Page 29 - Hub-4 Magazine Issue 80
P. 29

 Concrete Review
 Why sustainability is a concrete matter
As with the majority of the construction industry, concrete production is in a state of flux as it tries to balance growing project demands with the need for a more sustainable approach to building. However, James Bullock, managing director of ConSpare, says that by taking a holistic approach to reducing carbon emissions associated with production, concrete batch plants can not only be more sustainable, but save on cost as well...
With global construction output expected to grow by 42% by 2030 according to the Institute of Civil Engineers, concrete usage is only going to increase. Our comprehensive database puts the number of batching plants in the UK at approximately 2,000, with these plants currently contributing 1.5% of the nation’s carbon footprint per year.
The importance of concrete batch plants
The concrete industry is undertaking a wide range of solutions to reduce its environmental impact, but often the concrete batching plant itself is overlooked. What measures can be undertaken at a batching plant level to complement other carbon reduction initiatives?
Producing concrete through concrete batch plants has always been a resource intensive process. It requires large volumes of raw materials, particularly high CO2 cement, is powered by electricity, and consumes large amounts of steel components such as wear parts and spare parts.
The challenge today is finding ways in which this long-running approach to concrete batching plant operation can be improved to provide reductions in both carbon emissions and cost.
Challenges in the process and maintaining the process
The concrete production process has five distinct stages; storage, conveying, batching, mixing, and discharging (Fig 1).
Breaking the activities of a typical concrete batch plant down into these processes allows producers to find the problems which are creating inefficiencies, which can then be assessed and their impact on production analysed.
Although an initial problem may seem small at batch level, for example, a little extra cement added to each batch to ensure strength requirements are met, or mixers taking a few extra seconds to homogenise the mix, the additional cost and carbon emissions start to add-up very quickly.
When you combine this with the linear process of concrete production, any problems start to have knock-on effects across other elements of the process and can create bottlenecks. This cumulative effect ensures great rewards can be found when tackling problems within the batch plant and production process.
When you consider that a concrete batch plant often has an operational life of up to 30 years, plant maintenance decisions, however small, will have an important impact over time, in terms of both carbon emissions and whole-life maintenance costs.
Even the highest performance concrete batching plant will reduce in efficiency over time, and proactive maintenance investments and maintenance interventions provide a perfect platform to implement further improvements.
If the concrete industry can draw on the theory of marginal gains – making small, seemingly insignificant changes to processes that compound over time into wholesale improvements – this has the ability to make a big impact on improving plant uptime and Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) while simultaneously delivering carbon reduction.
By constantly making small improvements, our combined journey to net zero is accelerated – especially when these changes have the potential to be scaled up throughout the wider industry. >
 Fig 1. The concrete production process, consisting of storage, conveying, batching, mixing, and discharging
 www.hub-4.com May/June - Issue 80
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