The Last Word

You will have noticed in the news pages of this month's issue the number of new cement plant projects and also the number of company reorganisations, mergers, buy-outs, acquisitions, divestments and general organisational reshuffling. The new cement plant projects are fantastic news for everyone: Growing populations throughout the developing world mean burgeoning demand for cement and higher capacity utilisation figures, higher profits and more investment. Partly through the action of the cement industry, more and more people around the world are being brought out of absolute poverty¹ and are being given access to reliable infrastructure such as hospitals and clean water.

In the house of my venerable parents is an odd-shaped piece of furniture. It is an elongated rectangular box made of some highly polished wood, perched on four stout legs - they have to be stout because this thing weighs half a tonne. Opening the front reveals a radio dial, and opening the top shows a turntable for old-fashioned records. It is a Blaupunkt radiogram from around 1950 - you can actually see it for yourself by searching 'blaupunkt radiogram playing otis redding Fa fa fa' on Google. Placing a vinyl record on the platter and bringing down the needle into the spiral groove will bring forth a nostalgic series of clicks and pops as well as the full audio representation of your chosen music, faithfully rendered in full stereo through powerful - and heavy - speakers, after amplification through real glowing analogue valves. If the heating in the house fails, you can warm yourself next to the heat-emitting innards of the radiogram.

Yesterday, during my lunchbreak, I read a transcript of a recent lecture given by the former British politician Nigel Lawson at the University of Bath, UK. The subject was 'climate change,' the catch-all phrase that seems to be increasingly used to describe weather events that do not conform to our expectations of a generally benign climate. The person that recommended the article was Robert McCaffrey, the Editor of Global Cement Magazine who is, as regular readers of this column will be aware, something of a climate 'sceptic.' The content of the Lawson article was therefore not a surprise.

The global cement industry, normally a sector that stays 'under-the-radar' of public perception, has seen something of a relative media 'frenzy' in the general population recently. As those familiar with the global cement industry might expect, the recent spike in cement industry interest has been due to the planned LafargeHolcim merger. The story has taken the sector out of the business sections, onto mainstream websites and into the eyeballs of more people than normal.

As a former PhD chemist who moved somewhat diagonally to work for a cement magazine, I have learnt, forgotten and re-learnt a lot of chemistry. While my studies, in which I looked at how to get synthetic molecules to selectively bind to carbon dioxide (CO₂), were inherently interesting to me, useful to my supervisor (as a source of funding) and of some use to the wider scientific community, they did not represent what I wanted to do from a long-term perspective.