Life-Cycle Assessment of Sustainable Concrete

Dear Colleagues,

As one of the most carbon-intensive industries worldwide, the construction industry contributes to over one-third of total carbon emissions and energy consumption across all industries. Concrete is the most widely used construction material in the world. Finding sustainable alternatives to conventional concrete materials and developing advanced techniques for construction are crucial for mitigating the remarkable contribution of the construction industry to environmental impacts. For example, some promising solutions are using recycled aggregate, industrial by-products (e.g., fly ash, silica fume, ground granulated blast furnace slag), and compression casting. Hence, to promote the application of sustainable concrete in the construction industry, it is an urgent task to quantify the environmental impacts of sustainable construction materials across their life cycles (i.e., raw material extraction, production, construction, maintenance, disposal, and recycling), besides the mechanical properties. Life-cycle assessment (LCA) has emerged as an important tool for evaluating the environmental performance of construction materials and guiding sustainable decision-making in the built environment. This Special Issue aims to provide selected contributions on advances in the environmental assessment, economic analysis, and optimization design of sustainable concrete materials, with the aim of the sustainable development of the construction industry.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Environmental assessment of sustainable concrete;
• Economic analysis of sustainable concrete;
• New materials and techniques for concrete construction;
• Recycled and reused materials for concrete;
• Concrete material optimization based on LCA;
• LCA of sustainable concrete considering durability;
• Case studies of LCA in practical applications.

Dr. Xiaoxu Huang
Dr. Biao Hu
Dr. Yurong Zhang
Guest Editors

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