ABSTRACT
Concrete is the most consumed man-made material in the world. Its production contributes 8% of global CO2 (carbon) emissions and 1.7% of global water use. Despite its impact on the environment, concrete production is expected to increase across many global regions over the next few decades, resulting in increased carbon emissions and water consumption. However, building practitioners and researchers have largely focused on minimizing the carbon emissions of concrete without considering other sustainability metrics, like the amount of water withdrawn and not returned from the environment. In this study, we analyze 17,820 Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) of concrete mixtures in the United States: New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Phoenix. The concrete mixture EPDs were evaluated for the global warming potential (GWP), which is a measure of embodied carbon emissions, and the freshwater consumption (FWC), which quantifies the water footprint. Our results demonstrate significant variability in the GWP and FWC across these metropolitan areas with Los Angeles and San Francisco reporting the highest variability for both metrics. This variability is attributed to the application of concrete mixtures, as EPDs for polyurethane concrete were found to have lower FWCs. By employing a metro-level analysis to the reported GWP and FWC midpoint indicators, this methodology can be modified to include additional environmental impacts to better inform holistic and region-based sustainable design decisions for the built environment.
