CSIC Research Associate Omar Abo Madyan asks if the construction industry is on track to achieve net zero – and sets out why addressing carbon blind spots across the value chain will present new opportunities to reduce emissions and create more accurate carbon models and targets.
The blog, titled ‘Addressing carbon blind spots – redefining waste in the construction industry to reduce carbon emissions’ recognises significant industry efforts being made so far and highlights the complexity and uncertainty surrounding the construction process and material use which often cause carbon blind spots that are rarely modelled or accounted for.
The recent COP27 concluded that the 1.5C target is hanging by a thread making immediate solutions to further cut construction carbon emissions and improve efficiency and productivity needed now more than ever CSIC Research Associate Omar Abo Madyan
The blog calls for better identification of industrial waste across the construction industry:” The term waste in the construction industry is predominantly ascribed to physical waste that ends up in a skip and eventually in landfill. However, throughout the literature in the field of quantitative and qualitative waste management, numerous definitions of waste are considered across various industries. Following lean manufacturing principles, waste can be defined to include over-production, unnecessary transportation, inventory, displacements, waiting, over-processing, and defects. Current research at CSIC is applying the concept of waste from lean manufacturing to redefine waste across the construction industry, to understand the true efficacy of material value chains.”
Dr Abo Madyan recommends using zero loss yield analysis (ZLYA) that “provides a continuous improvement approach based on zero loss manufacturing and compares an actual performance of a system/process to a first principle best performance”. Addressing carbon blind spots will, he argues, present new opportunities to reduce emissions but stresses that “success depends on obtaining accurate data sets across the value chain” which “has proven to be challenging in the past as data recording processes have not seen significant improvements across the construction industry”.
CSIC’s research using the ZLYA methodology “has highlighted several issues including over-ordering, rework, rejected concrete, over-specification, concrete batching accuracy and waste. Results to date have shown high inconsistencies between design volumes and how much concrete is consumed. The yield of concrete – the amount which was actually used efficiently on site – varied between 61% and 97% for individual concrete components, while delivered concrete strengths could be more than double the required design strengths”.
In the blog Dr Abo Madyan brings focus to the urgency for construction to reduce emissions and improve efficiencies: “The recent COP27 concluded that the 1.5C target is hanging by a thread making immediate solutions to further cut construction carbon emissions and improve efficiency and productivity needed now more than ever.”
• Read the full Smart Infrastructure Blog by Dr Omar Abo Madyan titled ‘Addressing carbon blind spots – redefining waste in the construction industry to reduce carbon emissions’ here.