Cement industry cuts CO₂ intensity 25% since 1990, GCCA reports

A new report from The Global Cement and Concrete Association says there has been a 25% reduction in the CO₂ intensity of cementitious products since 1990. Image: GCCA

Cementitious products can be defined as materials that use a hydraulically setting cement, like Portland cement, as a binder to create products used in construction, such as concrete, mortar, and waterproofing compounds.

The report, Cement and Concrete Industry Net Zero Action and Progress Report 2025/6, also highlights more than 60 decarbonisation projects across alternative fuels, alternative raw materials, carbon capture, renewable energy and recycled concrete

The document also calls for policies enabling non-recyclable waste use in kilns, wider adoption of blended products, national carbon pricing mechanisms and the use of construction demolition waste as recycled raw materials.

“Our industry is collaborating and innovating across every aspect of our production – finding new ways to work and deploying exciting technologies that are already making a genuine step change,” said GCCA president and Heidelberg Materials chair Dominik von Achten. 

“However, to achieve the industrial scale transformation that our world needs, we cannot do it by ourselves – our industry needs the support of governments, policymakers, stakeholders, and our allies across the built environment right now.”

Despite the fact that the carbon intensity of cementitious products has fallen, the overall carbon footprint of the global construction industry is still rising rapidly, with more than half of emissions coming from cementitious materials, bricks, and metals, according to another recently released report. Construction’s global carbon footprint is on course to double by 2050.

The new study published in Nature’s Communications Earth & Environment warned that construction’s carbon footprint alone would be enough to exceed the per-annum carbon budget to hold global temperatures below 2˚C over the next two decades.

It also found that the construction industry’s carbon footprint in global emissions has gradually increased over three decades, from 20% to 33%, fuelled mainly by material-related inputs such as cement, bricks, metals and glass.

A major reason for the increase has been a rapid rise in the number of major construction projects in developing regions.