Recycling sand and gravel aggregates from construction and demolition waste could meet half of China’s demand for the materials essential for building skyscrapers, roads and railways by 2050, a Chinese-led study has found.
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By embracing a circular economy strategy, some provinces could achieve aggregate recycling rates as high as 65 per cent, the team led by researchers from Tsinghua University found.
This could significantly ease China’s annual aggregate demand, which is projected to halve by the middle of this century to a mass equivalent to 1,500 Great Pyramids of Giza.
“Our study indicates that with targeted support, recycled aggregate production could meet a sizeable share of future demand at reasonable recycling rates,” the team said in a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications last month.
Zhu Bing, co-corresponding author of the paper and director of the Institute for Circular Economy at Tsinghua University, said that by 2050, “recycled sand and gravel aggregates are expected to meet 48 per cent of the total national demand for sand and gravel”.
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Aggregates are granular particulates like sand, gravel and crushed stone, that form the main components of construction materials like cement and asphalt, used to build foundations, buildings, roads and railways.
They are the most extracted materials worldwide, making up half of all globally extracted materials, according to the team, which also included researchers from Britain, Norway and Germany.