RE: Environmental Impacts - Concrete
You are viewing a single comment's thread:
Great post! Few people pay attention to the HUGE footprints left behind long before we build new roads and buildings.
I'm not too excited about CeraTech's announcement yet. Too often these 'proprietary' mixes will have as large, or greater footprint than the materials they replace. Likewise with the Solidia process, how does their oven-curing balance out with the reduction in water use? If you're saving water on-site, but it's getting used elsewhere to meet your extra energy needs, it's not really getting saved at all.
Flyash and slag are already added to many cement mixes in the US, and are required in most government funded projects. There's a lot of pros and cons to how and why we do that, along with lots of big business and politics. It would take 1500 words to scratch the surface of that mess, so I'll skip it for now.
I'd like to use all those words to talk about how much of the waste and ruin in this, and nearly all other industries, is due mostly to greed. We have the science and technology to heat cementitious materials to the required 2000°F way more efficiently that we do now, which is by burning fossil fuels either directly for heat, or indirectly for electricity, usually a lot of both. The problem is it lowers profits. We could drastically cut down on the transportation related pollution by using smaller, mobile facilities that can be set up at or near the point of construction. We do this in America if a project is large enough that the setup cost for on-site production will be less than the cost of transporting the materials, but very seldom do environmental concerns figure into that math beyond comliance with regulations.
A new Age is dawning, I hear, so maybe people will evolve out of the mindset that led us here before it's necessary. I don't fear too much for the fate of the human race, because we tend to perfom better as a species when under threat of extinction. We have the knowledge to continue our growth, AND make this world a green paradise that we can all enjoy. All we need now is the will to put the long term well being of our species ahead of profits and ego.
"The old way is the good way". In my opinion, the new "cleaner" cement technologies are just testing the waters. Portland cement is currently the king of the cement industry and it will be quite sometime before it gets replaced. You're correct that changing the status quo certainly reduces profits and that is a huge detractor.
In regards to Solidia, they introduce a process that replaces the water normally used in curating with CO2 in a heated oven. The technology is ONLY applicable to precasting. What this means is that they have to cast the cement into the final product first, heat it in an oven, and then saturate it with CO2 within the same oven. The final product is a hardened concrete brick that is then used in construction products.
You aren't wrong about the impact of greener solutions. This is the trickiest part. It could easily have a greater impact than CO2, but since it's proprietary no one will know for some time.
Green solutions remind me about the fable of the panacea. Taking it removes all ailments from your being and, perhaps, grants you immortality to a degree. However, if you stop taking the drug, you will surely die a horrible death.
Take, for instance, solar power technology. The tech advances further and further to a point where it surely will capture a majority of the energy reflected upon it. The marketing done on a global scale is impressive, but in no way covers the impact of the hazardous and toxic materials it consists of or addresses how to deal with it once it needs to get replaced.
The biggest problem with most modern 'green solutions' is that they're neither green, nor solutions, just profit machines telling a sustainable lie.
Money, politics, and industry are currently an inseparable unholy trinity all aimed at maintaining the status quo. Solar power is a great example of this... solar panel farms are the worst possible implementation of solar powered electricity, but it's the one that keeps the money flowing where it's always been flowing. Decommission coal plants be repurposed as solar furnace powered generators, but it's cheaper to just close them, and it helps keep the price per kw/hr up.
I agree with you, but also must write that politics is the biggest problem. Buying your political favors, I mean, lobbying is a significant reason for the problems we have today.
Repurposing decommissioned facilities is a worthwhile endeavor. I wish companies would utilize this option more.
If you see buying political favors as the biggest political problem, that makes money the bigger problem. I'm not disagreeing with your thoughts on politics and lobbying, just with your heirarchy of problems. They're all so intertwined now... industry concentrates money into the hands of few, who use that money to influence politics, to allow them to grow their industry and control more money...
By themselves, none of these things are inherently bad, but by giving control of all three to the same small group of people, we've created a perfect petri dish for corruption, which is the decay that eats away at all of institutions.
Unfortunately, corruption is a part of who we are as a species, so until we evolve out of that, we'll never get rid of it. The best we can hope for is keeping the levels of corruption low enough that the corrupt merely impede our progress, rather than guiding it.
Apologies for the late reply. Kids and work called to me. I can't argue against my interpretation of the hierarchy you mentioned. I'm not beyond being mistaken about a thing.
I would also love to write that you're mistaken about these industries. Even the climate change revolution has its faults. I don't want to admit to corruption, but again I would also be wrong.
I'm happy, however, that we as a species can acknowledge we at least have an impact on the world even though it's quite evident from reviewing our history.
I struggled with the word 'industry'... maybe 'corporatism' would be better?
Our species' impact is undeniable, many scientists now call this the 'Anthropocene' age. I'll have a whole post in the near future about my thoughts on our impact on the planet, as well as our interpretation of our impact on the planet.
I've written about environmental impacts and popular forms of energy production on my parent account. I look forward to reading your blog when you're done. I love to read differing perspectives on the matters of human impacts. The common theme I find is that we all know something needs to change, but there's an immense pressure, as you've discussed, to either slow our progress or prevent it.