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Fly ash concrete

I am prepping my house for sale, and it had a pretty badly cracked sidewalk and driveway.  Its a pretty common problem, with a straight forward solution:  bust out the old concrete and pour new.  And it is great that a problem so common has a sustainable solution: fly ash concrete.  Fly Ash is a waste product that comes from coal fired power plants.  Now coal fired power plants are bad, and the sooner we get rid of them the better, but we do not have the infrastructure in place to stop burning the stuff, and we wont for some time.  Around 100-110 million tons of Fly Ash are produced annually, often dumped here or there, with not much attention paid to it until things like this happen.

But millions of tons of fly ash can be used in concrete.  The ash replaces Portland Cement, and cement production releases millions of tons of CO2 into the air every year – you have to heat limestone up to 1300 degrees to turn it into cement, and that fire creates the CO2.  Concrete is the most common man made construction material used in the planet – 100s of millions of cubic yards are used each year.  Every time someone does something as simple as a driveway or sidewalk repair, they can help out the environment by using some fly ash.  My own little job used 4.5 cubic yards of concrete, with 15% of the cement replaced by fly ash from Bode Concrete of San Francisco’s sidewalk mix. My man Sal “Rocky” DeGuarda did the job for me, I recommend him for jobs in San Francisco.

39 Marietta Driveway Concrete Job 010

You have to ask for it, and your contractors will get it for you.  People want to be responsible, because we all want a better world for our kids.

39 Marietta Driveway Concrete Job 005

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A Benefit with a Foundation for the Future

Foundations are not like kitchens. People don’t leave a house that is for sale saying “Wow, did you see that foundation, how cool was that!” It is the quiet things however, that can have a major impact. The new concrete on either side of the embedded beam is fly ash concrete. Fly ash is a byproduct of coal fired power plants. It is used to replace some of the cement in concrete.

“For every ton of cement manufactured, about 6.5 million BTUs of energy are consumed…(and) about one ton of carbon dioxide is released. Replacing that ton of cement with fly ash would save enough electricity to power the average American home for 24 days, and reduce carbon dioxide emissions equal to two months use of an automobile.” (source?)

“Experts estimate that cement production contributes to about 7% of carbon dioxide emissions from human sources. If all the fly ash generated each year were used in producing concrete, the reduction of carbon dioxide released because of decreased cement production would be equivalent to eliminating 25 percent of the world’s vehicles” (source)>

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