New ‘green’ geopolymer concrete delivers win-win for industry and the planet

Concrete is the most prevalent building material on the planet, and though the world would be pretty flat without it (not many tall buildings and structures), 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. It’s the most widely produced man-made material on earth. Production of Portland cement is currently exceeding 2.6 billion tons per year worldwide and growing at 5 percent annually. To halt these alarming pollution figures, innovative research on geopolymer concrete, along with ways of using a waste byproduct from coal-fired powerplants, is being conducted by Dr Erez Allouche, assistant professor of civil engineering at Louisiana Tech University and associate director of the Trenchless Technology Center.

A greener alternative, inorganic polymer concrete (geopolymer) fits into an emerging class of cementitious materials that utilize ‘fly ash’, one of the most abundant industrial by-products on earth, as a substitute for Portland cement.

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Tags: atmospheric co2, building material, cement industry, cementitious materials, coal plant, concrete industry, concrete technology, geopolymer concrete, Innovation, innovative research, plastic concrete, polymer concrete, powerplants, production of portland cement, trenchless technology center

This entry was posted on Friday, October 2nd, 2009 at 12:17 pm and is filed under Cutting-edge Research, Innovation, Project Energy, Resources, Shape of Things to Come?, environment, gizmag. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.