The Importance of Alternative Materials for Building Construction: Comparison
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The escalating demand for natural resources within the construction industry is progressing upward. At the same time, however, there is a great concern regarding the depletion of these resources. On the one hand, the depletion of primary sources of natural sand worldwide, combined with environmental and ecological concerns, drives the adoption of alternative aggregate materials for sustainable concrete construction. On the other hand, stone dust, a waste from the quarrying industry, offers a cost-effective and practical solution for producing concrete. 

  • recycled concrete
  • stone dust
  • mechanical properties

1. Overview

On a global scale, the construction industry is a significant consumer of both renewable and nonrenewable natural resources, utilizing approximately 35–40% of all raw materials. Additionally, it consumes 40% of the total energy production and approximately 15% of the world’s available water while being responsible for about 35% of the world’s CO2 emissions [1]. Considering the substantial impact of the construction industry on the environment, the sustainable management of natural resources in this sector becomes imperative for a more environmentally conscious future.
Among the main raw materials, sand and gravel are widely used in the construction industry as fine and coarse concrete aggregates, respectively. They represent a significant portion of the concrete’s total volume [2], with sand alone accounting for over one-third of the aggregate by volume or mass [3]. The demand for these materials is enormous, with an estimated consumption of 3.2 billion to 5.0 billion tons of sand annually for various applications such as concrete, glass, ceramics, mortar, and road construction [3,4][3][4]. By the year 2100, the amount of sand used is projected to reach 25 billion tons annually, significantly exceeding the available supply of approximately 10 billion tons per year [5]. With the growing demand for natural materials, these resources are becoming increasingly scarce, directly impacting aggregates’ rising prices and, consequently, the cost per cubic meter of concrete [6,7,8][6][7][8].
The high demand for sand has led to it being referred to as “the new gold.” It is estimated that approximately 200 tons of sand are used in the construction of a house, 15,000 tons are required for each kilometer of a highway, and 12 million tons of sand are used in constructing a nuclear power plant. This indiscriminate use creates a high demand for the extraction of this new gold, destroying physical and biological environments worldwide [9,10][9][10].
Additionally, environmental agencies are increasingly imposing restrictions on the extraction of natural minerals. These restrictions have resulted in challenges like limited supply, decreased quality, and higher prices for river sand. As a result, the search for alternative options to river sand has become an urgent matter [11]. Such restrictions have cascading effects, including instances of operators exceeding permit limits or engaging in unauthorized sand mining. Consequently, this reshapes sand prices and has repercussions on infrastructure projects, real estate markets, and development priorities [8,12,13][8][12][13].

2. The Importance of Alternative Materials for Building Construction

Recent policy initiatives promote the adoption of cleaner, circular practices in the building and construction materials sector in developed regions [14], as in the European Commission’s Circular Economy Action Plan [15]. The 1972 United Nations (UN) Conference on the Human Environment was the first intergovernmental effort to set broad environmental goals [16]; today, to achieve environmental sustainability, governments and industries are adopting circular economy practices, which comprise a systematic approach focusing on restorative and regenerative aspects of the economics of the manufactured product [17].
Growing concerns for sustainability, resilience, and environmental preservation power the demand for cost-effective and eco-friendly building materials [18]. In this sense, substituting raw materials for waste produced in other industrial sectors represents an important chance to promote circularity in the construction sector by combining industrial ecology, recycling, use of scraps, waste materials, and by-products [19,20,21][19][20][21]. The European Union is an example of a political system actively implementing a circular economy and industrial ecology. Their protocols and guidelines cover various stages of a building’s life cycle, emphasizing the importance of circularity and material resource efficiency [22,23,24][22][23][24]. During the design phase, careful choices are made to reduce material demand and waste generation. Also, the construction phase plays a significant role in minimizing waste production and embracing sustainable materials, including recycled and reused resources [19,21,25][19][21][25].
In the U.S.A., the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) supervises the utilization of waste materials in the production of construction materials. The EPA provides a Methodology for Evaluating Beneficial Uses of Industrial Non-Hazardous Secondary Materials, along with a collection of resources and tools that aid in evaluating the potential adverse effects on human health and the environment related to the beneficial use of secondary materials [26].
In China, research on eco-industrial parks has provided valuable insights for developing a circular economy, alongside studies on cleaner production, industrial waste recycling, and urban planning [27,28][27][28]. This strategy has played a crucial role in expanding the application of circular economy principles from individual enterprises to eco-industrial parks, cities, provinces, and regions, focusing on resource efficiency, material efficiency, environmental protection performance, socioeconomic performance, and green management [27,28,29][27][28][29].
In Brazil, although still in its early stages in terms of a more comprehensive analysis, there is the National Solid Waste Policy, which promotes integrated waste management and the use of reverse logistics as a tool for implementing shared responsibility throughout the product life cycle. More recently, a reverse logistics program has been implemented, focusing on reusing materials and their return to the primary industry [30,31][30][31].
Along with the European legislation, there is also the Japanese Construction Material Recycling Act, which requires mandatory sorting and recycling of the construction waste generated in a building’s demolition or construction, or in the extension work of buildings and repair work or remodeling of buildings’ materials [21,26][21][26]. In Australia, the Resource Efficiency Policy requires governments’ large owned and leased office buildings and data centers, and new office buildings and fit-outs, to maintain a National Australian Built Environment Rating System through this policy. National agencies are also encouraged to promote the market for recycled and sustainably sourced materials by purchasing construction materials with recycled content to implement public works [26,28][26][28].
The increase in urbanization and industrialization leads to the depletion of natural resources [32]. This leads to exploring suitable alternative materials which are sustainable and economical [33]. A notable material in this regard is green concrete, which incorporates recycled materials as substitutes for aggregates, cement, and admixtures in concrete production [34]. In recent decades, the use of construction and demolition waste as coarse and fine aggregates has emerged as a proven sustainable solution [32,35,36][32][35][36]. Several studies have been conducted to evaluate the feasibility of recycling waste to produce sustainable concrete, such as granite and marble residues [37,38,39,40[37][38][39][40][41],41], stone dust [42,43,44[42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49],45,46,47,48,49], fly ash [42[42][50],50], limestone and quartz powder [50[50][51][52],51,52], jute fiber [53], ceramic waste [48], crumb rubber [54], rice husk ash [49], plastic wastes from recycled face masks [55[55][56],56], microplastics [57[57][58],58], EPS [59[59][60],60], and others [61,62,63,64][61][62][63][64].

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