China has surpassed the EU to become the largest carbon market in the world, and around 1000 cement enterprises in China are included in this mandatory trading scheme.
During a trip to Beijing over Christmas, The Fifth Estate dropped in on the China Building Materials Federation to get a better understanding of the work they’re engaged in to create more sustainable building materials – and to accurately certify their embodied carbon and any other important criteria that meet the demands of Australian clients.
We interviewed Jin Zhang, secretary-general of CBMF’s green & low carbon branch and conducted a walkthrough tour of one of the showrooms, which we recorded on video, after an introduction by Matrak’s Shane Hodgkin following our Circular Disruption event in November last year.
Zhang said the CBMF evolved from China’s National Bureau for Building Materials, which started in 1956. It became its own association after restructuring in the 2000s and serves three purposes, to:
- provide government consultation and assistance with creating policies and mechanisms
- provide consultation to enterprises on industry standards on technological innovation
- serve the public through research into sustainable development goals and encouraging corporate social responsibility (CSR).
The state of play for the industry
In 2020, the Chinese government enacted its “dual carbon target” to achieve a nationwide carbon peak by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060. The building materials industry, however, achieved peak carbon emissions between 2023 and 2024, and from 2025 onwards, the country has focused on transitioning from peak carbon to carbon neutral.
“Our focus is on how to enable enterprises to continue to reduce emissions to eventually reach net zero for the whole industry,” Zhang said. Which is why the “six zeroes” policy was introduced for the industry to encourage zero carbon emissions amongst manufacturers and producers.
The six zeroes include zero purchased electricity, zero fossil fuels, zero primary resources, zero carbon emissions, zero waste, and zero staff via robotics.
Zhang elaborates that zero purchased electricity, fossil fuels, and carbon emissions focus on improving the industry’s energy structure and efficiency. Meanwhile, zero primary resources and waste are focused on more efficient resource utilisation to reduce the use of virgin materials and move towards recycled and renewable resources.
“There might be some questions around ‘zero staff’ – it’s actually more of a positioning for AI and digitisation to help remove humans from hazardous and high-intensity labour conditions and not about reducing employment or violating labour laws,” Zhang said.
Decarbonisation pressures
Compared to the new energy or AI sectors, the building materials industry is more traditional, serving traditional manufacturing and real estate, Zhang said.
And the challenges with traditional sectors are that they continue to use existing infrastructure and production models, which are reliant on heavy resources and energy use.
“How society perceives these materials is changing. As we move forward, people will start to reject using these materials because they will feel these industries consume too much natural resources, and yet these materials don’t perform well and haven’t contributed to changing our living environment.”
According to Zhang, one of the biggest challenges these companies face is how to change public perception towards traditional industries. Which is what makes the six zeroes, which aim to have companies reduce resource use and environmental damage, an attractive concept that’s worth adopting.
“There might be some questions around ‘zero staff’ – it’s actually more of a positioning for AI and digitisation to help remove humans from hazardous and high-intensity labour conditions and not about reducing employment or violating labour laws”
This would prove that companies have committed to using fewer resources to produce materials that deliver change to society and our living environment.
The concepts of carbon emissions, greenhouse gases and climate change are a great entry point to discussing our challenges, because whether in the US, Australia or in China, we share a common environment, Zhang said.
And through these topics, upstream companies, downstream developers and the public can find alignment on how they could work together to mitigate climate change.
How the stick increased innovation for the cement industry
“In recent years, we’ve experimented with innovation [to help decarbonise] materials. Upstream, we’ve been working on zero carbon factories, with a focus on tracing the carbon footprint of our products, because as everyone knows, 30-40 per cent of building emissions originate from building materials.”
Mandatory carbon market scheme for cement
Other than steel, the biggest emitter is cement, which has been a heavy focus for the federation for the past two years. During this time, a mandatory carbon market scheme for cement was launched, requiring any companies exceeding certain emission benchmarks to spend additional funds purchasing carbon allowances.
“China has surpassed the EU to become the largest carbon market in the world, and around 1000 cement enterprises in China are included in this mandatory trading scope,” Zhang said.
“Cement emissions largely come from the calcination of natural limestone, and these minerals need to be replaced to reduce carbon emissions. Which is why we are now utilising international mainstream [decarbonisation] research in China.”
In addition, the country’s cement manufacturers are also substituting the fuel source for processing cement by using the co-processing (simultaneous recycling of mineral materials and recovery of energy) of waste as a heat source for the kilns, as well as implementing further energy efficiency measures in the process. (This involves simultaneous recycling of mineral materials and recovery of energy.)
“These measures are already widely used and common among all Chinese cement companies.
“We believe China’s cement industry is at the global forefront in terms of both technology and low emissions.”
“China has surpassed the EU to become the largest carbon market in the world, and around 1000 cement enterprises in China are included in this mandatory trading scope”
Cement isn’t the only solution to concrete
Zhang explains that cement brings the most direct impact for downstream builders due to it being an upstream product, and once moved downstream into concrete and other cement products, it will ultimately impact building emissions.
The best way to reduce the footprint of concrete is to use less cement, he said. But quality control standards in both China and Australia mean there is a limit to how much cement could be reduced. And therefore, there is a need to reduce from other raw materials such as aggregates and admixtures.
According to their research, there are two approaches; the first was introducing a carbon grading or labelling system for low carbon concrete. After meeting mandatory minimum carbon emissions standards, the products will receive certifications to encourage concrete companies to purchase lower carbon products.
The other is to reduce the emissions of sand and gravel aggregates, which account for 6 per cent of concrete’s carbon footprint. Inspired by research and development by Brazil’s Vale, one of the largest mining companies in the world, China’s industry adopted methods such as utilising sand manufactured from industrial tailings or recycled aggregates from crushed construction waste.
“We’re currently looking into turning [the production of] recycled aggregates from crushed construction waste into tradable carbon credits,” Zhang said.
“For the past two years, we’ve been vigorously promoting the use of metallurgical and limestone mine tailings in concrete in China.”
Some examples of companies at the forefront of development include Huaxin Cement, which works on a high level of fuel substitution with construction waste, and Anhui Conch Cement, which focuses on utilising CCUS (carbon capture utilisation and storage) in their materials.
“We believe China’s cement industry is at the global forefront in terms of both technology and low emissions.”
The latter also built the nation’s first “zero purchased electricity” facility in Shandong, utilising solar PV, wind-powered electricity and biomass energy to eliminate the need for external power.
In the concrete space, a subsidiary of China Building Materials in Nanjing has developed a new technology that injects CO2 into the early stage production of concrete to achieve carbon sequestration, which has reached early commercial release.
In another process under development, the country is piloting the use of carbon dioxide to cure precast concrete structures, therefore trapping carbon in its structures.
Policies for change
The core issue is ultimately how to motivate downstream producers to pay for these low-carbon materials, Zhang said. For a long time, it was China’s Green Public Procurement (GPP) policy. Originally, this was only a direct subsidy for green consumer goods such as furniture and renovation materials and wasn’t focused on construction materials used by the building sector.
Over the past two years, the country has introduced a new policy to incentivise the purchase of green and low-carbon building materials. Currently, more than 100 cities in China are piloting the policy, which has specific indicators for green building materials.
These indicators have specifications around the use of energy, resources, environmental emissions, and quality. However, the policy didn’t include much on greenhouse gas emissions and carbon footprint; these have only been included in the GPP mechanism. This meant downstream users could intentionally or unintentionally overlook the policy requirements.
Carbon emissions and indicators are hard to measure
This was likely because carbon emissions and indicators are hard to directly measure, said Zhang. Developers and consumers can’t just “feel” the difference between high, low or zero carbon products, the same way they can tell the difference between “high or low quality” products or products using recycled or virgin materials.
“That’s why we’ve been focused on solving the information asymmetry and increasing the transparency of products, which will increase mutual trust between upstream and downstream as well as empower consumers to cultivate the habit of purchasing greener building materials.
Improving confidence in the data and the process is key
“If upstream can achieve greater transparency in disclosing data, the downstream will have more trust in the carbon data and products with ‘low-carbon’ or ‘green’ endorsements.”
The solution to transparency is already mature in markets such as Australia, Europe, and the US, which have Environmental Product Declarations (EPD).
“EPD reports allow us to understand the product’s climate change impacts, acidification and eutrophication.”
However, completing even one EPD report has significant challenges, Zhang said. The report needs signification amount of underlying data to create a life cycle analysis. For example, to understand the climate impact of concrete over its lifecycle requires data on the impacts of cement, and perhaps its sand and gravel additives.
“Ideally, we like the data to be provided by our commercial suppliers, but practically, they may not be able to trace the environmental impacts of all suppliers – and therefore having databases is crucial.”
A raw materials data set is on the way
While countries such as Australia and Europe have matured commercial databases to help companies make EPD statements, China lacks a comprehensive database for industries such as construction and building materials. And therefore, the federation has also been focused on creating a “raw material dataset”.
“For Chinese firms at this stage, transparency is more important than data quality. People might argue about high quality disclosure, but we think the first step should be just to get started – which is often the most difficult.
“The second step would be to improve transparency, and the third step would be to improve quality.”
The Chinese view of bamboo, hemp and waste
As to some favourite materials for low carbon, such as bamboo, Zhang said that it’s not used in its natural form but rather processed into large sheets of veneer to use as cladding, for example, over a steel core to reduce the use of steel in the project.
The most common usage in China right now is using bamboo cladding over pipes to reduce base consumption of steel or PVC, while also resolving issues from leakage and thermal insulation found in traditional materials.
Zhang said this team is working on developing industry standards for the use of the material in engineering, with a long term focus to completely replace traditional concrete drainage pipes.
Hemp is another story – due to a lack of supply, hemp is not used.
Another material focus in China is the upcycling of construction waste and tailings, Zhang said.
“We are looking to apply these materials to high value applications and larger scale utilisation.
“Because China’s overall infrastructure and urban development have largely plateaued, meaning we are now past the peak in construction of developments, our focus moving forward is on urban renewal, which includes maintenance and retrofitting of buildings.”
Zhang said subsequent developments would generate large amounts of raw construction waste, but despite this, the country lacked effective ways of disposing of the waste besides landfill and incineration, which had “secondary environmental impacts.
“That’s why our current research is focused on how to get mass-manufactured building materials to absorb and sequester construction waste. That’s why we’ve introduced certifications to recognise products that meet industry-specific benchmarks and help with commercialisation.
“In terms of environmental protection and circular economy, this is the main direction we are heading.”
What a partnership looks like between Australia and China
According to Zhang, his federation hopes to launch an initiative to encourage downstream decarbonisation and promote real estate developers, property managers, and construction manufacturers to champion low-carbon building materials.
“From our Australian counterparts, we are hoping to learn about their best practices and policies that encourage upstream and downstream collaboration and how they encourage the procurement of low carbon materials, which will also help Chinese companies achieve a more effective closed loop.”
On the other hand, Zhang said very few can claim they have had as significant a progress as China when it came to producing low-carbon cement, saying the country had invested substantially in cement production technology.
“If foreign counterparts are interested in decarbonisation technologies in the cement industry, it would be beneficial to exchange notes with Chinese companies.”
The original interview was conducted in Mandarin and translated into English. Watch the full interview in Mandarin below.
