Displaying items by tag: UK
Betolar calls for a global performance-based standard to support low-carbon building materials
03 May 2023UK: Riku Kytömäki, the chief executive officer of Betolar, has called for a global performance-based standard to replace the current building requirements that restrict the use of new low-carbon materials to replace cement in concrete production. He made the comments at the London Concrete Expo. Kytömäki argued that current standards state that concrete manufacturers must use a certain percentage of cement to strengthen the finished product. Betolar’s product Geoprime is an additive designed for use in cement-free concrete production with ash and ground granulated blast furnace slag (GGBFS). However, “ageing” standards rule out the use of these kinds of products such as this despite their sustainability advantages.
Kytömäki said “It is time for global concrete industry to step up their sustainability efforts. New material innovation is available. It is cost-effective and helps to meet stricter durability requirements. However, the current regulations across the markets are restricting the use of circular materials allowed in concrete buildings.” He added that his company’s product Geoprime, “does not require large investments, but there is regulation to be developed quickly so that new solutions and materials can be used."
Betolar says it has analysed over 200 side-streams other than slag and fly ash, providing flexibility to process locally available side-streams. It added that there are also significant CO2 savings to be found in logistics when manufacturing processes take place near the source of the industrial side-streams.
CRH now ‘de facto’ American company
28 April 2023Ireland/US: Albert Manifold, the chief executive officer of CRH, has described the company as a ‘de facto’ American company at it its annual general meeting. "This is a golden age of construction in the US," said Manifold, according to the Irish Times newspaper. He added that moving the group's main stock market listing to the US made it "more of an American company, which de facto we actually are". He also noted comments by US president Joe Biden in February 2023 that the country was planning “to buy American” as part of its infrastructure spending. North America accounted for 75% of the group’s earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) in 2022 compared to around a half in the early 2010s.
CRH said in March 2023 that it was preparing to move its primary listing of shares to a US-based stock exchange.
Beumer Group opens new head office in the UK
28 April 2023UK: Germany-based Beumer Group has opened a new local head office at Ashby de la Zouch in Leicestershire. The previous head office in the country, near London, will continue to operate as a satellite office.
David McGarry, the chief executive officer of Beumer Group UK, said “The opening of the new UK head office reinforces our strong partnership and commitment to our customers in the UK and Ireland, this will enable us to provide an even more seamless service to support them in their continued growth investing in local expertise in the long term.”
Beumer Group sells products for conveying, loading, palletising, packaging, sortation and baggage handling.
UK: Aggregate Industries has launched the ECOPlanet product range. The products offer a reduction of at least 30% in the carbon footprint of cement, compared to CEM I ordinary Portland cement, by using second cementitious materials such as fly ash. The launch of the ECOPlanet range is part of the subsidiary of Holcim’s 2030 sustainability strategy, Building Progress for a Sustainable Future.
Dragan Maksimovic, the chief executive officer of Aggregate Industries, said “The launch of ECOPlanet expands on our existing low carbon products including ECOPact, the world’s broadest range of green concrete or Super-Low Carbon, the first asphalt using biogenic material within the bitumen. The product is driven by innovation and by our ambitions to build a net zero future, and we’re delighted once again to be pushing the boundaries of low carbon construction solutions.”
King’s Award for Enterprise for Thermoteknix
26 April 2023UK: Thermoteknix Systems, a global manufacturer of infrared and thermal imaging systems for the cement industry, has been presented with the King’s Award for Enterprise, recognising significant and sustained growth in the company’s international trade. Overseas sales for the company grew by 173% in a three-year period across key markets including North America, Europe and Asia.
Thermoteknix has been a multiple recipient of the public accolade awarded to UK business, having previously won the Queen’s Award for Enterprise: International Trade once and the Queen’s Award for Enterprise: Innovation twice. The awards have been renamed following the accession of King Charles III, emphasising his desire to continue the legacy of Queen Elizabeth II in celebrating the achievements of outstanding UK businesses each year, which she began in 1965.
Commenting on winning the first King’s Award honour, founder and managing director of Thermoteknix, Richard Salisbury said “We are extremely honoured to receive this award and would like to acknowledge the hard work and commitment shown by our whole team in delivering outstanding results for our customers around the world in what continues to be fast-changing and challenging markets made all the more onerous during the Covid-19 pandemic.”
Founded in 1982, Thermoteknix has sustained continued growth from its Cambridge headquarters, manufacturing and supplying advanced thermal imaging solutions to defence and security markets, and process monitoring. Thermoteknix successfully exports to more than 70 countries around the world.
Paul Douglas, Production Technician at Thermoteknix, is part of the team on site at the company's UK manufacturing facilities who prepare the Thermoteknix kiln shell scanners, and kiln and cooler cameras for delivery to Cement plant customers around the world.
Carbon capture firm MOF Technologies rebrands to Nuada
25 April 2023UK: MOF Technologies, a Northern Ireland-based company whose technology efficiently captures CO2 directly from industrial sources, is rebranding to Nuada. The new name is an ode to the company’s Celtic origins and is inspired by the ancient mythical king, Nuada, whose name means ‘to capture.’
Nuada says that its next-generation ‘heatless’ technology is ‘redefining carbon (CO2) capture,’ slashing the energy penalty and costs associated with CO2 capture.
Nuada has combined advanced solid adsorbents, named MOFs, with proven vacuum swing technology to enable the separation of CO2 from flue gas using pressure instead of heat. This ‘heatless’ system represents a step change in innovation that slashes the energy penalty and cost associated with carbon capture, the main barriers for mass adoption in industry.
The company says that the new branding and direction have come at a critical time as the world is sprinting to decarbonise and mitigate the impacts of climate change. This is particularly the case in hard-to-abate industries like cement production, where carbon capture is essential to reaching Net Zero targets.
First Graphene consortium to start graphene-enhanced cement trial at Breedon Cement in June 2023
21 April 2023UK: A consortium led by Australia-based First Graphene including Breedon Cement, Morgan Sindall Construction and the University of Manchester plans to start a trial producing graphene-enhanced cement in June 2023. The project will aim to produce around 2000t of the cement in the first instance. Its performance as a binder in mortar and concrete systems will be analysed to assess the performance improvement, prior to use in real-world demonstrations by Morgan Sindall Construction. Data from Breedon and First Graphene production sites has already been analysed by the University of Manchester and found graphene enhanced cement to both offset CO2 and demonstrate potential mechanical benefits, even at graphene loading levels less than 0.06%.The project is supported by a Euro215m grant from the Innovate UK scheme.
Michael Bell, the managing director and chief executive officer of First Graphene, said “Our research and development in collaboration with some of the world’s most innovative materials technology organisations, coupled with buy-in from industry partners to trial our graphene products, sets the foundation for a strong commercialisation pathway.” He added, “Greening of the concrete and cement sector provides our company with a great opportunity to strengthen both our revenue and ultimately profitability as market demand for decarbonisation technologies and materials increases.”
Building new buildings from old ones
19 April 2023Holcim launched its formal take on construction and demolition waste (CDW) this week with the unveiling of its ECOCycle technology platform at the BAU architecture fair in Munich. This amounts to managing the distribution, processing, grinding and recycling of CDW back into new building material products. It claims that its concrete, cement and aggregate products can contain 10 - 100% of CDW with no drop in performance.
It is hard to gauge whether this is marketing for existing operations or the start of something new. Yet, in its 2022 Sustainability Report, Holcim said that it recycled 6.8Mt of CDW back into building products and that it is on track to meet its target of 10Mt by 2025. This target was neatly put into words as wanting “to build more new buildings from old ones.” Ahead of the announcement of the launch of ECOCycle, it added that it was going to roll out its Susteno product around Europe. This product, made from 20% CDW, was originally released in Switzerland in the late 2010s. Notably, recent acquisitions by Holcim that connect to its growing focus on CDW include Poland-based Ol-Trans in July 2022, UK-based Wiltshire Heavy Building Materials in October 2022 and UK-based Sivyer Logistics in April 2023.
As covered by Global Cement Weekly in February 2023, Holcim is not the only heavy building materials company pivoting to CDW. The European Union (EU) set a 70% recovery target for it in 2020 and various cement company sustainability reports have described the region as being receptive to moves into this sector. Cemex set up a global waste management subsidiary called Regenera at the end of January 2023. This division covers both alternative fuels, CDW and industrial by-products, so it is more general than Holcim’s current effort, but it shows intent in the same direction. Cemex previously set a target of recycling 14Mt/yr CDW by 2030.
Heidelberg Materials has been working on developing recycled concrete paste and its ReConcrete-360° concrete recycling process. As of its last sustainability report, this process had been tested at the pilot scale and is now being developed and scaled for industrial application. In addition to acquiring UK-based Mick George Group in December 2022 Heidelberg Materials has also purchased Germany-based RWG Holding in January 2023 and Germany-based SER Group in February 2023. All three companies operate in the CDW sector.
The other notable contribution that Heidelberg Materials has been making is as a partner of the ‘Circular City - Building Material Registry for the City of Heidelberg’ project. When Heidelberg Materials announced its involvement in the initiative in mid-2022 it said it was the first city in Europe to apply the principles of urban mining. The goal of the project is to take an inventory of the city’s buildings and then compile it in a digital material registry. The basis for the registry is the Urban Mining Screener developed by EPEA (Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency). This programme can estimate the composition of buildings based on building data such as location, year of construction, building volume or building type. Circular economy supply chains can then act accordingly when a building is retrofitted, demolished or deconstructed. So, for example, at the start of the project it worked out that a former US Army housing estate conversion site was calculated to contain approximately 466,000t of material, with about half in the form of concrete, a fifth in the form of bricks and 5% as metal.
That last example compares to a European Commission estimate that, as a whole, Europe generates around 450 - 500Mt/yr of CDW. A third of this is concrete. As with alternative fuels and slag previously, this may be money going into the ground. Recycling building materials is not new but any significant increase in reusing CDW that can reduce the clinker factor of cement (and the cement factor of concrete) offers a potentially cheaper route to building materials decarbonisation than carbon capture and utilisation/storage at current costs. Hence the continued interest.
Switzerland: Holcim has launched ECOCycle, its initiative to recycle construction demolition materials into new building products. It says it can recycle construction demolition materials across a broad range of applications, from decarbonised raw materials in low-carbon cement formulation, to aggregates in concrete and fillers in road construction.
Jan Jenisch, the chief executive officer of Holcim, said “Across all metropolitan areas where we operate, we are at the forefront of driving circular construction to build new from the old. With our ECOCycle technology we can build cities from cities, recycling 100% of construction demolition materials into new solutions, so everything gets reused and nothing gets lost. With our world’s growing population and urbanisation, circular construction is essential to build a future that works for people and the planet.”
The building materials producer is deploying its ECOCycle technology across its range of products to scale up circular construction. It says that its process enables concrete, cement and aggregates to contain from 10 - 100% recycled construction and demolition waste with no change in performance. The initiative is supported by distributing, processing, grinding and recycling construction and demolition materials into new building material products.
ECOCycle brings together previous work Holcim has conducted in the field such as launching a cement in Switzerland made with 20% demolition and construction waste. The company is now launching this product elsewhere in Europe. In France it is building an affordable housing complex using 100% ECOCycle recycled concrete. In the UK it is building a residential area with 50% ECOCycle aggregates that have been made from 100% recycled construction demolition materials.
Ireland/UK: A six-month feasibility study conducted by Mannok at its Derrylin plant, in conjunction with Catagen, has found a number of ways that the cement producer can reduce its CO2 emissions. Using Catagen’s HGEN renewable hydrogen generator with waste heat recovery could potentially decrease the cement plant’s annual CO2 emissions by 7%. In addition the study found that using biohydrogen generation from waste biomass could generate larger volumes of hydrogen with less renewable energy required, compared to electrolytic hydrogen generation. Using Catagen’s BIOHGEN process in this way could minimise carbon intensity by a further 18%. A combined group of engineers from Mannok and Catagen worked on the project.
Kevin Lunney, operations director at Mannok, said “We are very excited to be working with the Catagen team, who have demonstrated a deep level of technical ability and competency during the feasibility work. I have no doubt that Mannok will derive significant value from the work already completed, with many new opportunities for collaboration now presenting that we would not have considered before. Achieving Net Zero is now the primary goal for our business and I expect Catagen will play a significant role in our achieving that goal, which we expect will have major benefits for the sector overall.”
In early April 2023 Mannok revealed that it had secured funding from the UK Government Green Energy Scheme to support its energy transformation programme. The first phase of the initiative, which the funding will support, is the generation of onsite green hydrogen to replace the use of diesel in over 70% of the company’s 150 heavy-goods truck fleet.
Belfast-based Catagen started as a testing company providing emissions data to the automotive sector. It has started working in other industrial sectors - such as cement, glass and steel in Europe and the US – as part of its ClimaHtech product range.