Cement production alone accounts for roughly 8% of global carbon emissions. The calcination process — heating limestone to produce clinker — releases CO2 as a chemical inevitability, not just an energy inefficiency. Our cities are built from it. Our infrastructure runs on it. And unlike timber or steel, conventional concrete has almost no viable reuse pathway: it gets crushed into aggregates at end of life, losing most of its embodied value in the process.
There are levers being pulled. On the production side, Supplementary Cementitious Materials (SCMs) — fly ash, ground granulated blast furnace slag, calcined clay — can replace a significant share of cement in a mix, reducing embodied carbon without sacrificing structural performance. Performance-based specification, where engineers define durability and compressive strength requirements rather than prescribing a standard mix, opens the door to lower-carbon alternatives. The UK’s Low Carbon Concrete Routemap, Norway’s Lavkarbonbetong standard, and The Concrete Sustainability Council are all pushing in this direction — but there is still no agreed European benchmark, and EPD coverage across concrete manufacturers remains patchy.
On the reuse side, the key is connection design. Enabling concrete columns, beams, and panels to be reused requires careful design and reversible implementation of connections (source: One Click LCA)— precast elements with mechanical fixings rather than cast-in-place monolithic structures. It is technically possible. It is rarely specified.
So: how are you navigating concrete on your projects? Are you writing performance-based specifications or pushing suppliers toward EPDs? Have you worked with CEMIIIA / CEMIIIB or low-carbon concrete mixes in practice — and what was the resistance? And is anyone in Europe actually specifying precast concrete for reuse? What are the manufacturers with the lowes impact?