Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Society's transformation in response to climate change will reshape the future of our economy. Materials are vital to modern society but induce significant greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. GHGs from material production rose from 15 to 23% between 1995 and 2015. The Canadian Government and the cement industry have made a clear commitment to reduce embodied carbon emissions in construction materials and promote the use of lower-carbon materials. This research program's overarching objective is to tackle the challenges in modelling mine waste utilization in construction materials and quantitatively evaluate the potential to reduce GHGs in the mining and building sectors from a life-cycle perspective. Specifically, short-term objectives for the five years include: 1) Demand estimation of mine waste for Canada's building sector; 2) Supply chain preparedness of mine waste for building materials: This will answer how much mine waste is currently used in the construction industry and has the potential for near-term implementation in Canada; 3) Bridging the utilization gap between the two sectors and mitigating its life-cycle GHG emissions; 4) Develop a toolkit that supports decision-making and demonstrates the effectiveness of the methods mentioned above in assessing the potential of mine waste utilization for the building sector in the Greater Toronto Area. A dynamic material flow analysis (MFA) with hybrid life-cycle assessment (LCA) model in the building sector with map tools will be developed to estimate granular and dynamic demand for new materials in construction and renovation in given research areas. The anticipated outcomes of the proposal are primarily peer-reviewed scholarly publications presenting the methodologies and new findings of analyzing the mine waste utilization in the construction sector. Our development of a dynamic MFA-LCA with granular data harmonization will promote the application of data science in the field of Industrial Ecology. This program will also provide visualization toolkits to practitioners for interactive communication on embodied carbon accounting in similar projects. The combination of material flow accounting and carbon footprint assessment will inform policy-makers of embodied carbon reduction by using more mine waste in Canada. These outputs will have a high potential to be integrated into national, industry's, or companies' strategic planning of sustainable buildings. A transparent and systematic accounting of carbon footprint conducted in this program is highly demanded by city managers, planners, engineers, and other interested stakeholders to promote, monitor, and accredit their net-zero transition agendas. Lastly, the program will train one postdoc, three graduate and three undergraduate students in total with interdisciplinary experience in construction, mining, and sustainability assessment to address the current shortage of expertise in the public and private sectors.