Forbes recently published an article on sustainability in construction. It mentions concrete and steel being good candidates for sustainability improvements but the author is clearly on the prefabrication bandwagon as the focus of the article was prefabricated construction. Prefabricated construction is reducing cost and resource use while speeding up the time required to build something. It is a great tool our industry can use to build a better world today and in the future. That being said steel, and especially concrete, production processes consume massive amounts of energy which produces massive amounts of greenhouse gasses. Love him or hate him, Bill Gates is onto something through his investment in a company named CarbonCure which is producing a product that sequesters CO2 and reduces the amount of cement required batch concrete. If it works right, it will forever capture CO2 while reducing cement need and energy consumption to make concrete. Why is this important? By itself, the concrete industry produces 10% of manmade greenhouse gasses globally. Simply put, making even an incremental reduction to the energy requirement and CO2 production of cement can have a monumental impact on our environment. So while prefabrication might be a helpful but trendy process, buzzword or hashtag cement and concrete production might make or break our world. If we make a better concrete, we build a better world.
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