Reducing your environmental footprint

Leveraging our specialty additives in their mix, producers have a wide range of options for delivering highly workable, high-strength concrete and a lower embodied carbon footprint. Using more workable concrete saves labor costs and results in faster project completion.

This is one approach used at Arizona State University to reduce the carbon footprint of its Interdisciplinary Science and Technology facility. The concrete team set out to use a post-consumer byproduct to reduce the total amount of cement in the building structure by at least 40%. “It takes a lot of equipment and resources to produce cement,” said McCarthy Building Companies Senior Project Manager Carlos Diaz. “If you can replace a high percentage of cement with a recycled material like fly ash, you can offset a significant amount of carbon.” 

For this mix, concrete producer Hanson Aggregates, LLC, used fly ash (a byproduct from electric and steam generating plants), along with ADVA® and WDRA® concrete admixtures from GCP Applied Technologies to achieve their sustainability goals. “The ADVA® admixture gave us the opportunity to keep the water/cement ratio low while achieving high strength as well as the workability to place the concrete very easily,” said Bill Wheeler, Quality Control for Hanson Aggregates LLC. 

GCP solutions have the potential to reduce the embodied carbon footprint of concrete by up to 50% allowing to replace clinker and cement with eco-friendly, locally-sourced alternative cementitious materials.

In 2020, ADVA®, DARASET®, CONCERA® and other GCP concrete admixtures reduced CO₂ emissions by approximately 13 million tons, which is equivalent to taking four million cars off the road every day.