10 Jun 2025
Scale is something of a theme within this issue, in a thought-provoking if unintentional way. I found it fascinating to read about how the design teams of both Goods Yard in Stoke (page 14) and Colne Valley Viaduct (page 18) considered their projects from different perspectives and evolved beautiful shapes, textures and details for viewers near and far, fast and slow.
That was of course made possible by the sculptural, amorphous nature of concrete itself, and its ability to be almost anything to anyone. This is not only true of its form, but of its carbon content. Rather than a single material, concrete could perhaps be thought of as a loosely worded traditional recipe, which may vary enormously from one cook to another. It can be made from different ingredients for different uses, with significant variations in embodied carbon.
This can make it difficult to find the most appropriate carbon data, which is an ongoing strand of our work at The Concrete Centre and the wider Mineral Products Association. Much of our activity is about helping project teams to locate the data they need, and helping the industry to produce it, which is likely to be a never-ending process, as the understanding of measurement deepens and key documents need to be updated and refreshed. For example, MPA Cement has just released a revised version of Fact Sheet 18 on the embodied carbon of UK cements, to incorporate the wider range of multicomponent cements now available for specification under BS 8500.
Our new Concrete in Practice webinar series will share essential learning from projects that are still under construction – the first features engineers at Ramboll discussing the innovative processes they’ve adopted on the UK’s first high-rise laboratory at One North Quay in Canary Wharf, to reduce the embodied carbon of its concrete frame.
Somebody much cleverer than me once said the more they looked for carbon, the more they found. It resonated because that’s the case with so many things, just as you discover more of interest about a building the closer you look, or the way in which the coastline of Britain becomes infinitely longer as its crags and coves come into sharper focus.
I have always found shifting perspective – pulling back, zooming in – a fascinating exercise, and an invaluable tool for the design process and for tackling problems of any kind. When it comes to decarbonising concrete, the big picture and the detail are both important. Our regular Innovation feature shines the spotlight on the scientists hard at work in laboratories around the UK and further afield, who are concerned with its molecular structure and chemistry. But any innovation also relies on specifiers and suppliers to understand how to apply it at a building
level, and ultimately on big-picture industrial strategy and policy to reach widespread implementation. We need all these perspectives because different views offer different insights – and because carbon is a problem we have to solve at every scale.
By Toogood, Senior Director, Concrete, MPA