Concrete surrounds us in our cities and stretches across the land in a vast network of highways. It’s so ubiquitous that most of us take it for granted, but many aren’t aware that concrete’s key ingredient, ordinary portland cement, is a major producer of greenhouse gases.

Each year, manufacturers produce around 5 billion tons of portland cement — the gray powder that mixes with water to form the “glue” that holds concrete together.  Read More

A leading independent in one of the more specialized areas of manufactured concrete, Rialto, Calif.-based Eagle Roofing Products continues regional rollout of Platinum Tile, whose patented, penetrating coating acts as a thermal insulator to reduce heat transfer into and out of a structure. Applied to freshly extruded concrete tile, the coating is a product of nanotechnology, where measurements tend to billionths of a meter. Read More

In a research paper entitled “Repeatability and Pervasiveness of Self-Healing in Engineered Cementitious Composites,” accepted and soon to be published by the American Concrete Institute’s ACI Materials Journal, Mustafa Sahmaran, Professor of Civil Engineering and director of Advanced Infrastructure Materials Research Laboratory at Gazi University, Ankara, examines robustness of the self-healing mechanism in ECCs.  Read More