The challenges facing humanity in the 21st century include climate change, population growth, overconsumption of resources, overproduction of waste and increasing energy demands. For construction practitioners, responding to these challenges means creating a built environment that provides accommodation and infrastructure with better whole-life performance using lower volumes of primary materials, less non-renewable energy, wasting less and causing fewer disturbances to the natural environment.  Concrete is ubiquitous in the built environment. It is therefore essential that it is used in the most sustainable way so practitioners must become aware of the range of sustainable concrete solutions available for construction. While sustainable development has been embedded into engineering curricula, it can be difficult for students and academics to be fully aware of the innovations in sustainable construction that are developed by the industry. 

Sustainable Concrete Solutions serves as an introduction to and an overview of the latest developments in sustainable concrete construction.  It provides useful guidance, with further references, to students, researchers, academics and practitioners of all construction disciplines who are faced with the challenge of designing, specifying and constructing with concrete.

Professor Costas Georgopoulos is a Chartered Engineer, Fellow and elected member of the Council of the Institution of Structural Engineers, Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers, Fellow of the Higher Academy of Education and Fellow of the Concrete Society, with over 30 years of experience in consulting engineering, academia and professional bodies in the UK and overseas. His expertise on sustainable design and construction using concrete has been developed in posts such as Manager of Education & Training for The Concrete Centre and Chair in Structural Engineering Practice at Kingston University London.

Dr Andrew Minson is a Chartered Engineer, Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers and Member of the Institution of Structural Engineers.  He has been Executive Director for the concrete industry funded research, publishing and training body, The Concrete Centre, in the UK since 2009 and in this role is responsible for the UK cement and concrete industry sustainable construction strategy which was launched in 2008 and updated in 2012.  He was on the buildings task group of the UK Innovation and Growth Team Low Carbon Construction review published in 2010, is on the Greening the Industry panel of the UK Green Construction Board  and is a member of the IStructE  sustainability panel.   Since completing a doctorate at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, his 20 years experience has been equally split between Arup in building engineering and The Concrete Centre.

Preface 

Foreword

Professor Jacqui Glass

Chair in Architecture and Sustainable Construction, Loughborough University

1. Introduction

            1.1 Sustainability and Sustainable Development

            1.2 The Role of the Design Team in Sustainable Development

            1.3 Sustainability Credentials of Concrete

            1.4 Book Layout and Context

2. Challenges & Responses

            2.1 Introduction

            2.2 Climate Change

            2.3 Environmental Protection

            2.4 Social Progress

            2.5 Economic Growth

            2.6 Regulatory Responses

            2.7 Summary

3. Conceptual Design of Buildings & Infrastructure

3.1 Introduction

3.2 Conceptual Design of Buildings

3.3 Conceptual Design of Infrastructure

3.4 Summary

4. Material Specification

4.1 Introduction

4.2 Assessing Environmental Impacts of Materials

4.3 Responsible Sourcing of Materials

4.4 Cements and Combinations

4.5 Aggregates

4.6 Water

4.7 Admixtures

4.8 Novel Constituents

4.9 Reinforcement

4.10 Special Concretes

4.11 Specification Examples

4.12 Summary

5. Construction, Operation and End of Life

            5.1 Construction         

            5.2 Operation

            5.3 End of Life

            5.4 Summary

 Appendix A: Thermal Mass

 Appendix B: Biomass Product

 Appendix C: Choice of Concrete Slab Options

 Appendix D: Worked Example on Embodied CO₂ for a Building Slab

 Index