Slashdot Mirror
Can We Live Without Concrete? (cnn.com)
A combination of cement, water and ground rock or sand, on the surface concrete might seem crushingly mundane. Yet it has defined construction in recent centuries and with it, in part, modernity. From a report: But do we need to re-evaluate our concrete habit for our sakes and the planet's? Production of cement is disastrous for our biosphere, while the degradation of many concrete buildings has some construction experts predicting a colossal headache in the future. There are myriad proposed solutions, such as changing the way we make concrete, creating sustainable alternatives or doing away with it altogether. But would we want to live in a world without concrete? And what would that world look like?
"We make more concrete than anything else, any other product, apart from clean water," says Paul Fennell, professor of clean energy at Imperial College London. One 2015 report estimates that each year approximately three tons of concrete are used for every person on Earth -- roughly, 22 billion tons. To put that in context, a recent study estimated that 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic have been produced, ever. Manufacturing cement, concrete's binding agent, is energy-intensive, Fennell says. Ordinary Portland cement -- the most common form in concrete -- is produced by baking lime in a kiln and emits approximately one ton of carbon dioxide for every ton of cement. Concrete production is responsible for approximately 5% of global man-made CO2 emissions, according to the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.
"We make more concrete than anything else, any other product, apart from clean water," says Paul Fennell, professor of clean energy at Imperial College London. One 2015 report estimates that each year approximately three tons of concrete are used for every person on Earth -- roughly, 22 billion tons. To put that in context, a recent study estimated that 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic have been produced, ever. Manufacturing cement, concrete's binding agent, is energy-intensive, Fennell says. Ordinary Portland cement -- the most common form in concrete -- is produced by baking lime in a kiln and emits approximately one ton of carbon dioxide for every ton of cement. Concrete production is responsible for approximately 5% of global man-made CO2 emissions, according to the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.
Come join us https://pay.reddit.com/r/Concrete/
Can't live with it, can't live inside it.
Agenda 21 - that's what all this is about. They kinda have to beat around the bush for awhile so as to make the idea of depopulation more palatable. For heaven sake, what will the wealthy elite do once robotics tends to all their needs? Oh, those pesky poor humans are just fucking up the planet. Get rid of them...right??
Almost as much bullshit and low quality in the premise of this posting as asphalt and the whole asphalt lobbying and astroturfing.
Concrete is heavy, and plastic is light. So by weight, it seems reasonable that "we" produce more concrete than plastic.
Means the answer is NO.
Concrete is literally the most versatile construction material on Earth. It will never, ever be going away.
Concrete is the reason we can build things higher than four stories.
Ergo, humanity must not exist, since we could not have existed before concrete. Now that the shadow has been unveiled, we will truly pop out of existence.
So long, cru
Seems like a promising alternative, and is much more sustainable.
as far as I can tell, this summary is blaming concrete because the energy source is dirty. What if the energy came solely from turbines, dams, nuclear power, or some other form of clean energy?
I get that the US is a bit of a third world/developing nation so their ability to use clean energy is somewhat stinted, but more modern nations have made great strides towards a cleaner source of joules.
And I see this line of thinking all the time. "X is bad, because it takes a lot of energy to make X". Just clean up your energy sources, then X wouldn't be so bad.
Hemp is a good alternative to concrete. In addition it is renewable and extracts Co2. Plus it makes other useful things like clothing. Unfortunately the cotton industry is preventing the world from growing it. It is those people that are preventing us from having buildings made from hemp today.
"Radical environmentalists" won't be satisfied until 95% of the population is wiped out and all the remaining population (themselves excluded of course) are living in mud huts. Then they'll find a reason why mud huts are harming the environment.
Ergo, humanity must not exist, since we could not have existed before concrete.
The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Some of us could have existed, others not. To understand why, ask yourself: What was the human population before the invention of concrete, and what is the human population now? At least some of this additional carrying capacity probably arises from inventions that rely on concrete.
Is it? Do they have a hockestick chart proving that beyond all doubt?
Well, this settles it then. Let's ban — or, at least, "cap-and-trade" — all concrete-production effective immediately. New taxes would have to be collected (and spent) to implement it, house-building will triple in price, but think of all the jobs this will create — especially, among these same "construction experts"!
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
we're going to have to listen to these two lunatics pushing the agenda by way of which headlines they post. Whoopee! You're doing a disservice to the health and minds of fragile readers; all this doom and gloom is making some young readers sick to their stomachs. :( Maybe even causing some to go do unspeakable things at schools and malls.
Is this your intention?
You bullies.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Build with wood and your building becomes a carbon sink!
All we need to do is shove magic graphene all up in that business, christ, don't people read Slashdot?
Why do you propose changes to make everyone's life worse?
Figure out a way for life to actually be better. That's what you did in the 1970s when there was air pollution and water pollution. Air pollution was a problem, not a fear about a possible problem.
Fund some research to create something better than concrete if you want something better than concrete.
Don't ask us to give up living modern lives and mire ourselves in artificial poverty. That's not something Americans or Asians will do. Europeans might.
I'd be willing to bet there are no non-hydrocarbon powered cement plants (maybe hydro, somewhere). Cement manufacturing takes an enormous amount of energy. You ware basically burning rock so you can imagine the heat involved. So don't discount the environmental impact. Plus cement is heavy and gets shipped great distances.
Sorry. We're too dependent on it as a building material.
Now, this doesn't mean we can't modify concrete to reduce/eliminate some of it's deleterious effects on the environment.
But, in the end, we still need concrete in whatever forms it eventually takes.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
by baking lime in a kiln and emits approximately one ton of carbon dioxide for every ton of cement.
If only there was some way which we could head a kiln without hydrocarbon fuel....Oh wait there are lots of ways we could do that...So Its not really cement manufacture that is the problem is it? Sounds more like an problem of how we are choosing to source the energy for it.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
The world is static and never changes. We never need to alter our behavior for environmental or supply reasons.
Concrete is as good as stone, and you see how long ancient Greek, Roman, and Egyptian stone structures have stood. Our society is easily as great and indelible as that of the ancients. Our buildings are strong and will never collapse, not like the house of cards the leftists have built.
Concrete also causes us to use less wood. While on the one hand that's a good thing since even older forests are a great carbon sink, on the other hand it wooden houses are a really great way of removing carbon from the biosphere for quite a long time; the average wooden house stores the equivalent of 20 tonnes of CO2. Building 400 million wooden houses would compensate for the entire CO2 surplus in the biosphere (or at least in the atmosphere). In theory ;)
0x or or snor perron?!
The crux of the article was Rammed Earth, which I think is a great replacement for concrete for certain applications (some load-bearing vertical walls mainly). Dirt cheap, clay & sand.
Some applications of concrete are frivolous and I think can be replaced. The reason is mostly cost and availability, and the current labor force is skilled with using it. The wall-facade material of choice before concrete, and before gypsum drywall, was Lime plaster. For wet or exterior applications I am in favor of using lime as it is less carbon-intensive than concrete and produces a beautiful lighting effect from birefringence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birefringence), owing to the tiny calcite crystals that form when it cures back into limestone. See http://www.sapphireelmtravel.com/travel-journal/chefchaouen-morocco-blue-city for an example.
There's also benefits to the water vapor breathability of lime vs. concrete (which doesn't breathe, unless it's cracked).
Producing Lime plaster is less carbon-intensive than cement as it requires lower temperatures, and the CO2 driven off by the limestone during calcining (which happens in Ordinary Portland Cement production as well) is mostly re-absorbed by the slaked lime as it cures back into limestone (leaving the net CO2 footprint coming from the fuel used to calcine the lime, if coal or natural gas or wood is used, although perhaps decades into the future someone comes up with a nuclear-fueled kiln, electric or high temp gas or whatever).
The big downside to lime plaster is the time it takes to cure, and what that does for timelines and labor costs. It usually requires multiple thin coats (with a week or more between =3/8 inch coats - need time for CO2 to reabsorb as carbonic acid which also requires the material be damp, but not covered in water) which blows up the labor costs.
https://johnspeweik.com/2011/10/27/the-lime-cycle/
The upside to using lime plaster is there's a wealth of historical information on what to do with it... much of the "bling" of the pre-1800's architecture can be traced to the use of lime or limestone.
E.g. the Moroccan process of Tadelakt - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadelakt
Venetian plaster - https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/venetian-plaster-trend-guide
the real at&t mix
and their answer us generally, "we'll never get there" or "I'll let you know when we get there". Some people just need to share misery with others. Remember, sharing is caring.
Sod Off, Swampy
FIVE PERCENT of global CO2 emissions for cement production. Reinforced is one of the most useful, versatile, and inexpensive construction materials we have devised. I wish to reduce co2 emissions - targeting something that far down the stack seems stupid to me given its utility. Much better gains in CO2 reduction can be made elsewhere (power generation and transportation).
Silence is a state of mime.
The enlightened idiot. We all know of at least one in our lives. They read an article and believe that this is the answer to everything. Not only that, but THEY are the now self proclaimed messiah and leader for the new world that will be brought forward. Discard the old guard, in with the new gods.
And so today marks the acknowledgement of another idiot. And after reading many of the responses we have quite a few candidates for the award for the biggest idiot, and perhaps even some Darwin canidates.
We exhale CO2 lets kill some humans off as well since we hurt the atmosphere.
The post is based on a false premise: that CO2 production is inherent in making concrete. There is already a process to not do that. Further, most of the CO2 is made from generating the heat to make the concrete. Most of that CO2 production is low-hanging fruit to eliminate.
This is just more chicken little chicken shit.
what is we mix graphine into the cement. I bet we can make it stronger, less water permeable and also better for the environment.
Am i a genius chemist/engineer?! No. i just read the other article like 5 stories down on slashdot :/
Because we know you'll also object to wood, steel, aluminum, carbon fiber, plastic, bone, fiberglass, or any other structural material we can come up with. Magical unobtanium which can be produced and used at scale without any environmental effects doesn't exist and never will.
Sorry, forgot the link:
https://phys.org/news/2012-04-...
Clearly australopithecus was unable to evolve until concrete was invented. So, NO!
Stupid headline M'Smash.
They compared concrete to plastic, but most of the weight (about 85%) in concrete is sand and rock. Although even with that the world uses a lot of cement.
Rather than looking for alternatives I'm guessing this is a plea to make the manufacture of cement more environmentally friendly (green energy for the heat, capture the CO2, etc.). That would make far more sense than trying to find an alternative to concrete.
It is called North Dakota. Go there sometime. Then you will be getting yourself some Concrete instead!
Hippies are FAR more unsustainable for the planet simply because they're Humans. If we want to get serious about helping the planet we really need to start seriously asking "is it time to cull the hippy population?"
That is very cool. Thanks for sharing!
the real at&t mix
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Concrete is part of that problem too. It's heavy AF, and thus cost a lot of fuel to move around, and because of the weight these transport causes large amounts of wear and tear on roads, which leads to more expenditure of fuel to fix them, etc. It's actually a bit of a vicious circle.
Two concrete articles today! It's great.
Talking about environmental impact is great and all, but we will use concrete until something supplants it due to economics. Right now we are seeing real interest in tall timber construction, and while the designers will tell you about potential environmental benefits the real driving force is potential dollars - it's expected to be faster and cheaper than concrete and steel. Concrete construction is energy intensive as the article points out, but it's also surprisingly labor intensive - moreso if you want to do it well.
my friend? I'm curious how one goes about become as enlightened as thee?
Take more carbon out of the environment than released, especially the newer Graphene based concrete where a slury of graphene and water is used in place of plain water, making the concrete up to twice as strong and more water resistant.
Betteridge's law is about the possibility of "excitement", it works on titles with the form "could it be exiting?" (the answer is no). This title is almost the opposite, concrete is so normal that we wouldn't even think of a world without it so the question is reversed, "would it boring if we stopped doing this normal thing" is used instead. This trick relies on peoples assumption that changing the status quo will be big and "exiting", when normally it is boring, guiding people into assuming an exiting answer. A slightly more complex rule that works for both is - when a title asks a question, with a yes/no answer, the answer is the boring one.
In this case there are already polymer resin based substitutes, so any change in cost/availability of gypsum cement big enough to stop the use of concrete will instead cause a small change in building appearance and in the long run not much else
Stop doing that, and tear down the ones we have...
We use concrete because concrete is cheap. Really, really, cheap. You can get similar results with other materials for many applications but there are few materials that are as readily available, easy to use, and inexpensive as concrete. Come up with a material with usable performance and a similarly low price point and you can be sure we would use a lot of that.
FYI one ton of concrete is a piece roughly 0.42m^3. So they are saying we each use a piece of concrete about the size of a desk each year.
Nothing beats good old wood. We should make everything out of it: parking lots, curbs, roads ... plank roads are awesome.
FIVE PERCENT of global CO2 emissions for cement production.
Captain pedantic here but it is NOT cement. It is concrete and they are not the same thing. Every time you conflate the two terms a civil engineer looses his wings. Cement is an ingredient in concrete but concrete is not cement.
Most of the time you move concrete thrice. Once to get the components to where it is being 'made', and again to get it where it is being used.
And after a while, you may, may remove it and either recycle or dispose of it.
Transportation costs are a real thing, but in this instance I doubt these costs are such a big deal. Now steel has advantages, perhaps, in production costs and recycling, but sometimes you need strength and mass, and until we rethink design, concrete is the solution.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Just like you don't pull the cord on your parachute until you hit the ground. Falling doesn't hurt much and is quite self sustaining with all that gravity. When it does become a problem some one else will solve it for you, it's the intelligent way.
Believe it or not it has to do with sand.
Sand with sharp edges.
Sand from the desert is round and is not good for cement.
So stop worrying about the CO2, energy, etc needed to make cement. we are running out of sand.
https://science.slashdot.org/s...
http://www.spiegel.de/internat...
https://www.npr.org/2017/07/21...
IOW: we are fsked. Roads, buildings, bridges, etc will have to be built with something else and nobody cares to even worry.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
When I was little, I was told a house made of strawbale and another made of wood failed to survive severe weather, particularly strong rain[1] and wind.[2] Or have I been duped all these years by the brick construction lobby?
[1] "The Pros and Cons of Straw Bale Wall Construction In Green Building"
[2] "The Three Little Pigs" by Joseph Jacobs
Like all things environmental.
What are the alternatives? Wood, Bricks, Stone...
What are the Pros vs Cons of these alternatives? Renewable, Deforestation, difficult to ship, difficult to work with, limitation on what can be made...
Can a hybrid approach be done? Are we using more Concrete then we need? Do we really expect this building to span the Melania?
Where I live there is an abandoned factory made from Concrete, it is an eye sore in the city. However it is nearly indestructible, and will cost too much to knock down.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
If we could teach AI to quarry, transport, shape and stack rocks at least as well as humans did in the 17th century, we could literally build castles (and bridges and aquaducts) with very little energy input. Rocks are everywhere, and an army of AI powered instruments could be programmed to improve on the work of even the best stonemasons: If they scanned each available stone that comes from a quarry, algorithms could design the optimal stacking arrangements to minimize gaps and maximize structure stability. They could "solve" a construction project like it's a giant 3D puzzle, thus minimizing the number of stones that would need to be chiseled. But even chiseling stone with machines uses very little energy. The pace of construction would only be limited by the number of autonomous tools brought to bear, and they themselves could turn out to be cheap and mass-producible. Sure, you can't build skyscrapers from rocks, but I would happily live in a city of six story rowhouse blocks built from stone. The neighborhoods in Europe that are actually built in this way are beautiful, functional and pleasant to live in. With AI building tools that sink the cost of labor to almost zero, I think we should explore returning to some of these old, well-tested building methods and architectural designs.
We could once, but then we were with less. We can try it now but what will be te consequences. No high buildings, speedways, dams and more. So I say: we can't.
Here's an example of what we're doing in Vancouver BC, to build low-cost housing for the homeless. These modular buildings use metal framing instead of concrete foundations: https://vimeo.com/208333352 No concrete needed!
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
I do not understand how one would convert limestone, CaCO3, into the primary ingredient of portland cement, CaO, without releasing a nontrivial amount of Carbon Dioxide.
Could you explain what I'm missing?
THanks.
When all is said and done, it'll come out that Hoffa's body is embedded in the concrete of Trump Tower.
Perhaps the original poster was unaware of recent advancements from the University of Exeter resulting in graphene-reinforced concrete.
Summary:
146% increase in compressive strength
79.5% increase in flexural strength
400% decrease in water permeability
50% of miscellaneous materials used
446 kg/tonne reduction in emitted CO2
https://www.graphene-info.com/...
Spam the Melania? Do the Trumps have to be in every conversation?
On my slashdot, you don't say. Co2 only makes up .04 percent of our atmosphere. It's the year 2018 and we still have these left wing shills spamming fake news on this site.
Take an airplane fly to Suriname and find out.
It looks like wooden houses.
Even worse:
each year approximately three tons of concrete are used for every person on Earth -- roughly, 22 billion tons.
Every year we are adding 22 Billion tons to the weight of the earth. Sooner or later, that's going to start having an effect.
Regular concrete for a lot of applications is way too strong (say non-load-bearing walls). So switch to aerated concrete, AAC for that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Here's the problem: If you're going to call out cement production as one more thing that's going to destroy the Earth with global warming, that's fine, but you've got to come up with an alternative that doesn't set back human civilization (such as it is; I don't feel like we're very 'civilized' at all, but I diverge) 2000 years in the process. Do we start making everything out of stone again? Obligatory jokes about slaves and pyramids, I guess. Wood? Environmentalists would have a fit, also show me how you can build a 100 story skyscraper out of wood. Something else? Or do we just go back to living in grass huts?
That's the major problem. Most 'environmental' problems regarding 'sustainability' seem like they would have us going back to an agrarian society of just subsistence, and 7.6 billion people aren't going to go for it. Come up with viable alternatives!
The answers are, Yes we can live without concrete, and No you wouldn't want to.
Concrete is pure genius as a physical product. Think of it, stone that has a liquid phase, so that you can shape it easily into any shape. Nor is the utility of a liquid phase limited to the final form. Construction crews now routinely use concrete pumps to send concrete from anywhere, to anywhere on the construction site. Stone in a pipe!
This article just appeared claiming a concrete twice as strong as existing concrete while releasing less CO2.
https://inhabitat.com/
"Cost of transportation" wasn't exactly the point (I get the impression you're talking about monetary costs), the point was that it further increases the carbon dioxide footprint, compared to alternative, lighter materials.
And, yes, these costs are real, very real. Especially if you're thinking in terms of larger constructions where you use thousands of tons of it. It adds up to a huge amount of very heavy traffic just carrying concrete. And the point here is that we may very well continue to need concrete, but we seriously need to rethink how much of it we really need, and how we apply it, in what form.
Easy. Start with a trivial amount of limestone. :)
I haven't seen it mentioned yet in this thread. There are a couple different varieties, but they all require lye or natron and a variety of other materials plus a fixed amount of water to generate actual stone. The chemistry involved is slightly more caustic than the lime used in cement, but has the benefit of creating geopolymer chains (think rock fiber) throughout the material instead of just cementing the aggregate together as concrete does.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... for more info.
Um no that building is not nearly indestructible. A qualified demolition company, after planning, can have that building down in a couple of minutes.
Your city just doesn't want to pay for it and instead is waiting for someone else to purchase the property and deal with it then, passing the cost to someone else in favor of major tax cuts to that new property owner.
I acquired some rental properties with the (little bit) of money I made from a small IT/IS business and I learned a lot of hard lessons very quick - but luckily the first property I bought had, though very old, had a very solid concrete structure with little water damage. The only disadvantage to modern concrete is if it's not maintained in a way to prevent water seeping into the rebar the structural integrity will rapidly degrade. As long as you can maintain that you can maintain the building semi-indefinitely.
I can't imagine concrete is as comparitavely bad for the environment if properly maintained when compared to other materials. The only real alternatives you have will have either greater costs associated (steel) or scalability issues (wood). Steel is probably more enivornmentally sound but the cost and complexity of a large structure is way more than a similar RC structure. Wood structures don't scale well and don't have a long lifespan.
As luck will have it, Slashdot just ran a story today on Graphene Makes Concrete Twice as Strong" https://science.slashdot.org/s...
In general textile reinforce concrete (TRC) is starting to be used in buildings and traffic applications. TRC in general uses a lot less concrete (50%+ if you can believe product marketing) in some applications and is more corrosion resistant.
If you google "textile reinforce concrete" you will find interesting articles from research, trade groups and commercial applications.
Egyptians already made concrete back then.
An electrochemical process? Thank goodness we have unlimited supplies of CO2-free electricity available.
Have gnu, will travel.
What are the alternatives?.
We don't need an alternative to concrete. We just need an alternative to fossil fuel fired kilns. Kilns can be nuclear or solar, and since they use pure heat, there is no Carnot inefficiency. They could be used in a co-generation process, using low grade waste heat to warm the lime, and high grade heat to finish.
Cement production could be used as a nuclear load leveler. During periods of high electric power demand, send the heat to a turbine. When demand drops, switch the heat to the kiln.
Do we really expect this building to span the Melania?
Why do buildings have to span the First Lady? And how? Is that, what the president wants to do with the wall?
Well, that knocks down the building, and now you have a pile of rubble that is either left to be an eyesore or carted off to be landfill.
It would be much better if the building could be reused, but often that isn't really possible. OTOH, I had a friend who lived in an authentic adobe house...which was a real nuisance, because electrical wiring an plumbing had to be on th exterior of the walls unless you wanted to put in false flooring or some such, and even then to get them from one room to another required professional assistance, as in someone whose profession was making holes in that kind of material...not just a plumber or an electrician. I suspect concrete would be something similar, though a factory should have rooms that are large enough that false flooring wouldn't be as much of a problem.
IOW, sometimes when a building is designed for one use it can be quite difficult to remodel it for another use if it's made out of something difficult to work with.
You are correct in asserting that it's only a costly problem to deal with, not one that's impossible to deal with. But costly has its own problems.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Every year we are adding 22 Billion tons to the weight of the earth. Sooner or later, that's going to start having an effect.
Like the hollow center collapsing?
I knew Journey to the Center of the Earth was more fact than fiction!
THAT is the goal of a lot of the "Earth first" lDIOTS.
There is a mythconception touted by some that concrete is bad. That is totally wrong. Concrete is almost all rock and sand. There is very little cement (the material at issue) in it. And the long term net effect is that concrete is a benefit because concrete structures last for a very long time, measured in hundreds to thousands of years as opposed to wood built structures that last mere decades.
Additionally, if you properly design your structures you can make concrete even greener by eliminating the need to heat or cool the buildings. I have done this with both our home and our butcher shop. Concrete offers tremendous thermal mass which can store the heat from summer over to winter to keep the building warm and store the cold from winter over to summer to keep the building cool.
I have done this with our home which masses about 100,000 lbs inside an insulated envelope. Even in our extreme cold climate in the central mountains of northern Vermont we don't have to heat or cool our house. It will stay in the mid-40's through the winter and rise to the 60's in the summers. We can optionally raise that to the mid-70's in the winter with just 0.75 cord of wood (a very small amount for those of you who don't use wood heat), which is a renewable resource from dead wood on our land.
Our butcher shop is built along the same lines but far more massive at 1.6 million pounds of concrete built in six shells with insulation between each. We have no heating system and no refrigeration system to chill our cutting room, etc. We've been operating for three years under Vermont state inspection and on May 1st we received our USDA license. I've been told repeatedly by the USDA and other government officials that they are amazed by our facility because it is so good, requires so little maintenance, is so easily cleaned and how it naturally stays the right temperatures. All of that is about design. I love math. Math applied is even better - it solves real problems.
Concrete is not evil and is not the cause of global warming. Properly used concrete and cement are the solution to reducing pollution and cutting energy consumption.
as you correctly state, Concrete will never go away, which means people can now complain and campaign against this endlessly. The PERFECT hook for them.
Keep the downvotes coming, we'll repost.
Original downvoted:
YOU my Dear AC have given us the definitive hook (Score:-1)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 04, 2018 @11:26AM (#56554018)
as you correctly state, Concrete will never go away, which means the wingnuts can now complain and campaign against this endlessly. The PERFECT hook for them. I'd upvote for you is I were logged on.
Do we really expect this building to span the Melania?
I don't think even Donald gets to span the Melania these days.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Just use the graphene enhanced concrete that captures enough carbon to be carbon neutral. Bonus it’s multiple times stronger.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
An electrochemical process? Thank goodness we have unlimited supplies of CO2-free electricity available.
In the future, we do (because we must).
I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious. --Albert Einstein
This process was discovered in 2012. Does anybody use it?
Simply by exhaling, humans contribute roughly 7% of annual CO2 tonnage, worldwide. Again, that's just by *BREATHING*.
Just trying to put that into perspective here...
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
>Production of cement is disastrous for our biosphere
Hmmm, ok.
>Concrete production is responsible for approximately 5% of global man-made CO2 emissions,
So, no.
We get the same result by improving car mileage by 15%, which we could have done a decade ago, as reducing concrete's output by 100%, which we can't do even in theory.
When you're solving a set of problems you start with the biggest one first. This is not the biggest problem.
What about plastic buildings? It is waterproof and takes centuries to degrade. Besides, most everything is made of plastic now. It can also mix with rebar for reinforcing structures.
Old structures made of concrete without rebar does not degrade rapidly. When concrete is not sealed properly and water is allowed to penetrate repeatedly, the rebar rusts and stresses the structure from the inside, causing it to crack and chip.. Plastic serves as a water insulator and thus rust.
Where can you get enough plastic for a building? The ocean. There is enough plastic floating in the South Pacific to easily build a few nice structures.
All we have to do is move back into caves which is what the eco extremists really want.for everyone but themselves ...
On second thought, I believe they want we, the unwashed masses to move back into trees and to forget that we know how to make fire.
Yeah ... that's it !
it is an eye sore in the city. However it is nearly indestructible, and will cost too much to knock down.
Sounds like a great emergency weather/disaster shelter; if it is so resilient a structure, then going in to "knock it down" would be a damned shame and a ludicrous waste....
So conceal it then. Too expensive to knock down, but there are ways to "decorate" or "cover" things so that they are hidden behind foliage or permanently-installed building-high fences/wire mesh covered in camouflage, for example.
In the future, we do
We were going to use it to charge your car. But it was reallocated to concrete production. I hope you didn't trade in that diesel bro-truck.
Have gnu, will travel.
I suspect concrete would be something similar, though a factory should have rooms that are large enough that false flooring wouldn't be as much of a problem.
Uhm.... It is harder to put nice holes in concrete than wood, but it's definitely not as hard to deal with as putting holes in heavy steel rafters, which need to be done to run wiring in certain buildings. Drilling holes of varying sizes in concrete/masonry is a COMMON thing, such that there are common drill bits designed just for that.
Typically you can build only the exterior walls with concrete and the support columns. Then inexpensive aluminium studs and drywall can form the interior walls. That way you can run any cabling you want in the interior walls.
Their argument for the economics of the process is quite poor:
* They argue the under 800 Celsius process is more than twice as expensive than the usual polluting process.
* So that suggest using an over 800 Celsius process, where the economics rely on selling Carbon Monoxide, but:
** They haven't counted the expenses of purifying the result and delivering it in a form buyers could use. Their own process generates O2, and there's other stuff due to impurities in the source limestone. Nobody buys CO in order to get O2 as well. Someone needs to separate the CO, and it's not necessarily easy or cheap.
** They don't understand that demand for CO is far lower than demand for concrete and far less localized. If everyone used their process, CO prices would plummet, and quickly the process will end up with the same economics as the under 800C process. Many locales where concrete is made simply don't have much CO demand, and can't rely on this at all.
** Carbon Monoxide quickly devolves into Ozone, which is a serious pollutant and greenhouse gas in itself when its emitted on the surface. That's not an argument against the process, but the pollution controls involved will have a cost.
All in all, their process will end up being costing double or more than the usual process either way.
Yes, sadly there are still some unburned hydrocarbons left. Please, donate today and help us burn them all.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
We exhale CO2 lets kill some humans off as well since we hurt the atmosphere.
We would eventually have to if human respiration were the only significant source of CO2 emissions. It'd be an ugly option though, kill a few to save many.
Thankfully we have other options available to us, like not burning coal for electricity. That has the added advantage of reducing mercury pollution as well as not being the option where we murder a bunch of people. A win-win.
I propose we build a time machine and all go back in time when CO2 levels were lower. We can pass this problem off onto some future generation, just like prior generations have tried to pass it onto us.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Common concrete does have its problems. Often it is not permanent but ages poorly, particularly in salt water environments. The use of volcanic schist to replace rebar is a boob to us all but adding other ingredients to concrete can create a much strong mix. That means that buildings could be made with thinner slabs and supports made of concrete. It may be a way to roll back some pollution and by making buildings more durable actually lower the demand for concrete. Also we just might come up with new materials that will totally eliminate concrete.
The co2 figures for cement production aren't from the energy used to heat the reagents; co2 is one of the byproducts of the reaction.
Every time Pendantic-O looses a barrage of truths, Captain Doofus loses his powaaaaaaaah!
Concrete is a necessary item in today's world.
However, the pollution from it is NOT the actual making of it. The vast majority of the CO2 emissions comes from burning coal to provide heat directly (uhm, china, india, etc), AND/OR from the massive use of coal for electricity.
The only way to clean this up and minimize it, is to shut down coal plants. Keep in mind that NO coal plant can produce clean electricity/heat. At its absolute best, which is impossible to obtain, coal will produce double the CO2 of what methane does. And many many times more what Nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar produce.
SO, for now, we need to quit focusing on small items like aircrafts, and concrete and instead focus on electricity and have all nations QUIT BUILDING NEW COAL PLANTS and instead focus on Nuclear, wind, solar, geo-thermal, hydro, etc. Even Nat Gas should be stopped.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Fuck you. Concrete is the best thing ever.
How much of that extra weight is Dihydrogen Monoxide?
we have plenty if we can get the leftys to shut up. Nuclear power, combined with AE (wind, solar, hydro, geo-thermal, etc), are all clean and perfect.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Every year we are adding 22 Billion tons to the weight of the earth. Sooner or later, that's going to start having an effect.
Like the hollow center collapsing?
I knew Journey to the Center of the Earth was more fact than fiction!
Just fill the hollow center with concrete to strengthen the earth.
I hope you wrote that as a joke because you make something out of nothing. It takes 2 2 billion tons of weight to make 22 billion tons of cement.
A stupid article anyway since it is based on CO2 and assuming it is a problem.
Yep and your going to have to give up copper, steel and aluminium too as all these metals require coal mining.
Now we know baseload power must be nuclear, coal or hydro, but there has been lots of talk about using lithium batteries and I wonder how children mining precious metals feel about that.
I wonder if the green movement has lost it's way, having been fooled into thinking an essential nutrient for life could somehow destroy the planet, only to make the worlds mega rich even richer. Wake up.
That makes sense, and it means that if the exterior is in good shape, the building really *should* be reused rather than torn down. (And it means that comparing it against my friends adobe house is less sensible.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
What is needed is an alternative to steel. Building have a life span maybe up to 100 years. More commonly only 30. Concrete is pourous and invariably water gets absorbed even if it's just water vapor in the air. This rusts the rebar and slowly buildings deteriorate. Structures made without rebar CAN last thousands of years provided there are no earth quakes and they are thicker. But rebar buildings are vastly stronger and more flexable and allows less concrete to be used. If buildings last longer then they won't need to be replaced and more concrete would not be needed.
So the answer is using more expensive composites that can replace steel but do not deteriorate over time.
1. Concrete is safe in terms of structure fires.
2. Concrete is extremely strong.
3. Concrete can be made into nearly any shape, it can be cast on-site in custom forms or cast offsite and trucked-in.
4. Concrete is not vulnerable to UV damage, unlike nearly every other building material.
5. Concrete is not vulnerable to common insects like termites.
As a result of many of the above, Concrete structures LAST, a long time. Just look at all the Roman concrete that is still standing.
There is no othe material that can match or beat concrete across this full range of characteristics. Even steel, which could match many of the above characteristics, still requires protection from corrosion, and that protection (usually some form of paint) ends up being vulnerable and needs to be re-applied over and over again.
Fire, water, termites, ship worms, fungus, and more beat wood every time.
There's a good reason why wood lost out to concrete, steel, glass, and compostites for everything from large buildingd to ships.
Liberals are the reason we use soo much concrete. It works like this. A poor conservative wants to buy affordable housing. So he sets up a tent or builds a log cabin in the woods. This makes rich liberal property owners no money, so the liberals pass laws saying log cabins are not up to code. Now all building must be made with concrete and be built by construction companies owned by rich liberals. However, some people are just too poor to be able to afford the houses run by the liberals. These poor people are called homeless. Liberal hate homelessness because it lowers the values of their housing units that they sell to the middle class.
Therefore In order to 'help' poor people they created Department of housing and urban development. The purpose of this program is to charge the middle class inflated prices to keep poor people in giant concrete housing units called projects or prisons.
In order to fight the concrete scourge we need to outlaw liberals. The first thing that will happen is the conservatives will open up most of the `public` lands to the public. People will move from the filthy liberal run cities to the wide open swaths of land that were previously set aside for the exclusive use of animals. People will no longer have to worry about building to code, so housing will no longer be prohibativly expensive. We will also use far far less concrete. People win, but liberals will loose lots of money, so they will declare my ideas racist and uncaring. Fuck em.
That sounds like an interesting piece in of itself. Do you have anything you've shared beyond the blurb above?
... three years ago. Never looked back since. So yeah, I guess we can.
*Tatum*crash*thud*
Thank you, thank you I'm here all week.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
How, the materials they are using already are present on this planet and have a fixed weight. Now if they were pulling the resources from another planet, that would be a different story.
No, we cannot live with without concrete.
Unfortunately that it is so hard to knock down. Modern concrete buildings use rebar for stength which eventually rusts splitting the concrete as it expands leaving the building structurally unsafe. Both impossible to use and difficult to knock down at the same time. And if you do knock it down not recyclable.
True that.
What would the romans think?
The issue of 'sustainability' can only be cured if there is no human being left on this world
Therefore, if you environmentalists are so concerned about the issue of 'sustainability' all of you should kill yourself
I conquer (word of the day).
It takes 2 2 billion tons of weight to make 22 billion tons of cement.
What if you used concrete for the 2.2 billion tonnes of weight? Then you would only need .22 tonnes to make 22. Do it a couple dozen more times and you could just recycle an old paver to make the worlds entire supply.
Homeopathic Civil Engineering!
> Well, that knocks down the building, and now you have a pile of rubble that is either left to be an eyesore or carted off to be landfill.
What? No.
Demolished concrete is absolutely not waste for a landfill, it's a construction material resource. It is pretty much standard practice for demolished concrete to be diverted from the landfill. Except for incidental demolished concrete (the random chunks by small operations), concrete is typically hauled off to be crushed and reused. At the scale of an abandoned concrete building, I can absolutely guarantee that it will be recycled. Trucks, excavators, and front end loaders will be there for a week or more picking and hauling off that demolished concrete. It will be crushed and supplied as "recycled concrete aggregate", which in most cases is equivalent in new quarry aggregate.
When the recycled concrete is crushed, it is often used as aggregate in new pavements (concrete and asphalt), and even used as the compacted aggregate base below these pavements. Those are the few I've encountered in the industry. The advantages to using recycled concrete is that it replaces material needed from a quarry. Recycled concrete you can usually achieve the same gradations of quarry aggregate. Though it cannot replace the need for very angular aggregate when that interlocking is needed such as in structural backfill.
Not in concrete reality, but perhaps in the abstract.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
How about graphene reinforced concrete:
https://www.dezeen.com/2018/05/03/graphene-reinforced-concrete-stronger-university-of-exeter-scientists/amp/
1. Concrete is safe in terms of structure fires.
So are lots of other materials. Pretty much all of them are more expensive outside of some corner cases.
2. Concrete is extremely strong.
It is strong in compression. Not so much for certain other types of stress. It doesn't handle shear stress well at all unless you reinforce it. Plus it's is hardly the only strong material.
3. Concrete can be made into nearly any shape, it can be cast on-site in custom forms or cast offsite and trucked-in.
Again, not unique to concrete though these are definite assets of the material.
4. Concrete is not vulnerable to UV damage, unlike nearly every other building material.
Steel, aluminum, rock, brick, and many many more are not affected by UV. The only things that are are really wood and plastic.
5. Concrete is not vulnerable to common insects like termites.
Neither is steel. What is your point?
There is no othe material that can match or beat concrete across this full range of characteristics.
And concrete doesn't match any other materials characteristics so again I fail to see your point. But the most important reason we use concrete is that it is CHEAP. When you need a lot of something cost matters.
As a result of many of the above, Concrete structures LAST, a long time. Just look at all the Roman concrete that is still standing.
They last if they are designed well. Using Roman structures is misleading because of survivorship bias. Plenty of concrete structures from that era did not survive.
Even steel, which could match many of the above characteristics, still requires protection from corrosion, and that protection (usually some form of paint) ends up being vulnerable and needs to be re-applied over and over again.
Tell you what. Go ahead and build a suspension bridge out of concrete with a span the length of the Golden Gate. Concrete is a great material. It's not the end all be all of materials. We use it because it performs well and because it is cheap but it isn't the best solution to all problems. If steel were as cheap as concrete you can be sure we would use more of it than we do. But concrete is cheap so we use it in places where from a pure performance standpoint other materials might be preferable but for cost.
He fell to pieces... in an auto scrapyard.
https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
So much to unpack here, jeez. I live in a highly conservative state, with wide tracts of land set aside for animal use. The government does not own this land. Liberals do not own this land. Filthy rich conservatives own this land. Corporations own this land. There are no woods because the conservatives and corporations can plant more crops or raise more cattle on open land vs. forested land. The bulk of realtors here are conservatives. Inside of the few large-ish cities property costs a bunch of cash, this is because of the oil boom that was rendered detrimental to the state by conservatives. Conservatives who whole heartedly bought the lies of oil corporations who are in turn run by conservatives. Construction companies here are, again, run by wealthy conservatives. These companies do substandard work so that they can be paid to redo it year after year, be it roads or buildings. Conservatives run the department of housing, which squeezes every penny out of the hands of the poor for roach infested hovels made of more drywall than concrete. Conservatives then make upgrades to these hovels, at least on the outside, to give them curb appeal and drive up rent... inside the hovels, in order to keep the poor impoverished.
In order to fight the concrete scourge we need to outlaw greed. Not conservatives or liberals, but the jackholes that make $60,000+ a year.
No one in their right mind will move into isolation. Modern conveniences are inextricably tied to the cities.
Also, i apologize for the following ad hominem counter-rant. Building codes create safe and habitable buildings you uneducated fuck. Racism and uncaring do not play into your dimwitted rant. You are out of touch with reality if you honestly believe that the fat cats thst run this country identify as liberal. They identify as whatever group lets them make the most profit so they can afford more disgusting levels of opulence than you will ever possess in your life. I will wholeheartedly admit that both sides have fucked this country raw, and blame rstio shifts from state to state. ND and FL are probably different, same for NY and NV. We live in a diverse but still highly corrupt government which is borderline incapable of caring about its citizenry; so long as profit is favorable.
You still refuse to answer the question!
Does having an extra billion people make a difference? Why is this so hard for you?
I'll even give you a little clue to help you along. Those extra billion people will want jobs and and things, so more businesses will start too.
Whoosh
Wow people don't eat coal. Is that the first thing you said that is true? But still nonsense. When did any one claim people eat coal?
Just more Windy bullshit.
http://sugarmtnfarm.com/cottag...
http://sugarmtnfarm.com/butche...
For a meat processing facility (a.k.a. butcher shop) the cost of labor is the biggest chunk of the budget pie closely followed by energy for eating and cooling. I've long (50 years) been interested in how to make systems like houses work right in our cold northern, but also hot southern, climate with minimal active systems. Our cottage and butcher shop are practical implementations of this.
No
Did you even bother to read how it was calculated? If you had, you would know that they simply took the total energy used and divided by households and capita.
Did you even bother to read it yourself WindBourne, or even use common sense?
For that to be based on total electricity use like you claim, America would have to be producing something like 2-3 times the electricity of China. Hint: America produces less than China.
So reading ability or common sense, it's clear you have neither.
They repeatedly mention residential electricity. There is no justification for your lies. As always you are clearly just making things up.
Across the countries we chose to compare household electricity use varies enormously.
In the US typical household power consumption is about 11,700 kWh each year, in France it is 6,400 kWh, in the UK it is 4,600 kWh and in China around 1,300 kWh. The global average electricity consumption for households with electricity was roughly 3,500 kWh in 2010.
By taking residential electricity use and dividing it by population we can look at how much electricity the average person uses at home in each country.
Each American uses about 4,500 kWh per year in their home.
You clearly didn't read the site but jumped in anyway with your lies.
Gads, why can you not try to think a little before posting as one of the two logons that you have? It would be nice that if I am going to have troll, that you at least had some intelligence rather than just continue lying and being a hypocrite. Shesh, the fact that you are paid by the CHinese gov is bad enough.
Standard response from you WindBourne.
Muddy the water by attacking the messenger instead of the message, sprinkle in a few lies for good measure.
Then try to claim the other person is lying with no evidence at all to back up your claims.
I'm not even going to bother in future with your personal attacks,bring them on, you just hide behind them because you have no arguments. Why you keep following me around and trolling your coal bullshit every time someone shows how bad for the environment America is, is something that only you know.
Personal attacks and lies, it's all you ever bring.
But is any cement actually being produced by this method and is this cement more durable than current Portland cement?