An Empathetic Added Sustainability Index for Cementitious Based Construction Materials

The construction industry is the largest consumer of natural resources and the Portland cement is not environmentally friendly. The global production of Portland cement contributes around 5-7% of the total CO2 emissions, CO2 being mainly responsible for global warming and climate change. The concept of sustainable development in the concrete industry is not well defined and, currently, there are no models capable of assessing the environmental footprint of cement-based materials from a holistic point of view. In the scientific literature, two different categories of sustainability indicators can be found. The first ones are simple and the compressive strength is considered as the main performance parameter. The indices of the second generation are an evolution of the first. These take into account different parameters, but they are not able to express the sustainability in its complexity. For this reason, a new Empathetic Added Sustainability Index (EASI) was developed.