This whitepaper focuses on the tradeoff between operational savings and embodied carbon, which are resulting from retrofit activities. The research presented in this report marks the starting point to shed a light on the relevance of embodied-carbon emissions resulting from energetic retrofits.

Plastic pollution and climate change are serious and interconnected threats to public and planetary health, as well as major drivers of global social injustice. Prolific use of plastics in the construction industry is likely a key contributor, resulting in burgeoning efforts to promote the recycling or downcycling of used plastics.

This work highlights the reactivity of soda-lime glass powder on cement CEM IV-B-L 32.5R. Three colors of soda lime glass were used with varying amount of powder from 0 to 35 wt%. The water demand for standard consistency have increased from 28.40 to 45.93 wt%. The compressive strength increased from 26.46 to 31.66 MPa and the flexural strength also increased from 5.89 to 7.14 MPa after 28 days. The optimal value of 10 wt% of glass powder gave the maximum value of mechanical strength at 28 days.

Some Finnish buildings could cut their carbon footprints by as much as 43% – according to research conducted by One Click LCA for the Finnish government – and almost all could make a saving of 28% using easily available decarbonisation strategies.

Limiting global warming to 1.5°C requires immediate and drastic reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. A significant contributor to anthropogenic global GHG emissions is the production of building materials. Biobased materials offer the potential to reduce such emissions and could be deployed in the short term. Timber construction has received the main attention from policy and industry. However, the implementation of timber construction at the global scale is constrained by the availability of sustainably managed forest supplies.

Construction projects using emerging bio-based materials have been realized over the past ten to fifteen years within Europe. Bio-based buildings utilize properties of natural materials to regulate internal environments, particularly fluctuations in temperature and relative humidity. Despite individual exemplar projects demonstrating functional performance and long-term operational cost savings, there hasn’t been a proliferation of commercial or domestic bio-based projects.

The use of supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs) to replace part of the clinker in cement is the most successful strategy to reduce CO2 emissions in the global cement industry. However, limited supplies of conventional SCMs make it difficult to take this strategy further unless new types of SCMs become available.

The only type of material available in the quantities needed to meet demand is clay containing kaolinite, which can be calcined to produce an effective SCM. Such clays are widely available in countries where most growth in demand for cement is forecast.

There are several facets of aluminum when it comes to sustainability. While it helps to save fuel due to its low density, producing it from ores is very energy-intensive. Recycling it shifts the balance towards higher sustainability, because the energy needed to melt aluminum from scrap is only about 5% of that consumed in ore reduction. The amount of aluminum available for recycling is estimated to double by 2050.

Glass is a material inextricably linked with human civilization. It is also the product of an energy intensive industry. About 75% to 85% of the total energy requirements to produce glass occur when the raw materials are heated in a furnace to more than 1500 °C. During this process, large volumes of emissions arise. The container and flat glass industries, which combined account for 80% of total glass production, emit over 60 million tonne of CO2 per year.

The glass industry is part of the energy-intensive industry posing a major challenge to fulfill the CO₂ reduction targets of the Paris Climate Agreement. The segments of the glass industry, e.g., container or flat glass, are quite diverse and attribute to different glass products with different requirements to product quality and various process options.