How “Green” is Green Concrete? Why SUVO is on the verge of disrupting the entire industry
23 JANUARY 2024
WRITTEN BY THE MINUTE LEGER
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It’s 2024, and climate change appears to be on everyone’s agenda. From politicians to corporate suits, all the way down to the fifteen year old student at the front of the picket line. Greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) are one of the primary culprits of climate change. What usually comes to mind is methane gas from cows, vehicles emitting 3.53 billion metric tons of CO2 a year, and ghastly scenes of smokestacks spewing out puffs of thick, grey smoke on an infinite loop. Most people don’t think about the literal ground beneath their feet, nor the polished walls that safely enclose them in their homes. But in fact, construction material like concrete is thenumber one industrial polluter of carbon dioxide.
Cement is a fine powder which binds with water, sand, and aggregates to form concrete which is required to build roads, bridges, buildings, and practically any type of infrastructure under the moon. Cement is produced by heating a mixture of limestone, clay and sand in a rotating kiln at over 1400C degrees. The smoke produced from this process is what creates the bulk of greenhouse emissions, or 8% of the world’s emissions in precise numbers. As construction is the second largest industry in the world, creating concrete uses enormous inputs of energy and resources, and is extremely carbon-unfriendly.
Therefore, making concrete “greener” has been the focus of some academic studies. Few companies have resorted to creating concrete with less cement; by simply reducing the amount of cement in the final formula. But this introduces risks to the strength of the concrete. From a safety and financial perspective, this is not an optimal solution. The term “green concrete” has been vaguely used to describe a broad range of attempts to reduce the amount of cement in the final concrete product. It’s still a relatively untethered environment, in that contenders and observers both share a similar dilemma in how to effectively measure and standardise what qualifies as environmentally safe concrete. In the best case scenario, a reduced formulation represents a hybrid vehicle, but it’s never going to be a full electric vehicle.
So what does SUVO, a publicly traded Australian mineral company, have to do with the equation? SUVO, the sole producer of hydrous kaolin in Australia, a mineral used in the manufacturing of ceramics, packaging, rubber, and paint has recently begun incubating an interesting project in relevance to the ambiguous green concrete problem. It wasn’t enough for them to simply reduce the levels of cement; they wanted to find a way to replace it altogether, while still retaining the strength of the final concrete. To take it a step further, they wanted to use industrial byproducts and waste derived materials in their creation, to simultaneously clean up the environment.
“Governments around the world, including Australia, have ambitious targets to reduce carbon emissions by the year 2030. At SUVO, we’re on a mission to tackle the head of the problem. Cement production is the single largest greenhouse polluter, producing emissions equal to the global car fleet. With our expertise and dominance in the hydrous kaolin industry, we believe it’s our responsibility to create alternatives that bear better consequences on the environment, especially in the things that are necessary for the day-to-day. Innovation is a non-negotiable for us (Aaron Banks, non-executive chairman, SUVO).
In late 2022, SUVO enlisted the help of , which had already received funding from the Western Australian government to undertake research and development for creating a cleaner cement that had a lower carbon footprint.The results were promising. Colliecrete, or Geopolymer Concrete allowed SUVO & Murdoch to enter into an exclusive worldwide IP agreement. What makes Colliecrete unique is that it’s created from a mixture of industrial byproducts, waste derived materials, and metakaolin to achieve a cement substitution in laboratory settings.
In the lab, it was found that Geopolymer Concrete produced 50% less carbon emissions than Ordinary Portland Cement (OPC) which is the most widely used form of concrete. Even more promising is that there’s a potential pathway to an 85% to 90% reduction in GHGs. This has been a significant discovery and SUVO plans on testing Colliecrete in real-life applications. Given that Australia has a net 2030 emissions target of a 43% reduction below 2005 levels by year 2030, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine low-carbon construction materials becoming a standard.
On January 16, 2024, SUVO received an invitation from Sustainability Waste Alliance to perform a demonstration at Southwest Australia’s largest infrastructure project to date, the Bunbary Outer Ring Road. A successful demonstration could prove to show promising returns for the company, steering the adoption path toward greener construction material. Funding scientific projects like this requires significant funds, which SUVO plans on supplementing with the cash flow from hydrous kaolin sales in the Asian Pacific, over the next 6-12 months. The next logical step for SUVO is to patent their formulations to ensure no other company can produce geopolymer concrete, which would grant them sole ownership of the entire green concrete supply chain. Ideally, they would sell the dried formulations to large construction or manufacturing companies, many of which are longtime business partners of SUVO. This switch would have an immediate impact on the environment and be a 1:1 substitute for OPC formulations.
The global concrete market is forecasted to be USD$800 billion by 2027. What dent could SUVO’s green concrete make on this? If proven successful, it would be hard to imagine that SUVO’s current market capitalisation of $26M will remain this low for long.
CategoriesBlog, Business
Murdoch University
