Displaying items by tag: Product
UK: SigmaRoc subsidiary CCP has launched Greenbloc Standard, Ultra and Premium. The new designations correspond to 50%, 80% and 100% cement substitution. Professional Builder News has reported that Using Greenbloc Standard reduces structures’ CO2 emissions by 77% compared with structures built with conventional ordinary Portland cement (OPC)-based blocks. For an average semi-detached house, this is equivalent to 2.7t of CO2.
CCP general manager Phil Rotheram said “The expansion of our Greenbloc range continues our commitment to sustainable alternatives to our product offering as we fully commit to the challenges of removing embodied carbon from the built environment.”
Greenbloc Ultra featured in a gold medal-winning garden at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2023 in May 2023.
Qatar: Qatar National Cement Company (QNCC) has signed a partnership agreement with SAP and Mannai ICT. The deal is intended to help the cement producer use cloud computing products such as Google Cloud to manage its data. It will also use S/4HANA, a resource planning product, and SAP Success Factors, a employee management product.
Essa Mohammed Ali A M Kaldari, QNCC’s Chief Executive Officer, said “In undertaking this end-to-end digital transformation, our aim is to modernise and streamline our systems, increase efficiencies, and enhance the services we deliver to our customers and employees.” He added, “After implementation, our operations will be more agile and scalable, enabling us to capitalise on future opportunities in the market and region.”
Alaa Jaber, the managing director for SAP Qatar and Fast Growth Markets, said, “Through this digital transformation, QNCC is aligning itself with Qatar’s 2030 National Vision and supporting its sustainability plans. It is also ensuring its future success by increasing its visibility over all operations, enabling it to react in an agile way to changes in the market and expected rise in demand for its products. Moreover, QNCC will be able to make decisions informed by real-time insights and data analytics.”
Dalmia Cement (Bharat) launches Dalmia Supreme Portland pozzolana cement in Eastern India
05 May 2023India: Dalmia Cement (Bharat) has launched Dalmia Supreme cement, a Portland pozzolana cement (PPC), in the Eastern India market. The producer says that the cement is a is a specialised, best-in-class product formulated for all construction applications, offering better workability, higher density, chemical resistance and strength and faster setting times than ordinary Portland cement (OPC). Dalmia Cement already sells Portland fly ash cement under its Konark cement brand.
Dalmia Cement (Bharat)'s head of sales, logistics, technical services and marketing Rajiv Prasad said “We are excited to introduce Dalmia Supreme Cement in the Eastern market. In line with the company’s customer-centric approach, this new offering is to cater to the growing needs of a specialised product for 'Stronger, Faster and Better' construction."
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.
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.”
Cuban plant supplying oil well cement products
21 April 2023Cuba: Corporación Cementos Cubanos’ Siguaney plant is supplying oil well cement products for Empresa de Perforación y Reparación de Pozos de Petróleo y Gas (EMPERCAP) and Australia-based Melbana. It has contracts to supply around 300t to both companies for local projects, according to the Prensa Latina news agency. It is also supplying PP-25 and P-35 types of oil well cement to the government.
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.
Saudi Arabia: Riyadh Cement has ordered an airslide analyser from Switzerland-based SpectraFlow Analytics for its white cement production line. The contract also includes raw mix proportioning software. The product is an online analyser able to measure raw materials in airslides. The vendor says that by using its analyser, and a site-specific raw mix proportioning strategy, the variation in the local raw materials can be balanced out to increase consistency of the raw meal and kiln feed quality. Also the variable MgO, Na2O, K2O, Cl and SO3 content is optimally monitored.
This order is SpectraFlow Analytics’ 49th order for the cement Industry and the first airslide analyser installation in Saudi Arabia. This order raises the installed base in Saudi Arabia to seven analysers (6 crossbelt, 1 airslide) and worldwide to 71 analysers (40 crossbelt and 31 airslide).
SpectraFlow Analytics sells online analysis products to the cement, bauxite, gold, platinum, copper, potash, phosphate, coal and other minerals industries. Its products are based on near Infrared (NIR) spectroscopy as opposed to using radioactive sources or neutron generators.
Burkina Faso: Ciments de l'Afrique (CIMAF) has ordered a Polysius booster mill from Germany-based ThyssenKrupp Industrial Solutions (TKIS) for its grinding plant at Ouagadougou. This is the first industrial reference of the product that promises to allow a greater substitution of clinker with local filler by boosting the fineness and reactivity of the clinker. It will also maintain both cement quality to local standards and production capacity of the exiting ball mill at the unit.
Mohamed Naciri, the Regional General Manager for CIMAF, commented “Burkina Faso is a landlocked country where clinker has to travel at least 1200km to reach Ouagadougou, every technology aiming to decrease the cement clinker factor is welcome, this project is also an important milestone in our decarbonation road map, TKIS is a key partner for CIMAF to decrease our group CO2 footprint.”
CIMAF owns and operates 13 grinding plants in Africa. It runs plants in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Ivory Coast, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea Bissau, Guinea, Mali, and Mauritania. CIMAF's parent company, Omnium des Industries et de la Promotion (OIP), is a cement supplier across north, west, and central Africa, producing about 12Mt/yr. It is the third largest cement producer in Morocco with two integrated plants.