Computation of the environmental performance of ready-mix concrete for reducing CO2 emissions: A case study in Egypt

Abstract

Concrete is one of the largest sources of carbon dioxide (CO2) worldwide due to the use of cement as its main component. The share of CO2 from cement industry is about 7%. There is a growing need for ways and methods to systematically identify, asses, modify, the cement production process for emission reduction. In line with Egypt commitment to climate change in the COP27, a framework is designed for the assessment of the cement plant. The aim of this paper is to investigate and calculate the CO2 emissions from a building in the New Egyptian Administrative Capital in the area of R5 using ready mix concrete. This study used compiled data of emission factors from Titan Egypt cement plant as the producer of cement in R5. The essential data needed for the calculations were collected from the literature with the guidance of the Intergovernmental Panel of Experts on Climate Change (IPCC) Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories, the Cement Sustainability Initiative (CSI) of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) as well as the inventory sustainability reports guided by the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency (EEAA). This is done on two parts: the calculation of CO2 total emissions of the baseline scenario and the second part is a computation of the emissions based on the alternative use of different categories such as raw materials, fuel consumption, energy efficiency, transportation, and water consumption. A comparison between the baseline and the alternative case took place to compute the percentage of reduction in emissions from concrete. The study findings are promising. The total amount of emissions from the concrete used in this project is about 3114.49 tons. By using the mitigation measures, there is a potential reduction in the total CO2 emissions of the building by calculations is concluded to be around 5.94%.