Review of published EPDs for cement and concrete

Materials
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Buildings and Cities is a new international, open access, peer reviewed journal focusing on the built environment. They have recently published an article on the review and analysis of hundereds of published EPDs for cements and thousands of EPDs for concretes. There is a discussion about the ranges of GWP and energy, as well as the issues with current inconsistencies, data gaps, and lack of transparency such as disclosure of clinker content and use of secondary fuels. The paper provides a great deal of insight and some cautions about use of EPD information and is also useful to help people find EPDs as the full listing of all EPDs used in the analysis is also provided.

Embodied carbon of concrete in buildings

The Buildings and Cities journal also provides other sustainability and embodied carbon papers that may be of interest to this group.

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Thank you, Matt! Considerably informative.

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Thanks for posting, Matt.
The authors have done a great job analysing all these different EPDs and highlighted some of the methodological pain points (e.g. allocation of fly-ash and BFS; treatment of secondary fuels). Notwithstanding those issues, the spread in EPD results is quite reasonable in my view, when you consider how many variables are in play across these hundreds of EPDs. Of course, CO2e is the “safe” indicator which is reasonably well understood. If you looked at other environmental indicators reported through the EPDs (e.g. acidification, eutrophication, etc.), all bets are off.

Cheers,
Rob