Elaborating the History of Our Cementing Societies: An in-Use Stock Perspective

Abstract

Modern cities and societies are built fundamentally based on cement and concrete. The global cement production has risen sharply in the past decades due largely to urbanization and construction. Here we deployed a top-down dynamic material flow analysis (MFA) model to quantify the historical development of cement in-use stocks in residential, nonresidential, and civil engineering sectors of all world countries. We found that global cement production spreads unevenly among 184 countries, with China dominating the global production and consumption after the 1990s. Nearly all countries have shown an increasing trend of per capita cement in-use stock in the past century. The present per capita cement in-use stocks vary from 10 to 40 tonnes in major industrialized and transiting countries and are below 10 tonnes in developing countries. Evolutionary modes identified from historical patterns suggest that per capita in-use cement stock growth generally complies with an S-shape curve and relates closely to affluence and urbanization of a country, but more in-depth and bottom-up investigations are needed to better understand socioeconomic drivers behind stock growth. These identified in-use stock patterns can help us better estimate future demand of cement, explore strategies for emissions reduction in the cement industry, and inform CO uptake potentials of cement based products and infrastructure in service.

The service-stock trap: analysis of the environmental impacts and productivity of the service sector in Hungary

“…With regard to further testing of the estimations, it is worth investigating them in their socio-economic context. Cao et al (2017) estimated the cement content of material stock globally. They have found, that with regard to the 15 largest economies, 15%-45% of cement is accumulated in residential buildings, while the remainder is built into nonresidential buildings and infrastructures.…”

“…To this end, the key role of material stocks, as infrastructures, has recently been emphasized with special regard to future emissions and resource use (Wood et al 2018, Haberl et al 2019. Furthermore, several results suggest that a significant part of the material stock consists of capital stock of the economic processes (Ortlepp et al 2015, Cao et al 2017.…”

Impacts of booming concrete production on water resources worldwide

“…(a sensitivity analysis of the projections can be found in Supplementary Section 7). Future demand scenarios in this work were based on models developed by the IEA 33 ; however, as our understanding of in-use cement stock and population demand improves 37 , projections are likely to improve. In addition to the variability and uncertainty in the data, it must be noted that there is an expectation that differences in regional technologies or materials would influence specific water consumption or withdrawal for energy or processing.…”

The role of cement service-life on the efficient use of resources

“…This type of early removal of concrete structures would also be pertinent to situations in which less durable materials were utilized. Notably, for nations that have significantly lower inuse periods for cement than the United States, such as China [54,55], the benefits of elongating in-use stock of cement would be expected to be much greater, as indicated by the notable benefits of increasing longevity in the shorter lived streets and highways in the United States.…”

“…It has been suggested that within the past few years, there has been an increase in civil engineering use of cement in the United States [54]; however, there have been limited data capturing the changes in the relative fractions of cement use to each of the individual use categories studied in this work. Slightly lower efficiencies in kilns used and higher use of high emitting fuels in the past could have contributed to a higher GHG emissions profile than that modeled in this work, with greater emissions occurring in earlier years when cement production was lower.…”