Carbon mitigation by the construction industry in China: a perspective of efficiency and costs.

Evaluating carbon emission performance of the construction industry is a significant prerequisite for developing regional carbon mitigation plans. Taking environmental and technical heterogeneities into account, this paper employed a meta-frontier method to measure the carbon emission efficiency, carbon mitigation potential, and costs of the construction sector in different regions of China from 2005 to 2016. The empirical results show that substantial disparities in carbon emission efficiency exist in the construction industry. The total carbon mitigation potential of this sector was 206.76 million tons, with the Lower Yellow river area accounting for the largest proportion at 27%. Meanwhile, the carbon mitigation costs of this sector increased from 584.94 to 1273.30 yuan/ton during 2005-2016. The highest mitigation costs occur in the Lower Yangtze River area and the South Coastal area, indicating it was more costly in these areas to conduct additional carbon emissions mitigation. The results could facilitate the policy formulation on regional-oriented carbon emissions mitigation of the construction industry in China.

Experimental Investigation on the Mechanical Properties and Microstructure of Basalt Fiber Reinforced Engineered Cementitious Composite.

This study investigated fundamental mechanical properties of a basalt fiber reinforced engineered cementitious composite (BF-ECC) with different volume fractions of basalt fiber (BF), water-binder ratio (W/B) and fly ash (FA) content. The compressive strength, splitting tensile strength, flexural strength and static modulus of BF-ECC were studied at 3, 28 and 56 days, respectively, to explore their development along the ages. Furthermore, the scanning electron microscopy (SEM) analysis was conducted to evaluate the microstructure of BF-ECC. Experiment results demonstrated that bond quality between the BF and the matrix is good, which leads to a significant increase in the flexural strength and splitting tensile strength. The pozzolanic effect of FA obviously improved the splitting tensile and flexural strength of BF-ECC after 56 days of curing, and the appropriate content of the FA content in the BF-ECC ranges from 50% to 60%.