Sustainable development for concrete infrastructure in China

The growing concern over global warming and other significant ecological changes have made sustainable development become hot topic in all fields of science and technology. Concrete is the most popular and widely used construction material in the world. It not only consumes huge amount of energy and natural sources, but also emits large amount of CO2, mainly due to the production of cement. In China, the annual consumption of concrete has reached 7 billion tons in 2008. It is evident that such large amount of concrete production has put significant impact on the energy, resource, environment, and ecology of the society. Hence, how to develop the concrete technology in a sustainable way has become an urgent issue for the nation. In this paper, the scientific strategies for the sustainable development of concrete infrastructure in China are presented, including deterioration mechanism and damage model of concrete under coupling effect of both loading and environmental factors, as well as the loading-carrying and durability scientifically unified service life design theory. Moreover, the sustainable features of several important concrete infrastructures in China, such as Su-tong Bridge and Qinghai-Tibet Railway, are briefly introduced.