In 2002, cement emissions were some 1.4 billion tons of carbon dioxide. In 2021, cement emissions hit nearly 2.9 billion tons, which is more than 7% of the global carbon emissions.
Sheep graze on a grass land near a cement plant on the outskirts of Beijing, China, Oct. 17, 2015.
“Cement emission have grown faster than most other carbon sources,” said Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson, who leads Global Carbon Project, a group of scientists that track worldwide climate pollution and publish their work in peer reviewed journals. “Cement emissions were also unusual in that they never dropped during COVID. They didn’t grow as much, but they never declined the way oil, gas and coal did.
Rick Bohan, senior vice president for sustainability at the industry group Portland Cement Association, said, “in the U.S., 60% of our CO2 is a chemical fact of life... The reality is concrete is a universal building material. There is no single construction project that doesn’t use some amount of concrete in it.”“Each person on the planet is consuming on average more than a kilogram of cement per day,” said University of California Earth systems scientist Steve Davis.
China is key because it produced more than half of the world’s cement emissions in 2021, with India a distant second at about 9%, Andrew’s data shows. The United States spewed 2.5% of the emissions from cement, ranking fifth behind Vietnam and Turkey.China is not just making and using more cement, but the carbon intensity has been going up a lot lately, IEA’s Voss said.
Different cement uses have specific needs, such as strength versus longevity but users often just want the strongest and most durable when they don’t need it and this causes unnecessary emissions, Bohan said.
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