billy, there is a growing awareness that concrete is extremely environmently unfriendly and there has been an ongoing program to educate ill-informed people, not only here on HC, but around the world to refrain from the unnecessary use of it. The is a lot of research going into making concrete more environmentally friendly as there really is no substitute for much of construction, but it's a bit like the electricity and water situation, much, much more can be achieved by simply not wasting them in the first place than can be by increasing the efficiency of producing and supplying them. The other benefit is that stopping any waste has an immediate effect, look at water restrictions, whereas savings from technology are generally years or decades away, and in many cases, the energy used to produce the energy saving device takes a large part of the usable life of the device to be recouped, if all goes well.
