The impact of cement sustainability initiative on the South African cement industry’s performance

Abstract : Since the 19th century, Ordinary Portland Cement has contributed significantly to improve human living conditions especially in the urbanisation of society. In this context of urbanisation, millions of tonnes of cement are used yearly for the construction of concrete structures such as bridges, hospitals, residential structures and industrial buildings. The production of Ordinary Portland Cement does not only contribute positively to improve lives, but also negatively affects them by emitting between 0.9 to 1 tonne of dioxide of carbon (CO2) per tonne of cement produced. This volume of CO2 accounts for 5 to 7 percent of the total volume emitted in the world, identifying the cement industry as the second largest polluter in the world. Much research has been conducted for the past two decades to contribute to the understanding of the sources of CO2 emission and to propose solutions to the problem. At the same time several organisations and government entities around the world initiated different programmes such as the Cement Sustainability Initiative (CSI) and the Carbon Tax Bill for the protection of the environment and to pave the way for sustainability of the cement industry. The Cement Sustainability Initiative recommends, amongst other options, the use of best practice such as alternative kinds of fuel to produce cement. In this research study, waste oil and used tyres were used as alternative fuel and an objective function was used to determine the quantity of fuel material for minimising the CO2 emission. By solving the mathematical model with the Lingo software programme, used tyres were shown to have the highest efficient energy of 20 percent compared to waste oil. This excludes the higher CO2 emission value of 80.34 percent between the two alternative fuel materials. Finally, the results indicate that combined usage of coal with alternative fuel material may be categorised as best practice for a positive contribution to the reduction of CO2 emission in the order of 16.76 percent. This is with considering the local cement industry where the latter has an advanced positive performance in terms of maintaining a long sustainable industry as promoted by the Cement Sustainability Initiative (CSI).M.Phil. (Engineering Management