Students Go Sustainable with Concrete

Six students won the Portland Cement Association’s (PCA) student design competition, Concrete Thinking for a Sustainable World. Organized in two categories, structure and component, the competition encourages students to use concrete as a green building material. Henry Louis Miller of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute won in the component category by using postconsumer-waste plastics and toxically compromised soil to make cement bricks (shown); this development could give companies an affordable way to help recapture brownfields through the PCA’s solidification/ stabilization method, which binds toxins to the concrete. Giséle Fraser, Daphnée van Lierde, and Mikaëlle Rolland-Lamothe of Université Laval, Quebec, received first place in the structure category for their River Bank Filters, a proposal to use a former maritime construction site as a new Science Center of Quebec. The project is a concrete structure that extends out over the river to capture breezes; the team uses concrete walls to reflect the terrain in the design. See more photos at www.cement.org.