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Environment Friendly Concrete
Yet another option to use ash waste as a raw material. Oil shale ash can be used as replacement of cement in classical concrete. This way the carbon dioxide emissions, energy demand and waste are reduced.
Concrete is a very popular material for building and construction. The demands for strength of the material lead the concrete composition more cement based. Cement is a component forcing recognized environmental stress through the amount of carbon dioxide emitted during the production as well as the large energy demand. It has been estimated that 7% of the world’s carbon dioxide is connected with the cement production.
EcoCrete aims to improve the environmental performance of current concrete by replacing cement component with recycled industrial waste or recycled aggregates. Such recycled industrial waste can be oil shale ash.
Reid, D. Ardoran Ltd. 2009. Reducing the Environmental Impact of Concrete by Knowledge-based Design and Utilization of Industrial Waste Material (ECOCRETE). Available at: http://ieea.erba.hu/eco/page/Page.jsp?op=project_detail&prid=40
Your idea/solution in one sentence: Lowering the environmental impact of concrete products.
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I stumbled up on this opinion by an estonian climatologist in a weekly nature show. He said that climate change has been commercialized by media and governments as business.
They (for ex. EU commission) exclude all other factors that make up our climate only focus on CO2 emissions. The chain goes like this: climate is made by atmosphere, lithosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, where geological and cosmic inputs have the most effect.
But in EU they exclude all other spheres and focus only on atmosphere. And from atmosphere they eliminate all gases except CO2. And in case of CO2 they exclude all other origins than human produced. And from that they create the picture that only us humans develop the climate.
But our possibilities to affect the climate are small. We as humans focus on extreme weather and say that climate is changing while weather can be forecast approx 5 days ahead.
And also if actually climate is getting colder (again) then what we will do? Increase our carbon emissions?
What would we have done if we had lived in the time when ice age ended and northern-Europe was freed from the ice, the sea levels raised and so on? Would we have stopped all industries (imagine it would of been same level technological development) because of CO2 emissions???
What will we do if new ice age comes? Will we move to Africa? And Africa shuts down borders and says we dont want immigrants? What will we do then? Invade Africa for the right to live? Increase carbon emissions?
People should respect nature more to try to understand its processes. How can you say to China and India that you can not use fossil fuels when we got rich on these?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against decreasing emissions - i like clean air. But we should serve things with right names.
I'll stop now :)
By the way, the EcoCrete material I was writing about is a project placed to Estonia.
Ecocrete sounds nice and to hear that our small country gets involved is even nicer.
I have had the idea of Infocrete - a building material that could store digital information releasing us from the need of vast server parks and hardrives. Looking to the future its obvious that the amount of information wont be mesaured in megabytes or gigabytes or terabytes. The information and network will be hosted all around us in unmeasurable amounts.
Think if you could unite the clam shell and info-crete idea to use proteins from the nature to build ceramic (or other) material infostorage "spaces" not devices. [this turned into idea crashing now :D]