Without determined action, embodied carbon will soon balloon to 85 per cent of the built environment’s emissions. Yet, the federal budget handed down this week had little support for the industry to decarbonise, despite its support for renewable energy and the government’s continued decarbonisation targets.
In a recent interview, SmartCrete CRC’s chief executive, Clare Tubolets, sounded the alarm.
With the CRC she runs slated to conclude next year, she told The Fifth Estate that there are still very few plans to adopt any of its research into government procurement policies, which are well known to be able to kick forward market transformation.
Also, absent are any commitments to fight regulatory barriers that innovative businesses face when commercialising low carbon concrete.
Tubolets says the CRC she runs has invested around $74 million into technical research on a portfolio of projects. But what’s emerged is that the big challenges are not technical.
“We know how to decarbonise concrete,” she says. In fact, “this industry is really good at solving all the technical issues”.
Rather, what’s lacking is support for getting products commercialised.
There’s plenty of discontent in the industry. And the roadblocks are not just with the government. There seems to be huge inertia in any decision making around sustainability commitments as well.
One private sector source who has developed low carbon concrete said they were immensely frustrated, telling The Fifth Estate that marketing their company’s products as “low carbon” or “sustainable” often gets their company referred to the “sustainability person”.
This often means the procurement process is stretched out over months of meetings, interrogation and presentations. Only to often end up going nowhere – and for specified reasons. It’s a waste of time and resources, the source who preferred to remain anonymous said.
Tubolets says major market barriers that need to be tackled are in logistics frameworks, supply chains, risk sharing and pricing mechanisms. Then there were regulatory barriers and unharmonised state and local government procurement policies.
“There’s lots of weird regulatory barriers to the use of new materials,” Tubolets said. For example, 3D printing can allow houses to be built in 72 hours and reduce the strain on the already stretched construction workforce, which is expected to be in short supply by almost 190,000 people by 2035.
Yet because 3D printed structures are not defined in the National Construction Code, they cannot attain immediate occupation certificates. An engineer needs to be hired to test whether each house meets performance requirements.
Another example is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in some states is blocking the use of refuse based fuels. This means that some rubbish destined for landfill can’t be burned as a fuel source for cement.
This would be a good pathway to move away from coal, Tubolets says. But state-based EPAs are blocking the use of such solutions through controlling whether waste is classified for landfill or can be reused as industrial byproducts.
The supply chain is another problem; it doesn’t have enough knowledge about low carbon concrete materials to be able to implement them, Tubolets says.
“What we’re advocating to the government is that we don’t need to keep doing that technical research.
“What we need to do is start addressing the system that actually enables us to use all the great research and technology that we’ve already developed.”
But is low carbon more expensive?
The price issue is a bit of a red herring, Tubolets says. Low carbon concrete products on the market at the moment are at about cost parity.
However, there could be cost implications in construction processes from changing from one product to another.
“That’s just a process that we have to work through.”
Risk is the big barrier
But the biggest barrier is perceived risk, Tubolets says.
“In terms of our infrastructure, we certify roads for 40 years, bridges for 100 years, buildings for 50 years; these are long term assets.”
But when it comes to geopolymer concrete, it’s been tested for 40 years, but this does not give the industry certainty about how it might perform in a building after 50 years.
In a bridge, for instance, while there are accelerated aging processes where it is possible to test the load of cars driving over it artificially, and how fast the structure might fail, it’s not entirely possible to predict the performance of different concrete mixes.
Risks need to be priced into a product for people to feel more confident about the material, Tubolets says.
“It’s not just about the price; it’s also that failure in our infrastructure would be catastrophic if a bridge falls down – lives are at risk, so it’s a space no one really wants to play in.”
And when engineers certify a product or design that doesn’t fall within the standards of the National Construction Code, they personally take on the performance risk.
“You get this risk adverse environment when they are legislatively held to account for their performance.”
Picking the low hanging fruit
Tubolets says there’s plenty of low hanging fruit that can increase the uptake of low carbon concrete, such as better use of finance and insurance to price in risks, remediation and repair.
Another is for governments to take on risks. Their projects already consume about a third of all concrete used to build bridges, roads, hospitals, schools and footpaths. “Government has a really powerful lever as a buyer, as part of the supply chain.”
The government can also set market incentives for players such as Holcim and Boral to invest in manufacturing these materials at scale. And governments are best placed to take that level of risk because they are in a better position to maintain these assets financially, Tubolets said.
The reality is that big players in the concrete market already have low carbon products, and developers and the government need to ask for them.
The easiest solution of all is to introduce a carbon price through using methodologies that have already been established by embodied carbon calculation tools, such as Green Star rating and NABERS.
“If you apply our ridiculously low carbon value under the ACCU scheme, which is between $38 to $42, you could massively increase uptake of low carbon materials because they would be drastically cheaper [compared to] higher emitting.”
SmartCrete CRC’s activities are funded by its industry and university partners and an Australian Commonwealth Government grant.