Environmental Consciousness
This page was created for those with an interest in living in a more environmentally aware way. With the ever increasing demand for natural resources, including building materials, we think it is important to make an effort to reduce the negative impact human consumption has on the environment, and inevitably also on us.
Sustainable Development
Concrete is an ideal material in environmentally conscious designs, such as those of Creative Stone. Indeed, the South African Concrete and Cement Institute calls concrete “a significant contributor to the triple bottom line of sustainable development”. Sustainable development is defined as development that “implies meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.
Concrete a Sustainable Material
Concrete promotes this idea in many different ways and is as such termed a sustainable material. However, a sustainable product is one with a minimal environmental impact during its entire life cycle, and as such, there is always opportunity for concrete products to greener themselves by conscientiously choosing raw materials and managing manufacturing in an environmentally aware way.
Concrete vs Cement
Concrete is often confused with the material cement. Cement refers to a dry powder that hardens independently to act as an adhesive. As such, it acts as the glue ingredient of concrete. It is made up of mainly lime and silica that are crushed then heated in a kiln in a process called calcination. Clinkers are hard, rock-like lumps that come out of calcination and are ground with a small amount of gypsum (hydrated calcium sulphate used for plaster of Paris) into a fine powder to make Ordinary Portland Cement.
Clinker Production
Clinker production creates a significant amount of CO² and other greenhouse gases (GHGs). In South Africa cement contributes to approximately 1.2 per cent of total CO² emissions. CO² is produced in the process of calcination (about 50-60 per cent), with the rest coming from using fossil fuels to heat the kiln. The amount of CO² produced can thus greatly be reduced by improving energy efficiency and the use of renewable resources at the manufacturing plant, as well as by crushing additional by-products and recycled materials with the clinkers.
Cement Replacement
In making Creative Stone concrete, we appreciate the significant negative impact cement manufacturing has on the environment, and although Portland cement only makes up a fraction of our concrete mix, we always replace at least 15 per cent of the cement required with recycled materials. Naturally, we also would like to see the cement industry of South Africa taking the steps necessary to improve their sustainability record.
Creative Stone Concrete
Quality and Durability
Concrete is well known as a superior, yet affordable, building material because of its excellent qualities of versatility and durability. Our products are crafted to the highest of quality since we know that long lasting concrete products that can sustain wear and tear for generations will reduce energy needs for making new products, and thus also minimise solid waste. Our concrete mix consists of carefully proportioned ingredients engineered to maximise strength, durability, and of course, beauty. We strive for the most efficient use of resources by, for instance, always adding industrial by-products called pozzolans to our concrete mix, which not only reduces the amount of Portland cement needed; it also helps produce concrete that is very workable and durable.
Recycled or Reused Resources
One of concrete’s real sustainability advantages is that it is possible to incorporate post-consumer waste and industrial by-products in the concrete mix. We ensure that we do just that in all our concrete mixes, by replacing a minimum of 15 per cent of our Portland cement with recycled materials. We also use various suitable, no longer wanted, used materials such as glass bottles, old porcelain basins, broken tiles, or off-cuts from different natural stones such as marble or granite, instead of more traditional aggregates like gravel and sand. We then crush it and add it to our concrete mix just like any other aggregate. In this way, we not only reduce the use of new natural resources, we also prevent used materials from entering landfills.
And remember, at the end of a Creative Stone concrete product’s life span, the product itself is completely recyclable and can be used again in making new concrete creations.
Minimise Waste
With increasing population pressure on the earth’s natural resources, Creative Stone deems it important to adhere to the three R’s – reduce, reuse, and recycle in working towards conserving resources and minimising waste. For example, we only work on order so that no products, and consequently natural resources, go wasted. We also have carefully calculated formulas to ensure that we don’t waste any of our concrete mix during manufacturing. Additionally, we have permanent moulds that we can use over and over, and we generally try to use materials and tools that will last a long time.
In making Creative Stone concrete we use different sands and gravel that constitute some of the most abundant resources on earth. Moreover, some of the sand we use is simply “left-over” from other applications, but since it is excellent in our application we can put it to effective use.
Saying this though, extracting natural resources will always have an impact on the environment. So it is our duty to use these resources responsibly, recognising the affect the removal of which can have on surrounding ecology and human communities, and trying to work with suppliers that possess a sound environmental understanding of these issues and that hold fast to current environmental guidelines and legislation.
Locally Sourced Resources
Wherever possible, we use aggregates that have been sourced locally to minimise transport and thus the use of fossil fuels and the release of CO². Since the type of aggregate we use is dependent on client requirements, it is also ultimately the responsibility of the consumer to make sound purchasing decisions.