ANHYDRITEC® UK Saved 1.3 Million kg of CO2 in Five Years

Over the last five years, ANHYDRITEC® UK has saved 1,344,000 kg of CO2 from being released into the UK atmosphere. Not through complex offsetting schemes or new technology, but through something much simpler: specifiers and contractors choosing to switch from traditional cement and sand-based screed to calcium sulphate Gyvlon®.

In that five-year period, we supplied 9.6 million m² of screed across the UK. Had that same volume been laid using a conventional cement and sand-based screed instead, it would have required 1,920,000 kg of cement. This 1,920,000 kg of cement, mixed into a standard 1:4 sand-cement screed and laid at 65mm, would cover roughly 98,500 m² — a little over 1% of the 9.6 million m² Gyvlon actually supplied over that five-year period.

In fact, the estimated 1,344,000 kg of CO2 that would have been produced by using a sand-cement screed are equivalent to only 134,000 kg of CO2 produced by the same amount of anhydrite liquid screed, or roughly, 90% less.

According to the 2019 report Industrial Transformation 2050 – Pathways to Net-Zero Emissions from EU Heavy Industry by Material Economics, every kilogram of cement produced releases 0.7 kg of CO2 into the atmosphere. That's largely down to the cement manufacturing process itself: limestone, which is more than twice the density of water, has to be heated to 1,450°C to produce cement, a process that consumes roughly 0.75 tonnes of fossil fuel per tonne of cement produced.

Applying that 0.7 kg figure to the 1,920,000 kg of cement that would otherwise have been used gives a total of 1,344,000 kg of CO2 — emissions that, by choosing any of the Gyvlon® range of screeds by ANHYDRITEC, never entered the atmosphere in the first place.

1,344,000 kg of CO2 is a hard number to visualise on its own, so here's what it actually represents:

That's the scale of impact achieved simply by switching from a traditional cement-based screed to a calcium sulphate alternative, without any floor design or performance compromises, just a smarter material choice.

The beauty of this saving is that it doesn't ask anything extra of specifiers, contractors, or developers. It's not a case of trading off performance for sustainability, but a different starting material with a dramatically lower embodied carbon footprint, delivering the same reliable, high-performance flowing screed that projects already depend on.

Set against an industry where cement alone accounts for roughly 8% of global emissions, and where cementitious materials are the single biggest driver of construction's growing carbon footprint, that matters. Screed is rarely the headline material on a specification, but it's poured across almost every floor in almost every building, which means small differences in embodied carbon per m² add up fast across a live construction pipeline. We believe every kilogram of CO2 avoided matters, and the data shows that a simple specification decision, repeated across enough projects, can add up to a genuinely meaningful reduction at scale.

If your next project is currently specified with a traditional cement and sand screed, it's worth asking: what would switching to Gyvlon® save? Based on the numbers above, the answer might be more significant than you'd expect.