The Last Word

For the first few years of this magazine, we did not have a ‘Last Word.’ We had guest columnists who wrote about their observations of the industry, really starting with Johan Riedenlow, an early contact at HW Carlsen. For several years cement industry analyst Ken Rumph wrote a number of notable columns in the magazine entitled ‘View from the City, while Jean-Marie Chandelle, CEO of CEMBUREAU, wrote a very readable and informative monthly ‘View from Brussels’ for several years until his retirement.

The Covid Pandemic has been awful for millions of people around the world, but as it starts to slowly recede into the rear-view mirror, we are trying to deal with a new and sometimes unrecognisable world.

Many of us enjoy a burger from time to time. You may even enjoy a ‘beefburger,’ and when thinking of a sausage, no doubt meat will be involved. So a recent legal tussle over what the vegetarian versions of these products should or could be called is of some culinary interest to us all. It also affects the cement industry, as we shall come to see.

Google Maps has a new feature, Timelapse, which stitches together satellite images to allow users to scroll back in time to 1984. As someone who is as old as the first images on Timelapse, this is sobering. Many locations around the world have changed beyond recognition: The melting of Greenland, the ‘advance’ into the Amazon, the growth of megacities like Dubai and Beijing, the disappearance of the Aral Sea... The images are equally shocking and unsurprising.

Firstly, I’d like to say ‘thanks’ to my colleague Peter Edwards for writing  the Last Word since the start of the pandemic. We’ll now be taking it in turns to write the column for the foreseeable future.