Objective
Environmental requirements will be set up by the EU, national governments and consumers to all types of industries. Also the concrete industry will be forced to fulfil the requirements by environmental taxes or by voluntary agreements to get rid of taxes. To decrease the total amount of taxes or as a part of voluntary agreements the concrete industry must develop and adopt the most appropriate and economically feasible technologies and techniques for achieving environmental targets based on effective and clean technology.
In the context of this project proposal the concrete industry covers all partners involved in the whole life cycle of concrete spanning from extraction and processing of component raw materials, of concrete manufacturing, construction and rebuilding/extension of buildings and constructions, operation and maintenance of buildings and
constructions to demolition and waste treatment/recycling.
The main industrial objectives of this research programme will be:
To develop and implement cost effective cleaner technologies to reduce environmental taxes and fulfil environmental requirements in the concrete industry compared to other building materials and reduce the environmental impact of the concrete products. This will be valuable in marketing concrete products.
To promote the competitiveness related to the reduced environmental impact and hereby to reduced costs of the European concrete industry compared to USA and Japan.
To implement and test the developed cleaner technologies in practice.
To transfer cleaner technologies between the EU countries and between the SME industries.
In order to achieve the main objectives the research programme will include the following:
Development/adjustment of a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) model to investigate environmental impacts and assess improvements in the life cycle of concrete products. The LCA model will be implemented in a user friendly software programme.
Set up of political scenarios, i.e. priority lists of environmental impacts, which together with the LCA results will be used to determine the areas where cleaner technologies must be developed. Examples of cleaner technologies which will be developed and implemented are:
Environmental optimisation of the concrete mix design with regard to cement type and amount.
Maintenance and repair methods for concrete surfaces with less consumption of water.
Overall environmental optimisation with regard to concrete mix design and thereby quality of the concrete product, frequency of maintenance and repair activities, life time of the concrete products and recycling (for instance manufacturing a concrete type which is optimised with regard to environmental impacts and at the same time is having a bad quality, omitting maintenance and repair, demolishing the construction after maybe the half life time and recycling the crushed concrete in a new concrete product). It has to be emphasised that durability investigations not are included in the present project.
Recycling of crushed concrete as aggregate in new concrete
Use of secondary materials in cement
Use of secondary materials as fuel in cement productions
Development of maintenance and repair methods to lengthen the service life without influence other stages in the concrete chain (e.g. recyclability).
The research project comes under Brite Euram III Areal: Production technologies, 1.2 Development of clean production technologies.
Fields of science
Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
2630 Taastrup
Denmark