Tuesday, December 9th, 2025 | 1:00 – 2:00 pm
Josefine Olsson, PhD Candidate, UC Davis Civil & Environmental Engineering
Concrete is an essential material in the built environment and plays a critical role in infrastructure and urban development. Recent estimates have put global concrete production as contributing approximately 8% of anthropogenic CO2 emissions annually. The manufacturing of cement, the hydraulic binder that binds rocks together in concrete, is the main source of CO2 emissions from concrete. To mitigate GHG emissions from concrete, strategies need to be adopted along the full life cycle, i.e., from selection of raw materials, cement manufacturing, material and structural design to end-of-life management.
This webinar will present: (1) an investigation of the cumulative global influence of several GHG emissions mitigation strategies over the concrete life cycle, including improved cement manufacturing efficiency, cement substitution by supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs), structural design efficiency, and design for enhanced durability and longer lasting concrete structures; (2) an investigation of the future demand and availability of resources to be used as SCMs to produce low-carbon concrete within the United States, and (3) a framework for a performance-based sustainability evaluation of alternative concrete mixture designs. Cumulatively, the work presented can be used to provide researchers, engineers, concrete producers as well as policymakers with a reliable decision-support tool and bridge the gap between stakeholders’ efforts to decarbonize the concrete sector.
Josefine Olsson is a PhD candidate in Civil & Environmental Engineering at UC Davis. She studies GHG emission mitigation pathways for low-carbon concrete production and the life cycle assessment of cement and concrete and has a background in structural design. Josefine will start a position as a postdoctoral scholar at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in January.