Can green concrete help address the sand and aggregate crisis? A scoping literature review

Jean-François Rousseau, Amélie Lauzon and Melissa Marschke

Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 2025, vol. 68, issue 8, 1788-1806

Abstract: Construction material industries, including the concrete sector, drive a huge demand for aggregates, including sand, one of the most widely consumed resources globally. Emerging advocacy campaigns on sand sustainability frame less aggregate intensive “ecological” or “green” concrete materials as solutions to mitigate the socio-environmental impacts emerging from sand consumption. This scoping literature review considers how the benefits from green concrete are portrayed in the construction material-centered academic literature. The scholarship reviewed highlights that conventional concrete materials generate environmental problems that green concrete products could help to mitigate, most notably CO2 emissions. Much less emphasis is placed on sand requirements, while the scholarship approaches sand sustainability very vaguely. We conclude that such caveats pose important challenges to the enactment of sounder sand policy. If the sand crisis is to be addressed, we advocate for the sand advocacy and green concrete epistemic communities to better align how they promote wider systemic change.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/09640568.2024.2303630

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