Concrete as a Sustainable building material

by runeklitgaard

To evaluate a building material whether it’s more sustainable than another, more parameters has to be evaluated and compared.
The different environmental profiles of different products makes it difficult to choose the right product because you often end up with choosing between toxicology vs. energy and these different issues can be difficult to compare. A simple but not always correct solution can be to assess the CO2 emission from the production and handling of the product (grave to consumer) and then keep recyclability, scarce resource, toxicology etc. in mind.

The best way to make a first assessment is to compare the different building materials is to use general data for the products from databases. The general data in the databases gives consistent results and doesn’t rely on the different producers and their different production facilities and energy sources. When using data from the producers’ one has to ensure that the data is equal and can be compared.

Here I present some data from the one of the Danish LCA databases, BEAT2002. BEAT 2002 uses general data to calculate the CO2 emission from different types of building materials. My point is, by looking at data like these it makes it clear that it does make a difference which material you use for your building or construction.

Material Kg CO2/Kg Building material

Asphalt 0.045
Bricks 0.2
Cement 0.82
Concrete 0.134
Concrete steel fibre reinforced 0.45
Glass 0.77
Plastic 2.53
Rubber 3.3
Steel 1.82
Timber 0.476

Reference

From these data it looks like concrete is the most sustainable building material – even more than timber!