo 6y agoDebris is a type of solid waste.
- hinkley 6y agoI remember a while back reading about work on increasing the recycled content of concrete (using old concrete as aggregate in new concrete, I think?) but I did not bookmark it and none of my last set of searches seemed to be in the right direction. There’s a Wikipedia page on the subject but little of it sounds familiar, and those bits have no citations.
- swiley 6y agoWould living in tents reduce CO2 emissions? Is that preferable?
- hannob 6y agoIf you don't heat or cool them yes, it reduces CO2 emissions. No, it's not preferrable.
- straw11 6y agoWood, Straw Bale, Earth. This all works even in high rise building.
- swiley 6y agoI live in a high rise building made out of concrete and know plenty of people who live in wood buildings. I'll pay double to not have to deal with the problems wood buildings have.
- vaccinator 6y agoHow often do you replace your tent? Does it come from china?
- ehou 6y agoThe article doesn't mention one alternative: CLT (cross laminated timber) as a building material for houses and flats. See https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190717-climate-change-wooden-architecture-concrete-global-warming https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190717-climate-change-w... for example. Using CLT (and passive house principles) can reduce the total CO2 emmissions of a house by 90% in its total life span. The wood in CLT stores carbon and the passive house principles reduces energy needs.
- jillesvangurp 6y agoYes. And better than that using this at scale is going to require massively scaling up wood production (i.e. forestry). This too will help with capturing a lot of co2 in the soil. A lot of countries would end up restoring farm land to production forests and probably end up using sustainable practices for this. For those unfamiliar with CLT, this is a high tech building material suitable for making e.g. sky scrapers or other types of buildings. It's much lighter and stronger than concrete. Because it is lighter, you save a lot of fuel transporting it. It's fire resistant and rot resistant because it is chemically treated. It's also much easier to work with as you can drill, glue, saw, etc. it. Additionally, you can do this off site meaning actual onsite construction activities are a lot more straight forward, less noisy, and much less wasteful. Think Ikea for buildings. To sketch you a picture of how awesome this stuff is, the Japanese are planning to build a 1100 feet skyscraper made of wood, steel, and clt in Tokyo, which is of course a city that regularly sees earthquakes and tropical storms. https://www.archdaily.com/889142/japan-plans-for-supertall-wooden-skyscraper-in-tokyo-by-2041 https://www.archdaily.com/889142/japan-plans-for-supertall-w.... The biggest challenge is going to be simply scaling the production of this material and transitioning the construction industry to mostly using this instead of concrete. Right now it's kind of a novelty / niche thing and it is going to take a while to reach efficiencies and economies of scale we have with concrete today. It's not exactly cheap (yet) but it could become cheaper long term; especially if you consider all the benefits (technical and environmental).
- abdullahkhalids 6y agoWhat are the long term health effects of the chemicals used in the production of CLT, on the residents of the houses?
- pengaru 6y agoIt's also 11% of global anthropogenic mercury emissions. https://www.epa.gov/international-cooperation/mercury-emissions-global-context https://www.epa.gov/international-cooperation/mercury-emissi...
- straw11 6y agoWooden skyscraper and Straw Bale to the rescue. https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/wooden-skyscraper-revolution-timber/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/wooden-skyscraper-revo... https://inhabitat.com/work-begins-on-the-uks-largest-prefabricated-strawbale-building/ https://inhabitat.com/work-begins-on-the-uks-largest-prefabr...
- divbzero 6y agoSetting aside CO₂ concerns for a moment, I was explaining cement to a young child today and was suddenly struck by how marvelous cement is: It’s poured as a liquid yet solidifies into rock, and has been known since ancient times [1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cement#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cement#History
- hinkley 6y agoI was looking for brick pavers recently and was having quite a time locating actual bricks instead of cement pavers colored badly and textured worse to look vaguely like bricks to nobody sober during daylight hours. I can only assume their target audience is a drunken man, at night, in a rainstorm. I have to wonder why we are still looking for new ways to employ Portland cement at this point, over alternatives. You can, I’m told, reduce the footprint of clinker a bit with fly ash, but you get that mostly from coal, so it’s splitting the “savings” with an equally problematic cousin, and at any rate that supply should be in steady decline now, although I guess we discovered the Tennessee Valley Authority has stockpiles of the stuff when they lost one of them a decade or two ago.
- Waterfall 6y agoFalse. It's common in volcanos. It's why Roman Cement is so good. That, salt water and pig blood.
- teruakohatu 6y ago> I was looking for brick pavers recently and was having quite a time locating actual bricks I am not an American but I am not sure I have even seen a paver made from brick now that I think about it. I suspect the larger a brick is, the more chance of cracking. So if it makes you feel any better, you probably would not find one in New Zealand either.
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- hinkley 6y agoSeems clay pavers are still out there. Here's some in NZ: https://www.horizoninternational.co.nz/domestic-pavers/nubrik-clay-paving/ https://www.horizoninternational.co.nz/domestic-pavers/nubri... But I don't think any national chains carry them anymore.
- s0rce 6y agoYou can also supplement with iron slag cement and silica fume from iron and silicon production, respectively. Those are probably not going away.
- Oricle 6y agoOh fuck off, big company/industry are alot worse than anything we, the people do. Has anyone seen the deaths rates of covid now they have started focus on cases and not deaths? Yes, they are non existent! Because they were non existent at the start as well! Meanwhile, your told to ruin your life, business, relationships, suffer no medical care just because, loose all your liberties and freedom (what little you have left anyways) and just about anything else we haven't allowed to be taken away from us all ready! If told jump off a cliff would you do it? Don't answer, it's retoricle, we all ready know you all asked how to jump while doing it by your current actions! Actions speak louder than words, and the power grab of the isralites over gentiles is pretty much complete. Over 2000 year war is going end in a puff of smoke because your all a bunch of schooled (indoctrinated) brainwashed morons preferring to attack and destroy anyone who speaks truth! 'the more we move away from the truth, the more people attack those that speak it! "
- kinase 6y agoCrazy that quarrying and transport is less than 10% of the CO2 from Concrete.
- _nalply 6y agoBy the way, the bridge is part of the Brennerautobahn between South Tyrol in Italy and Innsbruck in Austria. The exact bridge is located in Italy. http://www.constructionphotography.com/Details.aspx?ID=14133&TypeID=1&cdonly=False&contributor=0&documents=True&images=True&licenses=1,2&mronly=False&sort=REL&video=True http://www.constructionphotography.com/Details.aspx?ID=14133... Opentopomap: https://opentopomap.org/#map=13/46.93620/11.45582 https://opentopomap.org/#map=13/46.93620/11.45582
- shortercode 6y agoThe largest issue with concrete is that we misuse it. As a building material it has great thermal mass ( aiding temperature stability ) and longevity. But all too often buildings are poorly designed for renovation, and hence end up being torn down after a couple of decades. A small fraction of the useful lifetime of the structure. Any building using concrete for a structure should be aiming to last at least 100 years. For those who didn't read the article: the chemistry of Portland cement works against it. Production requires heating the calcium carbonate to a high temperature to extract carbon dioxide from it. Which obviously produces large amounts of CO2 proportional to concrete production. However, concrete also absorbs carbon dioxide from the air over its lifetime. So the measured emissions aren't the entire story. Perhaps in future we will consider this an excellent source of carbon dioxide for the production of various hydrocarbons. I've heard of several efforts to create octane using carbon dioxide from the air, but you need a large amount of energy to extract a useful amount of CO2. Well this would be a good source of high concentration CO2. Perhaps not for octane ( we should really be moving away from combustion engines ) but perhaps plastics and other products that are currently derived from crude oil.
- jmiskovic 6y agoDo we want 100 year old buildings? I don't think we can predict the needs of building even 20 years into the future. City layout could change drastically. Monumental buildings should last a long time, but not every structure. The alternative is to build from wood whenever possible, and capture extra cabon in building material. This increases market need for wood and therefore forestation.
- wiz21c 6y agoMy house is at least 200 year old and have been inhabited by 4-5 families. Although I must admit that it is thermally very bad, its perfectly livable. Now the thing is that I like old houses. So, just pay a nice marketing team to make sure people love old houses (after all, we have marketing team that can sell poison such as cigarettes or carbon dioxide). Or, as you said, just build with something easier to handle such as wood (provided you recycle it, else it'll go back to biomass, releasing its CO2 again)
- URfejk 6y ago"Eliminate carbon dioxide, and plants would shrivel and die. So would lake and ocean phytoplankton, grasses, kelp and other water plants. After that, animal and human life would disappear. Even reducing CO2 levels too much – sending them back to pre-industrial levels, for example – would have terrible consequences for crops, other plants, animals and humans.": https://www.masterresource.org/carbon-dioxide/co2-gas-of-life/ https://www.masterresource.org/carbon-dioxide/co2-gas-of-lif...
- peter303 6y agoThe minimum necessary CO2 level for plant life is about 100 ppm. That is a quarter of current levels. No plant life, no animal life, no life on the continents. Only a few chemeotroph bacteria survive. The long term geobiological trend is for C02 to decrease through absorption by weathering rocks and burial of biogenic limestone in subduction zones. C02 was thought to be as much 50% early Earth. Then a percent or two in early Phanerozoic 400 million years ago. And natural about .025% in the current ice age.
- Anka33 6y agoSmells like an new opportunity to tax something while blaming it on climate change.
- nix23 6y agoIs the CO2 absorption calculated too? https://constructionclimatechallenge.com/2016/11/18/co2-absorption-properties-of-cement-materials-discovered-by-researchers/ https://constructionclimatechallenge.com/2016/11/18/co2-abso...
- loourr 6y agoOne question I've had about cement being a major source of CO2 emissions that I haven't seen addressed anywhere is that my understanding is as cement cures it does so by absorbing CO2 which is what turns it into rock. Does this not cancel out the effect of making the cement in the first place? And if not, why not? Would love to know if anyone has a good understanding.
- concguy 6y agoWhile concrete does absorb CO2 there is a large misconception that it can absorb as much as is output during production. In reality any concrete worth its cost can only absorb a very small fraction of the production output. A largely overlooked issue with the idea of concrete absorbing CO2 is exposed surface area. Imagine a hydro dam, one side is saturated with water, the other side is air. The dam is also usually quite thick, several meters to hundreds of meters. That really limits the available absorption surface especially considering the ratio of surface area to volume. Concrete foundations, epoxy coated parkades, even painted surfaces start to drastically reduce the possibility of CO2 being absorbed. Think of concrete like a membrane or a sponge. The thicker the membrane you want to pass a fluid through, the higher the pressure you would require. So using our pressure as atmospheric, getting a high depth of CO2 absorption requires a well connected pore structure, and a long time frame. Add to this membrane metaphor the issue of size. We design concrete structures to prevent fluid transfer, especially hydro dams! H2O is a smaller molecule than CO2, and the static pressure on the ‘wet’ side of a hydro dam increases 1 atmosphere every 10m. As concrete sets and gains strength, its porosity decreases. This process happens rapidly in the first few days, and only ever stops when the cement runs out of free water to absorb. CO2 absorption depth is a pretty common test when evaluating a structure for rehabilitation purposes (carbonation dept testing) as CO2 will mess with the concrete PH and corrode reinforcing steel which (depending on many factors) can be as shallow as 5cm from the concrete surface. I’ve seen structures with up to 5cm of depth, but that is outside of the norm. 1-2cm of CO2 absorption depth for a structure from the 50’s is pretty common in my area. Modern concrete, through many different means, has a highly disconnected pore structure (compared to the concrete of the 50’s). New concrete, is designed to reduce any type of fluid transfer especially after the first few days of curing. This will reduce the depth of CO2 absorption further. So bringing this all back together, consider the absorption depth of 2cm, a structure with minimal exposed surface area, and some sort of coating or cladding… and you very quickly realize that you are not going to be off setting CO2 production outputs by any significant margin, and its not in your best interests either.
- hobby-coder-guy 6y agoWorth it
- immmmmm 6y agoAlso the power needed to grind clinker down to powder is huge, overall comminution (grinding) industrial processes are among the biggest electricity consumer in the world. Cement ball mills are less than 1% efficiency. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cement_mill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cement_mill Having done two postdocs in the field i can tell its not progressing very fast...
- toomuchtodo 6y agoIs there any reason these facilities can’t source power using renewables PPAs?
- nom 6y agoOh wow that is interesting! Thank you!
- nlh 6y agoTIL concrete and cement are not the same thing. The words are often used interchangeably, but that's apparently incorrect: https://www.cement.org/cement-concrete-applications/cement-and-concrete-basics-faqs https://www.cement.org/cement-concrete-applications/cement-a...