CO2 Emissions Comparisons for Industrial and Commercial Floors: A Study on Cementous Sustainable Flooring Options

CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions have become a major environmental issue worldwide, and emissions have spiked faster than most could ever imagine. The issues have made it crucial to find financially feasible and long-term, use-efficient solutions that fulfill industrial needs. As society so much depends on the current industry outputs, we need to reduce emissions coming from those industrial facilities and premises where people shop and buy services and assets on a daily basis. These emissions need to be reduced on a global scale, and here, concrete as a building material comes into play as one of the most used materials, especially on industrial floors. A typical solution is a sturdy base slab with a use case-specific coating on it. The base slab is expected to last the whole life of the building, whereas the coating might be considered consumable and refurbished/fixed as a maintenance job many times before the building itself is demolished. In heavy use cases, the maintenance cycle might be fast, which reduces the usable time of the building and generates downtimes for business. The coating decisions have a major impact on the building’s lifetime emissions, which is the key focus of this study, too. Bad decisions can introduce unnecessary microplastics and nano dust particles to work environments and also generate restructuring needs of the operational activities. In the worst case, operations have to be shut down. Luckily, there are options, and emissions can be reduced in many ways. By using long-term and durable cementitious mix-based dry shake coatings, one can reduce top coating-based emissions, and by decreasing the amount of used reinforcement components in the base slab, an extra positive impact can be achieved. With a base slab, also more environmentally friendly low-carbon cement formulations can be considered, like fly ash or GGBS (ground granulated blast furnace slag) based formulas, which we discuss in detail and analyses traditional options compared to modern CEM3a and CEM3b versions. For the top coating, emissions are generated in the construction and maintenance phases. To find different options with cross implications on lifetime emissions, our study analyzes CO2 emissions sources for several concrete mixes, which are then paired with floor-top coatings based on Cementous mix or epoxy coating. We have pinpointed the potential for reducing the building’s floor-based lifetime CO2 emissions. The analysis is based on the impacts of the base slab and floor coating selection combinations. As a de facto comparison element, we used a 100 percent virgin Portland cement-based mix. The Portland cement was compared to CEM3a and CEM3b mixes. On the top surface of the floor, traditional epoxy base floor coating was compared to a modern dry shake-based option. In the analysis, the dry-shake-based floor showed major benefits. Emissions were drastically reduced, fewer maintenance downtimes were needed, and the general life expectancy was a lot longer for the dry shake option.