What is Ecological Concrete

The process of concrete obtaining involves high energy consumption, significant amounts of depletable natural raw materials, and greenhouse gas emissions. A greening variant of concrete is the substitution of the mineral aggregates from its composition with vegetal aggregates made by sunflower stalks. These vegetal aggregates have advantages from health, environment protection, comfort, energy saving, thermal, and/or sound insulation points of view. The aim of this chapter is to present the results of a research on concrete with sunflower stalk aggregates by applying a method of pretreatment of plant aggregates, and then a method of modifying the cement matrix, one of accelerating the hydration reaction of cement, and then a combination of cement matrix modification in parallel with the cement hydration reaction acceleration.