Content of review 1, reviewed on August 06, 2017

The authors make wrong assumptions on the contribution of OPC to world’s greenhouse gas emissions because they forget the contribution of carbon storage in OPC structures. Pade and Guimaraes (2007) estimate that for a 100 years life concrete structures can store around 28% of CO2 during 70 years life time and as much as 58% after demolition during 30 years. And a very recent study by Xi et al. (2016) showed that “a cumulative amount of 4.5 GtC has been sequestered in carbonating cement materials from 1930 to 2013, offsetting 43% of the CO2 emissions from production of cement over the same period”. Also its far from tuth that geopolymers are a low carbon technology, Turner & Collins (2013) prove that, Ouellet-Plamondon and Habert (2014) showed that only ´one part geopolymers` shows carbon footprint levels much lower than Portland cement based mixtures. Also Provis et al. (2015) already emphasized that geopolymers “are not intrinsically or fundamentally ‘low-CO2’ unless designed effectively to achieve such performance”. Recently The et al. (2017) confirmed this. Furthermore, Workability in geopolymers is poor and not easily adjustable due to a sticky and thick mortar that is generated during processing. This means that the traditional construction industry practices cannot be used for geopolymeric cements. Also the alkaline and soluble silicates that are added during the processing cannot be totally consumed during geopolymerization due to the existence of dissolution equilibrium of raw aluminosilicate in alkaline silicate solutions and this causes severe efflorescence of the final geopolymer products and high porosity and permeability due to the movement of alkali together with water to the geopolymer surfaces (Zheng et al., 2007). Ouellet-Plamondon, C. ; Habert, G. (2014) Life cycle analysis (LCA) of alkali-activated cements and concretes. In Handbook of Alkali-Activated Cements, Mortars and Concretes, 663-686 (Eds) Pacheco-Torgal, F.; Labrincha, J.; Palomo, A.; Leonelli, C.; Chindaprasirt, P., WoodHead Publishing-Elsevier, Cambridge Pade, C.; M. Guimaraes, M. (2007) The CO2 uptake of concrete in a 100 year perspective. Cem. Concr. Res. 37, 1348–1356. Provis, J.L.; Palomo, A.; Shi, C. (2015) Advances in understanding alkali-activated materials. Cement and Concrete Research 78: 110-125. The, S.; Wiedmann, T.; Castel, A.; de Burgh, J. (2017) Hybrid life cycle assessment of greenhouse gas emissions from cement, concrete and geopolymer concrete in Australia. Journal of Cleaner Production 152, 312-320. Tuner, L.; Collins, F., Carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2-e) emissions: A comparison between geopolymer and OPC cement concrete. Construction and Building Materials 43 (2013) 125–130. Xi et al. (2016) Substantial global carbon uptake by cement carbonation. Nature Geoscience 9, 880-883.

Source

    © 2017 the Reviewer (CC BY 4.0).

References

    J., T., J., M., U., B., G., O., Ts., Z., B., D., M., D., H., R. C. 2018. Comparative Studies of Alkali Activated South African Class F and Mongolian Class C Fly Ashes. Waste and Biomass Valorization.