MIT: CSHub’s Dr. Gregory Testimony on “Role of Concrete in Sustainable Development”; & CSHub Funding for Phase III Cemented for 5 More Years

The September 28th Newsletter of MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub (CSHub) features news about the testimony of Dr. Jeremy Gregory, Executive Director-CS Hub, before the House Energy & Commerce Committee’s Environment and Climate Change subcommittee. The CSHub is an interdisciplinary team of researchers dedicated to concrete and infrastructure science, engineering, and economics.

Dr. Gregory delivered informative and compelling remarks about the role of concrete in sustainable development and strategies to reduce its environmental impact. His comments provided some perspectives that run counter to incomplete and inaccurate information often communicated by the media and other information sources. He said, “Concrete plays a critical role in achieving societal goals for sustainable development. Calls for increased housing to address affordable housing shortages and more resilient buildings and infrastructure to mitigate the impacts of natural disasters will…lead to increased construction using concrete.”

Due to its importance in these construction applications, concrete has become the world’s most popular building material. In fact, production volumes of cement, the ingredient that gives concrete its strength, surpass that of steel by a factor of three. “This significant consumption is…important to address when setting industrial emission targets,” said Gregory.

Existing policies, however, can make it difficult for manufacturers to invest in the installation of energy efficiency and carbon capture technologies. “Congress should…encourage, rather than discourage, investments in energy efficiency and carbon capture, use and storage technologies,” Gregory advised.

Gregory’s testimony provided policymakers with the fundamentals of concrete’s environmental impact and presented a roadmap for future action. “The concrete and cement industries will need help from Congress,” he said. “Congress can start by reducing the barriers manufacturers face to taking early action.”

The newsletter also included a summary/overview of 2 research briefs:
“The Role of Pavements in Meeting GHC Reduction Targets-Volume 2019, Issue 6“ details the role of pavements in meeting greenhouse gas-reduction targets. The brief describes an approach to network asset management in Missouri that would reduce C02 emissions by 29.9 million metric tons on the state’s highways.

“The Role of Pavements in Meeting GHC Reduction Targets-Volume 2019, Issue 7“ describes a new performance-based planning model proposed CSHub researchers that could help state DOT’s better manage what the ASCE estimates is a $420 billion backlog of projects.

For the 2 tech briefs, please click on link above, on the images, or go to:
ISSUE 6: https://cshub.mit.edu/sites/default/files/images/GHG%20Reduction%20Pavements%20Brief.pdf
ISSUE 7:
https://cshub.mit.edu/sites/default/files/images/Treatment%20Types%20Research%20Brief.pdf
For the CS Hub website, and to subscribe to the newsletter, please go to: https://cshub.mit.edu

Funding for sustainable concrete
cemented for five more years:

CSHub has renewed its relationship with its industry partners for another five years, and will continue to study the environmental impacts of concrete and the hazard resilience of the built environment.

Founded in 2009, CSHub has spent a decade—Two 5-year phases—collaborating with the Portland Cement Association (PCA) and the Ready Mixed Concrete Research & Education Foundation (RMC) to achieve durable and sustainable buildings and infrastructure in ever-more-demanding environments. Over its next 5-year phase—Phase III—CSHub will receive $10 M of additional funding from its partners to continue its research efforts.

Julia Garbini, Executive Director-RMC said, “Taking CSHub’s work to the next level will not only help us achieve our goal of making concrete more sustainable, but will also continue to strengthen our communities by providing designers, owners, and policymakers with the best information and tools available to make the best choices for their construction projects.’

According to Michael Ireland, President & CEO-PCA, CSHub’s past research has also allowed the industry to investigate the unique properties of concrete and cement. “For 10 years and counting, the MIT CSHub has helped the cement and concrete industry to identify and study the myriad benefits of its products.”

Concrete, the world’s most-used building material, extremely strong and stiff material that can be produced nearly anywhere from readily available ingredients, using relatively inexperienced labor. Concrete also offers numerous properties such as durability, formability, and thermal mass that can reduce energy consumption.

Dr. Gregory said, “On a per-unit-weight basis, concrete is a low-environmental impact material. It’s essential to our built environment due to its durability, strength, and affordability. As a consequence, it’s the most-used building material in the world and hence, there is a significant opportunity to look at how we balance both its role in sustainable development and lower its environmental impact.”

Franz-Josef Ulm, Faculty Director-CSHub and Professor-MIT said, “Classical concrete science and structural engineering often use top-down approaches. You identify weaknesses at a large scale, go to a smaller scale, make a change, and then observe the response. It is different when you go from the bottom-up—you have all of the possibilities in front of you.”

To do this, over the past decade CSHub has taken a bottom-up approach—studying concrete from its nanoscale to its application in pavements and buildings, all the way to its role in urban environments and broader economic systems—to develop tools that measure the costs, environmental impacts, and hazard resilience of infrastructure and construction projects.

2018—developed the Break-Even Mitigation Percentage Dashboard to provide developers with data on the costs of hazard mitigation. The dashboard shows the return on investment for hazard-resistant construction. In some communities, researchers found that that return can come as early as two years. Their investigation into the life cycle of buildings has also led to the creation of the Building Attribute to Impact Algorithm (BAIA), which informs designers of which aspects of a building will have the strongest impact on its life cycle cost and environmental impact.

Researchers have applied these same life-cycle perspectives to pavements. A case study conducted with North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) highlighted actions that could reduce spending on pavements by tens of millions of dollars while meeting or exceeding performance and emissions targets.

Recent CSHub materials science research has also informed the discovery of novel solutions to longstanding durability issues in concrete. In particular, researchers identified new explanations for two major causes of damage in concrete—freeze-thaw cycles and alkali-silica reaction.

“Whenever you touch old problems, there are perceptions that they are very difficult to change. However, here we applied a bottom-up approach to an old problem and found solutions that have not been looked at before,” said Ulm.

In Phase III, CSHub will expand its scope to investigate concrete’s role in solving economic, environmental, and social challenges. Dr. Gregory added, “We have done a lot of work in the [first] two phases on the technical aspects of concrete. What we are trying to do in this next phase is to conduct research that will engage the broader public by leveraging crowdsourced data, artificial intelligence, and the latest tools of data science.”

“… Now entering Phase III, we are excited about the opportunities this close-industry-academia collaboration brings to MIT, the concrete industry, and society at large,” said Markus Bueller, Jerry McAfee Professor in Engineering and MIT Department Head-Civil and Environmental Engineering. “Applying cutting-edge fundamental research to problems in industry has the potential for large-scale impact.”

One Phase III project is already in development—the CARBIN app that uses a smartphone to record pavement quality from within a moving vehicle. For the APP LINKS: 1) Apple Store for iPhones and 2) Google Play Store for Android phones, and the September 2019 ISCP article titled “MIT’s “Carbin App” Enhanced—Participate Today!”, please go to: https://www.concretepavements.org/2019/09/29/mits-carbin-app-enhanced-participate-today/

For the CSHub article, please go to: https://cshub.mit.edu/news/cshubs-jeremy-gregory-testifies-house-committee-energy-and-commerce
For Dr. Gregory’s testimony, please go to: https://cshub.mit.edu/news/cshubs-jeremy-gregory-testifies-house-committee-energy-and-commerce
For the MIT article titled “Funding for sustainable concrete cemented for five more years”, please go to: http://news.mit.edu/2019/renewed-funding-sustainable-concrete-1004