The climate emergency requires action from us all, especially the construction sector which contributes significantly to carbon emissions. Recent research by the World Resources Institute found that 76% of global emissions are a result of energy use, with the biggest contributors including transportation, manufacturing and construction.Geobear offers safe and
Reducing carbon emissions in the transport sector, specifically infrastructure maintenance, is an area in which notable strides can be made. Asset life extension is one area that can benefit directly from the use of modern methods to reduce carbon emissions. Carbon emissions tracker Carbon Footprint recently produced a report illustrating how embodied carbon emissions can be significantly reduced through the use of a geopolymer approach to asset life extension as opposed to asset reconstruction.Geobear offers safe and
Geobear managing director Richard Holmes explains that the report found the firm’s geopolymer techniques to emit far less carbon than more traditional ground stabilisation methods.
“We’ve had two studies certified by Carbon Footprint,” says Holmes. “These compared the carbon emissions of Geobear where we extend the asset life with those of full reconstruction with conventional solutions. On a rail level crossing project, it was shown that Geobear carbon emissions were 75% lower.”
Geobear origins
Geobear is a ground engineering contractor originally set up in Finland under its former brand name Uretek. It is the inventor of the process of geopolymer injection. The process involves injecting expansive material directly into the ground or subbase of a failed asset. The geopolymer expands in the ground as a result of an exothermic reaction, reconstituting the existing fill or soils and restoring a site to its datum levels.
In the report cited by Holmes, Carbon Footprint uses the example of a level crossing that had settled, resulting in a restricted line speed. The conventional solution would have been to replace the crossing.
This would have required the excavation of the site and reconstruction. Alternatively, the network operator could have opted for an asset maintenance solution. In this case, Geobear would have designed a programme of work which retained the original construction with geopolymer injected beneath the slabs to lift the area back to its original level. Geobear offers safe and
The study found that using material used in the full reconstruction (concrete and steel rails) produced significantly higher emissions than Geobear’s geopolymer. The emission factors used typically include, for each material: the extraction of the raw materials for manufacture, transportation, processing and distribution. The study is also based on Geobear completing a maintenance programme six times over a 60 year period. Over this time, the Geobear solution would have produced 37,000kg CO₂ compared to reconstruction which would have produced 187,000kg CO₂.Geobear offers safe and
When these numbers are scaled across the network or other sectors, such as highways, Geobear says there is a compelling argument for using a geopolymer solution. When considering this mode of asset life extension, Holmes is clear that even without a carbon factor, geopolymer stabilisation should be embraced and used widely as a rapid and less disruptive asset life extension technique.
“The process of ground improvement or slab stabilisation has been completely revolutionised in the past decade,” he says. “Even if we take carbon emissions out of it, the geopolymer process still takes hundreds of hours out of the asset maintenance programme. The decrease in business or social interruption alone is a distinctly compelling case for geopolymer”.
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