Sustainable Benefits of a Low Carbon Cement Based Building: Fid-Bau Portal

Sustainable Benefits of a Low Carbon Cement Based Building

Nagrath, Kriti / Maity, Soumen

The current trends of production and consumption are unsustainable in terms of environmental emissions and resource use. With current trends of energy application, the emission and resource use will increase nearly two-fold by 2050, creating an increased stress on the global resource base. Thus the only option is to create and promote low carbon and resource efficient technologies without compromising on the cost of goods produced and financial viability. As per WBSCD, by 2010 the cement industry in India alone contributed to 7 % of the total CO₂ emissions of the country. Realizing this the Indian cement industry has embarked on an ambitious roadmap of reducing it by 50 % within 2050. Despite this improvement, still the emissions will rise from current (2010) 137 MtCO₂ to around 468 MtCO₂ by 2050. The present initiative explores the role of a new type of developed low carbon cement in reducing CO₂ emissions and natural resource use. The cement is based on a ternary blend of calcined clay-limestone-clinker. Building made out of this low carbon cement and its associated building materials indicates a preliminary saving of 0.46 kg CO₂ per square meter and 1.55 kg wastes per square meter. Considering the fact that India has a current shortage of 1.2 billion square meter of rural and urban housing which is increasing by 10 % per year, the potential of CO₂ and resource saving from sustainable construction is quite high considering only the housing sector.