Eurocode 1

The Concrete Centre’s annual student Structural Concrete competition, in partnership with Laing O’Rourke, has been won by Ashley Andersen from the University of Surrey. The 2021 competition challenge for teams of engineering students was to design a civic centre comprising a library and council offices in a new garden town in the north west of England.

The newly published Independent Assessment of UK Climate Risk from the Climate Change Committee calls for the updating of building regulations to address overheating in new homes. To address this, a number of key actions are identified, which The Concrete Centre fully support.  

World Environment Day on 5 June presents us all with an opportunity to evaluate our environmental footprints and the daily measures we must take as individuals, businesses and industries to decarbonise and encourage biodiversity, says Elaine Toogood.

Tony Jones of The Concrete Centre discusses the embodied carbon savings to be made by choice of cement types when specifying concrete at 56-day strength. 

Emily Halliwell of The Concrete Centre and The Basement Information Centre discusses the factors designers should consider to achieve low-carbon basement designs.

‘Are we running out of sand and construction aggregates in the UK?’ I periodically get asked this question in relation to availability for concrete, prompted I suspect by reports related to a shortages elsewhere in the world. The answer, put very succinctly, is No.

Tom De Saulles, The Concrete Centre's advisor on Building Physics expresses concerns that elements of new MHCLG proposals represent a backward step on addressing overheating in new homes.

Over the past few years the Government has made the use of off-site construction techniques as one of its core objectives for the construction industry. Jenny Burridge of The Concrete Centre looks at some of these options and the benefits that can be realised by choosing concrete as the off-site construction option.

Concrete mix design is an art, a science – and one of the keys to a zero-carbon built environment. When construction materials are ranked in order of their embodied carbon, people are often surprised to see how low down the list concrete is. The reason its global carbon cost is so significant is that it is used in such enormous quantities. There are good reasons for this.

As we try to lower our carbon footprint and produce lower carbon intensive projects, one of the ways we can do so is to look at how we specify the concrete we use. Jenny Burridge of The Concrete Centre.