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[EN] Concrete is the primary building material worldwide with a substantial impact on the built environment sustainability. Hence, it is necessary to assess concrete¿s combined functionality, economic and environmental impact. In this paper, two concrete sustainability assessment frameworks, MARS-SC and CONCRETop, were studied. Building on the identified gaps, a new framework, ECO2 was developed. ECO2 is a multi-criteria decision analysis framework that accounts for carbon sequestration of concrete, impact allocation of raw materials, and the impact from the use and end-of-life phases. Hence, it could be used to optimize the proportions of a concrete mix based on a user-defined sustainability objective. A case study concluded that, due to the whole life cycle scope, the environmental impact calculated through ECO2 is 20% higher than that by MARS-SC and CONCRETop. In case of reinforced concrete, where service life requirements are different, the ranking of the alternatives according to ECO2 will significantly change comparatively., The authors acknowledge no conflict of interest. This work is funded by the Faculty of Engineering and Environment's research development fund (RDF) at Northumbria University, UK.

This paper reports the development of a quantitative analysis system for selecting a greener and economically sustainable wind farm at the early design stage. A single wind turbine produces a limited amount of carbon emissions throughout its lifecycle. By taking a broader view, such as wind farms, collectively such an application would have a greater impact upon the environment and cost. Recent research on wind farms tends to focus on wind flow modelling to enable accurate prediction of power generation. Therefore, this paper presents a quantitative approach to predict a wind farm's lifetime (i) carbon emissions and intensity; (ii) potential energy production; (iii) return on investment and (iv) payback time from an early design perspective. The overall contribution of this work is to develop a quantitative approach to enable the selection of ‘greener’ designs for reducing the environmental impacts of a wind farm with hub heights between 44 m and 135 m while still considering its economic feasibility assessment. This newly developed system could potentially be used by top-management and engineers of wind turbine manufacturers and wind energy service providers for cleaner energy provision.

This paper describes the development of a quantitative analysis system as a platform for rapidly estimate energy, costs and carbon emission to facilitate the comparison of different wind turbine concept designs. This system aimed specifically at wind turbine manufacturing processes due to the fact that a large proportion of the environmental, costs and energy impacts would occur at this stage. The proposed method supports an initial assessment of multiple design concepts which allows the selection and development of a “greener” wind turbine. The developed system enables concept design of commercial wind turbine towers of hub heights between 44 and 135 m. The method supports an accurate estimation in regards to the dimension, energy consumed, maximum power output, costs and carbon emission in the early design phases of a wind turbine. As a result of the development, the proposed approach could potentially be used to minimise the carbon footprints of major engineering projects such as wind farms.

A UK government report released in 2017 indicated that fly ash (FA) production locally is expected to seize after 2021. This means that for the construction industry to meet its continuously increasing demand for an Ordinary Portland Cement (OPC) replacement, FA would probably need to be either imported or recovered from landfills through energy-intensive processes. Recent reports show that companies in the UK have already started importing FA from several countries from which Germany and China were chosen as case studies to exemplify the closest and furthest respectively. The environmental impact associated with the FA transportation raises concerns about the environmental sustainability of the final concrete product. Therefore, this study focuses on using a life cycle assessment (LCA) tool to analyse the environmental impact of importing FA from Germany and China and compare that to recovering landfilled FA in the UK. The study is the first of its kind to investigate the environmental impact of any of the alternatives. Using a Cradle-to-Gate approach and a mix of primary and secondary data, these alternatives were modelled and compared to conventional OPC and currently available locally sources of FA. Results show that the environmental burden from transporting FA from China to the UK will overcome the environmental benefits of it replacing OPC. It is then concluded that the most promising alternative for cleaner production of blended cement concrete is to recover the 50 million tonnes of landfilled FA from the UK using the Dry-processing technique explained in the study. The second best alternative is to import FA from a country within the Europe region to the UK.

This paper reports on the investigation of an excavator mounted dust suppression system for demolition and construction activities. Ever increasing pressure is placed on contractors to improve their environmental performance, especially dust emissions. Current methods of dust suppression have been investigated and each of the methods has also been critically analysed to determine their advantages and disadvantages. The investigation also examined the requirements of such a system and a concept system proposal was produced. A working prototype has been constructed for a mini excavator complete with a hydraulic breaker. The proposed system was rigorously tested in various configurations to determine its efficiency and effectiveness in comparison with current suppression techniques. The resulting benefits such as the reduction of water usage and cost are highlighted.