Displaying items by tag: Standards

UK: Hanson says it has become one of the first companies in the UK to be certified to the new ISO 19443 standard, for companies supplying products and services that are important to nuclear safety. The subsidiary of Germany-based Heidelberg Materials is a supplier to the nuclear sector and is currently working with three of the delivery teams on the Hinkley Point C (HPC) project.

Stewart Cameron, head of nuclear at Hanson UK said “It has taken our HPC team a year to complete the ISO 19443 process.” He added, “Although it is not a requirement for our supplies to the project, it recognises the efforts we make – and helps others understand – why nuclear needs to be different.”

Canada: The city administration of Langford in British Columbia plans to enact regulations requiring all public and private projects to use reduced-CO₂ concrete. It plans to support the rules with parallel measures affecting the design of buildings.

Victoria News has reported that the city authorities previously mandated reduced-CO₂ cement for all projects in June 2022, but subsequently relaxed the regulations after only one company – Butler Concrete and Aggregates – completed the transition. Butler Concrete and Aggregates produces its reduced-CO₂ concrete using slag cement supplied by Lafarge Canada.

Ivory Coast: The Council of Ministers has approved cement producers to use dolomite in place of limestone to reduce imports from Europe and Asia. The government said that it had conducted the necessary tests supporting the change in the local cement standard, according to the Agence Ivoirienne de Presse. The Ministry of Industry and other related government departments have been instructed to take action to support the change.

India: The government is planning to introduce new quality standards for cement. Reuters has reported that the central government plans to implement the change before the end of December 2022. A government source said "Better standards help comply with international standards." It hopes that the cement sector will increase its export opportunities as a result.

Algeria: Groupe des Ciments d'Algérie (GICA) has obtained a certificate of conformity with European standards (CE) for three types of cement. The certification should allow the company to export more products to Europe, according to the Expression newspaper. It applies to its Gica Moudhad and Gica Béton products. The move follows similar certification of products with the Association Française de Normalisation (AFNOR) from the company’s Aïn El Kebira plant in July 2021. At the same time the Minister of Industry said it was helping the group with its export strategy.

In 2021 GICA exported 2.25Mt of cement to countries including the Ivory Coast, Gambia, Ghana, Mauritania, Senegal , Cameroon, Benin,  Guinea, Brazil, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Haiti and a number of European countries.

Ghana: The Ghana Standards Authority (GSA) has reported discoveries of Empire Cement brand cement on sale on the open market despite neither it nor the Ghana Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) having issued permits for Empire Cement to produce cement. Graphic Online News has reported that the suspect products are wrongly labelled with certification marks. GSA director general Alex Dodoo warned that this constitutes an offence.

France: The Scientific and Technical Center for Building (CSTB) has certified Hoffmann Green Cement Technologies’ clinkerless H-UKR alkali-activated slag cement for structural use in buildings of all types. BusinessWire News has reported that the certification confirms the product’s safety, sustainability, lifespan and performance in conformity with Eurocode 2 and Eurocode 8 design standards.

Co-founders Julien Blanchard and David Hoffmann said “In the midst of ongoing frenetic communication regarding carbon neutrality, Hoffmann Green Cement is as usual endeavouring to back its announcements with verified and evaluated elements. The granting of these evaluations further objectifies the quality of our cement, notably with the awarding of a lifespan of 100 years. In this regard, we would like to thank the CSTB’s teams for drafting this unprecedented technical appraisal and our own teams who are working tirelessly on seeking innovative decarbonised solutions to preserve tomorrow’s world.”

Peru: The Ministry of Labour and Employment Promotion has initiated talks with cement producers, exporters and unions with a view to changing the standard national cement bag weight. The ministry recognised the 42.5kg/bag standard as a historical anachronism and unsafe. The Federation of Civil Construction Workers (FTCCP) has reported lower back injury as the main cause of ‘desertion of construction site.’ Beside the risk of injury, the standard has allegedly contributed to discrimination against older builders, because site managers often consider even those well below the state early retirement age of 55 to beunfit. The union has argued that 25kg bags would reduce the risk of harm to quality of life to 15%, while 15kg bags would entail a risk of just 5%.

Standards authority Produce will now hold a round table with stakeholders to review the possibility of a 41% weight reduction to the international standard of 25kg. Federation of Cement and Ready-Mix Workers of Peru (FETRACEPPE) general secretary Luis Gilvonio said that this will not solve problems overnight: where firms start instructing workers to carry two bags at a time, their net load will have increased. As such, he argued for continued awareness-raising alongside the law change.

Bagged cement accounted for 70% of Peruvian producers’ cement sales in 2021.

Argos USA announced this week that its integrated Roberta plant in Alabama is set to produce 100% Portland limestone cement (PLC) by June 2022. As part of the transition three of its terminals in North Carolina will also switch over at the same time. The company also expects that all of its plants will convert to PLC in 2023. Cement sites including Newberry in Florida, Harleyville in South Carolina and Martinsburg in West Virginia are already producing PLC.

The change by Argos marks the latest example in an ongoing trend of US-based cement companies moving entire plants to PLC production. In September 2021 LafargeHolcim US said that its integrated Midlothian plant in Texas was preparing to convert to full PLC production and that it would be the first plant in the US to do so. It later confirmed that the plant had done so by the end of 2021. In October 2021 GCC said that its Trident Plant in Montana would fully move to PLC in early 2022. Then in November 2021 Titan America said that its Pennsuco cement plant in Florida would make the change possibly by 2023. Moving into 2022 brought the news that LafargeHolcim US’ Ste. Genevieve plant in Missouri and its Alpena plant in Michigan had each transitioned to PLC production. Lehigh Hanson then rounded up the bunch earlier this month, at the start of February 2022, when it announced that a PLC was the primary product now coming out of its Mason City plant in Iowa. It even invited a US Member of Congress to celebrate!

The current expansionist phase of PLC usage in the US dates back to late 2020 when the Portland Cement Association (PCA) launched a dedicated website to promote the use of the blended cement by discussing its applications and benefits. It then released a new environmental product declaration in March 2021 and PLC received a mention in the PCA’s Roadmap to Carbon Neutrality when it was released a year later in October 2021. Lots of work went into PLC prior to 2020 though, both by the PCA and others. The first commercial production of PLC in the US started in 2005 and PLC gained its own blended cement specification in 2012. Notably, the PCA has been tracking the state acceptance of PLC by the Department of Transportation and it grew markedly during the 2010s.

The US is playing catch-up with PLC. In Europe its usage dates back to the 1960s. Cembureau, the European Cement Association, reported usage of around 30% in 2004. More recently in 2020, the VDZ, the German Cement Association, reported a similar figure domestically with the proportion of blended cement shipments including limestone, shale and multiple additives at 31.6%. In the US it is hard to gauge the scale of the current move towards PLC by producers, due to limited publicly available data. A PCA survey reported PLC production of 0.89Mt in 2016. If all the plants mentioned above convert fully to PLC and maintain their rated production capacity that would be something like 14Mt/yr of PLC in 2023 or 11% of the US’s total cement capacity. For comparison, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) reported total shipments of all blended cements at 3.3Mt in 2020 and a total of 5.4Mt for the first 11 months of 2021. Plus, remember that PLC is just one blended cement among others, like those that use slag or fly ash.

Recent developments show that a large change is coming towards the US cement market in the update of blended cements. It’s been a long time coming but the last six months have seen brisk increases in PLC production at scale. The exact data is not available but one might expect something around triple the current number of production plants making PLC if the US market heads towards European levels. This rough estimate doesn’t take into account existing partial PLC production levels. At the same time the US cement sector should see a fall in its emissions due to PLC’s 10% reduction in CO₂ emissions compared to ordinary Portland cement

Sri Lanka: The National Construction Association of Sri Lanka (NCASL) claims that no quality control checks are being conducted on imports of cement. The association says that there are labels printed on cement bags confirming that they were quality checked by the Sri Lanka Standard Institute (SLSI) but that it has no evidence of such checks actually being carried out, according to the Sri Lankan Daily Mirror newspaper. It has asked for the authorities to show evidence that the quality control checks are actually taking place.

Sri Lanka faced a shortage of cement in the autumn of 2021 due to input cost rises, supply chain disruption and negative exchange rates effects. The NCASL reports that most cement imports come from India or Pakistan.