Displaying items by tag: France

France: Climate protest group Earth Uprising says that it will target sites belonging to Holcim subsidiary Lafarge France for demonstrations as part of planned actions between 9 and 12 December 2023. Ouest France News has reported that the demonstrations will include a ‘festive but determined’ gathering at Lafarge France’s Saint-Barthélemy-d'Anjou concrete plant in Maine-et-Loire on 10 December 2023.

Lafarge France said “The people who intend to respond to this call for mobilisation against our sites have the wrong target. Of all industrial sectors, ours is moving the fastest and strongest in favour of the climate.” It added “Moreover, we are useful to society. The country's needs for housing, public facilities and infrastructure are immense, and concrete represents the best solution to meet them.”

France: Refractories supplier Calderys has announced the launch of its new brand platform following its integration of HWI (formerly HarbisonWalker International) earlier in 2023. The platform is comprised of four values, reflecting the personality of Calderys’ company culture, namely accountability, authenticity, multiculturalism and tenacity.

Chief people officer Melissa Bihary and global vice president communications Aurélie de Chassey-Hayot said “These new values and the overall platform have been developed through an employee-led exercise. Therefore, they truly define the essence of who we are and how we do business. They guide our actions and behaviors and help us make the best decisions for the benefit of our customers.”

France/Syria: The French Court of Cassation will deliver its decision on the appeal filed in May 2022 by Lafarge, now part of Holcim, in the case relating to its activities in Syria in the 2010s, on 16 January 2024.

The body will rule on the indictments of Lafarge for complicity in crimes against humanity and endangering the lives of others of its employees in Syria, which were confirmed by the Paris Court of Appeal in 2022, and which the company is still contesting. The group is suspected of having paid in 2013 and 2014, via its Syria-based subsidiary Lafarge Cement Syria several million euros to jihadist groups, including the Islamic State (IS) organisation, and to intermediaries, to maintain the activity of a cement factory in Jalabiya, even as the country plunged into war.

UK: Aggregates Industries has appointed Kaziwe Kaulule as Group Strategy and Commercial Growth Director.

Kaulule previously worked as the chief executive officer (CEO) of Lafarge Industries South Africa from 2020 to July 2023. Prior to this he was the CEO of Lafarge Cement Zimbabwe from 2018 to 2020. He has worked for Holcim Group since the mid 2000s holding audit roles for Lafarge in France before moving on to management positions in Zamabia. He holds a master of business administration (MBA) from the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School, a bachelor’s degree in commerce and a bachelor’s of science from the University of Cape Town.

France: Cemex’s venture capital unit Cemex Ventures has invested in construction value chain CO₂ emissions monitoring software developer Vizcab. Vizcab aims to help enable built environments to conform to stricter environmental regulations.

Head of Cemex Ventures Gonzalo Galindo said “Vizcab's exhaustive solution enables cooperation between different stakeholders to manage carbon strategies throughout a project's lifecycle, a critical challenge in our complex and interconnected industry. This solution also implements the use of building materials with sustainable attributes, such as Cemex's Vertua portfolio of products.”

Last week the US General Services Administration (GSA) announced that it was investing US$2bn on over 150 construction projects that use low-embodied carbon (LEC) materials. The funding is intended to support the use of US-manufactured low carbon asphalt, concrete, glass and steel as part of the Inflation Reduction Act. For readers who don’t know, the GSA manages federal government property and provides contracting options for government agencies. As part of this new message, it will spend US$767m on LEC concrete on federal government buildings projects following a pilot that started in May 2023. The full list of the projects can be found here.

This is relevant because the US-based ready-mixed concrete (RMX) market has been valued roughly at around US$60bn/yr. One estimate of how much the US federal government spent on concrete was around US$5bn in 2018. So the government buys a significant minority of RMX in the country, and if it starts specifying LEC products, this will affect the industry. And, at present at least, a key ingredient of all that concrete is cement.

This isn’t the first time that legislators in the US have specified LEC concrete. In 2019 Marin County in California introduced what it said was the world’s first building code that attempted to minimise carbon emissions from concrete production. It did this by setting maximum ordinary Portland cement (OPC) and embodied carbon levels and offering several ways suppliers can achieve this, including increasing the use of supplementary cementitious materials (SCM), using admixtures, optimising concrete mixtures and so on. Unlike the GSA’s approach in November 2023 though, this applies to all plain and reinforced concrete installed in the area, not just a portion of procured concrete via a government agency. Other similar regional schemes in the US include limits on embodied carbon levels in RMX in Denver, Colorado, and a reduction in the cement used in RMX in Berkeley, California. Environmental services company Tangible compiled a wider list of embodied carbon building codes in North America that can be viewed here. This grouping also includes the use of building intensity policies, whole building life cycle assessments (LCA), environmental product declarations (EPD), demolition and deconstruction directives, tax incentives and building reuse plans.

Government-backed procurement codes promoting or requiring the use of LEC building materials for infrastructure projects have been around for a while in various places. The general trend has been to start with measurement via tools such as LCAs and EPDs, move on to government procurement and then start setting embodied carbon limits for buildings. In the US the GSA’s latest pronouncement follows on from the Federal Buy Clean Initiative and from when California introduced its Buy Clean California Act in 2017. Outside of the US similar programmes have been introduced in countries including Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK. On the corporate side members of the World Economic Forum’s First Movers’ Coalition have committed to purchasing or specifying volumes of LEC cement and/or concrete by 2030. Examples of whole countries actually setting embodied carbon emissions limits for non-government buildings are rarer, but some are emerging. Both France and Sweden, for example, introduced laws in 2022 that start by analysing life-cycle emissions of buildings and will move on to setting embodied carbon limits in the late 2020s. Denmark, Finland and New Zealand are also in the process of introducing similar schemes. The next big move could be in the EU, where legislators are considering embodied carbon limits for building materials as part of its ongoing revisions to its Energy Performance of Buildings Directive or the Construction Products Regulation legislations. Lobbying, debate and arguing remains ongoing at present.

To finish, Ireland-based Ecocem spent a period in the 2010s attempting to build a slag cement grinding plant at Vallejo, Solano County, in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. The project met with considerable local opposition on environmental grounds and was eventually refused planning permission. The irony is that slag cement is one of those SCM-style cements that Marin County, also in the San Francisco Bay Area, started encouraging the use of just a few years later. Ecocem held its inaugural science symposium in Paris this week. A number of scientists who attended the event called for existing low carbon technologies to be adopted by the cement and concrete sectors as fast as possible. One such approach is to lower the clinker factor in cement through the use of products that Ecocem and other companies sell. A point to consider is, if Marin County’s code or the GSA’s recent procurement directive came earlier, then that slag plant in Vallejo might have been built. Encouraging the use of LEC building materials by governments looks set to proliferate but it may not be a straightforward process. Clear and consistent policies will be key.

France: Ireland-based Ecocem hosted a symposium on the application of new materials technologies in cement production on 14 November 2023. Participating materials scientists published a statement calling on the global cement industry to make use of alternative materials to achieve CO₂ emissions reductions. In the statement, they said “It is no longer possible to say that we lack the technology or that the costs are prohibitive.”

France: Lafarge France has ignited the new kiln at its Martres-Tolosane cement plant following a Euro120m upgrade. Local press has reported that the upgrade replaced the plant’s existing kilns and preheater tower with entirely new equipment. The new kiln has tripled the plant’s capacity, to 2.1Mt/yr from 0.7Mt/yr. Meanwhile, the new preheater tower will help to reduce the plant’s electricity consumption by over 20%. As a result of the upgrade, the Martres-Tolosane plant can now support an alternative fuels (AF) substitution rate of 60%, compared to 20% beforehand. Lafarge France aims to carry out further work to reach 85% AF substitution at the plant by 2027. Other planned projects include the installation of a carbon capture system.

Lafarge France chief executive officer François Petry said “We are going to create a research and innovation centre here dedicated to the capture of CO₂, with the ambition of ultimately making the Martres-Tolosane plant net zero carbon.”

Cementos Molins has been celebrating the first anniversary this week of its alternative raw materials unit at its Sant Vicenç dels Horts plant near Barcelona. It has processed 75,000t of waste since September 2022 when the site started up. More is yet to come as the unit has a production capacity of up to 200,000t/yr. The facility receives waste in coarse, granular, powder and sludge formats. Waste from concrete plants is crushed and screened to produce recycled aggregate. Industrial and construction waste is dosed and homogenised to produce alternative raw materials for cement production.

Global Cement Weekly has covered construction and demolition waste (CDW) a couple of times already so far in 2023. A number of cement producers are investing in the sector - including Holcim, Heidelberg Materials, CRH, Cemex – by developing technology, buying up other companies, setting up internal CDW divisions and so on. Holcim and Heidelberg Materials have been the more obviously active participants over the past six months based on media coverage. In September 2023 Holcim France commissioned the Saint-Laurent-de-Mûre alternative raw materials plant and Holcim Group invested in Neustark, a company promoting technology to sequester CO₂ in CDW. In August 2023 Lafarge Canada also completed the first stage of a pilot project to use CDW in cement production at its St. Constant plant in Quebec. Heidelberg Materials meanwhile announced in October 2023 that a forthcoming upgrade to its Górażdże cement plant in Poland would include a new CDW recycling unit and in September 2023 it launched a CDW division for its subsidiary Hanson UK.

Previously we have described how the European Union (EU) has set recovery targets for CDW. However, McKinsey & Company published research in March 2023 setting out the economic case for cement and concrete companies looking at CDW. It estimated that “an increased adoption of circular technologies could be linked to the emergence of new financial net-value pools worth up to roughly Euro110bn by 2050.” It is not a certainty and there is risk involved, but adopting circular practices is one way to reduce this risk. It then went on to predict that recirculating materials and minerals could generate nearly Euro80bn/yr in earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) for the cement and concrete sectors by 2050. The biggest portion of this could come from using CDW in various ways such as a clinker replacement or as an aggregate in concrete production, or the use of unhydrated cement ‘fines.’ Capturing and using CO₂ and increasing alternative fuels (AF) substitution rates would have a financial impact but not to the same scale.

Graph 1: CO₂ abatement cost via circular technologies for cement and concrete sectors. Source: McKinsey & Company.

Graph 1 above puts all of the McKinsey circular technology suggestions in one place with the prediction that all of these methods could reduce CO₂ emissions from cement and concrete production by 80% in 2050 based on an estimated demand of 4Bnt/yr. The first main point they made was that technologies using CO₂, such as curing ready-mix or precast concrete, can create positive economic value at carbon prices of approximately Euro80/t of CO₂. Readers should note that the EU emissions Trading Scheme CO₂ price has generally been above Euro80t/yr since the start of 2022. The second point to note is that using CDW could potentially save money by offering CO₂ abatement at a negative cost through avoiding landfill gate fees and reducing the amount of raw materials required. This is dependent though on government regulation on CO₂ prices, landfill costs and so on.

Cement producers have been clearly aware of the potential of CDW for a while now, based on the actions described above and elsewhere, and they are jockeying for advantage. These companies are familiar with the economic rationale for AF and secondary cementitious materials (SCM) in different countries and locations. CDW usage is similar but with, in McKinsey’s view, existing CO₂ prices, landfill costs, and regulatory frameworks all playing a part in the calculations. Graph 1 is a prediction but it is also another way of showing the path of least resistance to decarbonisation. It is cheaper to start with AF, SCMs and CDW rather than barrelling straight into carbon capture. The beauty here is that cement and concrete sold, say, 50 years ago is now heading back to the producers in the form of CDW and it still has value.

France: Holcim France has commissioned its new Saint-Laurent-de-Mûre alternative raw materials plant in Rhône Department. The unit produces cementitious paste from construction and demolition waste using Holcim’s ECOCycle upcycling process. It will source construction and demolition waste from the Lyon Metropolitan Area.

Holcim’s global head of circular construction Vincent Teissier said “Advancing such circular technologies is one of the main pillars of our sustainability strategy. This new advanced crushing unit in Saint-Laurent-de-Mûre is a major step toward using construction and demolition materials to their full value.”