How the cement industry has become the good guy by reducing carbon emmissions

Carbon foot printing is complex!  I am currently involved in carbon footprint assessments as part of the Confronting Climate Change project which is part of the Sustainable Fruit and Wine Industry Initiative.
This project focuses primarily on activities in the agricultural sector and the interlinked supply chains within this industry which include the farms, wineries, pack houses with cold storage and finally distribution.  The carbon footprints of each of these boundaries need to be reported on for numerous reasons which include benchmarks, tracking and continuous improvement.  This push to initiate a project like this originally came from retailers overseas who are trying to reduce their overall carbon intake and then the changing climatic conditions in the country which is detrimentally affecting the fruit and wine industry.  The EU has limits on it's intake of carbon or the carbon flows from other countries, which means products entering the EU are being monitored on their carbon footprints more strictly and if it is too high then this will have a detrimental affect on future trade.  This knock on effect will be felt even more so in the fruit and wine industry in South Africa.  In the fruit industry if farmers do not export at least 70% of their products, they stare bankruptcy in the face which in turn means job losses, less contribution to overall GDP, slowed economic growth and the list goes on.  As you can see, the consequences are massive and need to be taken seriously as soon as possible.  And of course let's not forget to mention the carbon taxes coming into play by 2020 for the agricultural sector.

To move away from the agricultural sector, one industry has made great strides in transforming itself from the bad guy to the hero in reducing carbon emissions: cement.  Alongside other major industrial sectors, the cement industry has a major obligation to contribute towards achieving the objective of reducing carbon emissions to stay within the global carbon budget, particularly since the traditionally resource-intensive cement making process has resulted in the industry being ranked among the world’s top contributors of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions.  The global carbon budget has been calculated at 1000 billion tons starting from pre-Industrial revolution times.  We have already used up half of that budget which means we are already experiencing a 2°C rise in average global temperatures compared to before the Industrial revolution.

Source: University of Cambridge, Program for Sustainability and Leadership

To explain a bit more about what processes take place in the cement industry, let's start with the raw materials.  Lime and other minerals are used as inputs which are mined from quarries (land use change).  None of these materials are recyclable.  Then the energy required to power the kilns for klinker production is considerable and the process releases large amounts of green house gasses into the atmosphere (coal burned in kilns and electricity from national grid).  Energy conservation has become a big driver in the industry not just because of rising costs but also the availability of that energy due to Eskom not keeping up with industry expansion and dwindling supplies of cheap coal.  Electricity emission factors in South Africa are also very high because it is derived from coal.  Taking all this into account, it takes 200 kg of coal to produce 1 ton of klinker and the entire process releases 900kg of CO2 e into the atmosphere for every ton of cement produced. Consequently, the global cement industry has been identified as contributing more than 5% of the total global carbon emissions. To add to this, economic growth is invariably associated with an increase in demand for cement and other building materials and this has prompted the industry to find new ways to overcome the associated environmental challenges and so embrace the challenge of making cement production a sustainable process.

The widespread calls for 'green cement' has prompted the industry to follow approaches ranging from reforming international building codes to finding alternative solutions to the traditional high energy intensive cement. +AfriSam has been at the forefront of achieving this 'greening' of the industry. Project Green Cement which was initiated in 2000 to measure and then identify these hot spots and thereafter reduce CO2 emissions has resulted in the following:

• CO2 emissions per ton of cement has been reduced by more than 30%.
• world first carbon rating system on all cement bags.
• reduced electrical energy consumption by 25% and thermal energy consumption by 40%,
• using alternative raw materials with lower carbon footprints to produce a 'composite' cement.
• instead of using clinker which is highly environmentally unfriendly, using pozolanic mineral components which is made up of by-products from other industries such as Ground Granulated Blast Furnace Slag (GGBFS) from the steel manufacturing industry, Pulverised Fly Ash (PFA) from coal-powered stations and silica fume, a by-product of silicon and ferrosilicon alloy production.  A perfect example of industrial symbiosis.

Well done Afrisam!  An example of a responsible and sustainable business the rest of the industry can follow.