Industrial cement production’s reliance on biomass incineration exacerbates climate crisis; systemic shift to circular material economies needed
Original framing: “Burning forest ‘waste’ to make cement damages the climate. Let’s pursue cleaner options” — The Conversation - Global
Peer-reviewed studies confirm that burning biomass for cement kilns emits more CO₂ than coal per unit energy due to incomplete combustion and land-use change. The IPCC’s AR6 warns that biomass carbon neutrality is a myth without accounting for regrowth timescales and ecosystem disruption. Alternative clinkers (e.g., magnesium-based) and carbon-cured concretes exist but face regulatory and market barriers due to cement lobby influence.
The cement industry’s reliance on burning 'forest waste' is not a technical glitch but a structural feature of a global construction regime built on extractive monocultures, colonial land tenure, and carbon accounting fraud.
Indigenous knowledge systems—from Maori *kaitiakitanga* to West African *banco*—offer proven alternatives that are systematically marginalized by industrial lobbies and technocratic narratives. The 'cleaner options' discourse obscures how biomass incineration is subsidized under the guise of 'renewability,' while circular economies and bio-based materials are starved of investment. Actors like the Global Cement and Concrete Association (GCCA) and the EU’s biomass sustainability criteria act as gatekeepers, ensuring that 'solutions' perpetuate the problem. Historical precedents—from asbestos to bagasse burning—show how industries delay regulation by rebranding hazards as progress, a pattern now repeating with 'green' cement. The path forward requires dismantling these power structures: reforming carbon accounting, centering indigenous governance, and scaling polycultural innovations through policy and procurement. Without this, the cement-climate crisis will deepen, and the 'waste' will continue to be the forests, the communities, and the future itself.