Showing posts with label climate crisis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label climate crisis. Show all posts

Monday, 28 April 2025

We’ve fitted some solar panels, crows Holcim UK. What took it so long?

At long last, Holcim UK – formerly Aggregate Industries – is fitting solar panels to some of its factory roofs. Bravo. 

Last week, Holcim UK issued a press release celebrating the installation of 464 solar panels on its concrete blocks plant near Cheddar – Somerset sunshine to help power Callow operations – obviously looking for a pat on the back.


But really, why has it taken this energy-hungry, CO2-intensive, polluting company so long to start fitting solar panels to offset its enormous CO2 emissions and enormous environmental footprint? 

It can’t pretend it didn’t know there was a climate crisis. Twenty-five years ago, the company admitted: 
During 2000, Aggregate Industries UK Ltd used over 740 million kWh of energy throughout its production processes. It is estimated that this energy consumption resulted in the release of approximately 224,000,000 Kgs of carbon dioxide.
Although by 2007, the company's CEO at the time seemed to row back, worried that climate change had hijacked the public agenda: 
The public agenda seems almost to have been hijacked by climate change and the CO2 debate. Important as it is, for us the agenda has always been much bigger and includes biodiversity, controlling pollution, waste, water and local nuisance. Sustainability is larger still, bringing in people and products and I believe we need to achieve a better balance in the future.
Since then, the future arrived, and from the early 2010s the UK public has been fitting solar panels on their roofs in their droves. Now, more than 1.5 million households have solar panels. How many of those people issued a press release extolling their green virtues?


The future arrived a while ago too for other UK companies, many of whom have also installed solar panels. In 2011, Adnams Brewery installed 962 solar panel at its distribution centre in Reydon. In the same year, work began on installing 17,000 solar panels at Toyota’s vehicle plant in Derbyshire. In 2013, Sainsbury’s announced it had installed 100,000 solar panels across 210 of its supermarkets. In 2015, Marks & Spencer completed the installation of the UK's largest single roof mounted solar panel array with 24,272 panels at its distribution centre in Castle Donington – enough panels to cover 25 miles if laid end-to-end. Notable achievements, worthy of a press release or two. 

When did Holcim start fitting solar panels? Not until July 2024 did Luke Olly, Head of Decarbonisation at Aggregate Industries UK, announce: 
Completing our first major solar project on one of our biggest sites is a key milestone for Aggregate Industries. 
What was the company doing during the decade that Adnams, Toyota, Sainsbury’s, M&S et al. were covering their rooftops with solar panels? Hoping that climate change would go away? 

What dent will this key milestone make on the site’s energy consumption? 
A total of 944 solar panels have been installed on factory rooftops at the site... [which] can generate more than 415,000 KWh of power per year, equating to 7% of the site’s annual power needs… 
If sustainability truly is at the core of its strategy – as it so often claims – Holcim UK will have to do better than that.
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As Just Stop Oil disbands could climate activism turn uglier?


Today, the Guardian suggests future movements are likely to go underground:
You’re not going to see people prepared to put themselves out of action by sitting in a jail cell for years, when they believe we don’t have much time left. 
We’ve started seeing trains of coal being set on fire, arson attacks on cement factories, full-on riots between environmental protesters and the police. 
I think we’ve got a long way to go in terms of how bad things can get but in the next few years I think we’ll look back and what JSO did, blocking roads and throwing washable paint onto buildings, will seem mild.
Arson attacks on cement factories? Apparently so. In 2024, climate activists set fire to a cement factory in Berlin: 
Their action was, as they indicated, inspired by previous attacks by colleagues from France, Belgium and Switzerland who sabotaged concrete factories. According to the radicals from ‘Switch Off!’ concrete production is ‘totally deadly for the climate’ and generates more carbon dioxide than all air traffic.
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What happens when you build a city from wood?

... one study found that building with wood instead of concrete and steel in 80% of new buildings would help offset half of Europe’s construction industry emissions.
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Wednesday, 16 April 2025

‘Is legal action the only way to save the planet?’

A vast number of actors are responsible for emissions, making it hard to establish legal responsibility, and often the worst harms occur in a different continent to the worst emissions. But in the last decade, a series of court cases around the world have sought to change the legal status quo. “It’s been a huge shift,” said Adam Weiss, chief programmes and impact officer at ClientEarth, an environmental law charity that has spearheaded this approach. “Judges now see the environmental issues we’re facing as existential, and have allowed the interpretation of human rights law to shift to grasp that.”
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Wednesday, 9 April 2025

UK investigating fraud claims alleging ‘green’ HVO diesel contains virgin palm oil

The wonder fuel that Holcim UK (formerly Aggregate Industries) has pledged to use to extract and haul material from Straitgate is in trouble. 

We have posted about HVO or hydrotreated vegetable oil fuel before. Condition 22 of Holcim UK’s planning permission to quarry Straitgate Farm says: 
Prior to the export of any sand or gravel from the site, a scheme which ensures that all heavy goods vehicles entering and leaving the site, together with all plant and equipment located within the site, use hydrotreated vegetable oil fuel shall be submitted to and approved in writing by the Mineral Planning Authority. The scheme shall include details of how the use of hydrotreated vegetable oil fuel will be monitored to secure compliance with this condition. All heavy goods vehicles and plant shall be used in accordance with the approved scheme. 
Aggregate Industries’ magical solution to its unsustainable 2.5 million mile haulage scheme for Straitgate Farm – a result of processing the as-dug sand and gravel 23 miles away at Hillhead near Uffculme – is to rely on hydrotreated vegetable oil, HVO, despite, as of early 2024, HVO being around 40 pence per litre more expensive than normal diesel... 

The concern must be that if every corporate is now going to be greenwashing their pollution away with the delights of HVO, where on earth will all the used cooking oil come from? And how many millions more acres of rainforest will have to be cleared to replace it? 
 ... industry whistleblowers told the BBC they believe large amounts of these materials are not waste but instead are virgin palm oil, which is being fraudulently relabelled. 

And data analysed by the BBC and shared with the UK's Department for Transport casts further doubt on one of the key ingredients in HVO, a material called palm sludge waste. 

Europe used more of this waste in HVO and other biofuels in 2023 than it is thought possible for the world to produce. 

UK consumption rocketed from 8 million litres in 2019 to about 699 million litres in 2024, according to provisional government figures. 

Its green credentials rely heavily on the assumption that it is made from waste sources, particularly used cooking oil or the waste sludge from palm oil production. 

But industry whistle-blowers have told the BBC that they believe virgin palm oil and other non-waste materials are often being used instead... 

"It's a very easy game," said Dr Christian Bickert, a German farmer and editor with experience in biofuels, who believes that much of the HVO made with these waste products is "fake". 

"Chemically, the sludge and the pure palm oil are absolutely the same because they come from the same plant, and also from the same production facilities in Indonesia," he told BBC News. 

"There's no paper which proves [the fraud], no paper at all, but the figures tell a clear story." 
Construction company Balfour Beatty has a policy of not using the fuel, citing sustainability concerns:
"We just are not able to get any level of visibility over the supply chain of HVO that would give us that level of assurance that this is truly a sustainable product," Balfour Beatty's Jo Gilroy told BBC News.
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Saturday, 5 April 2025

Cumbrian coal mine planning application withdrawn

Plans for a new coal mine in Cumbria – subject of these previous posts – are dead:

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Friday, 4 April 2025

Quarry decision ‘failed to assess climate effects’

Plans to build a quarry are in doubt after a council conceded to a legal challenge over how it assessed its possible impact on the environment.
Last year, Northumberland County Council approved a proposal to excavate dolerite - used to produce concrete - near Kirkwhelpington, which would see almost three million tonnes of material extracted over 20 years. 

Law firm Leigh Day said the authority agreed to concede to a claim it "failed to assess the likely climate effects of the development" relating to soil disturbance, meaning the grant of planning permission could be quashed. 

Campaigner John Winslow, represented by Leigh Day and supported by the Environmental Law Foundation, challenged the application in February. 

As a result, the council told Leigh Day it would concede that it did not comply with its obligations under the Town and Country Planning (Environmental Impact Assessment) Regulations 2017 by failing to assess the likely climate effects of the application. 

Ricardo Gama, from Leigh Day, said: "The council will now need to assess those impacts and reconsider its decision to grant planning permission."  
We help the voice of ordinary people and communities to be heard on matters affecting the environment in which they live. 

We exist primarily to help socially and economically disadvantaged communities which want to address their concerns, but lack the resources or information to do so. 
In relation to the Kirkwhelpington proposal, the charity writes: 
ELF had a victory in Northumberland, where an application was made for a 28-hectare aggregate quarry which proposed to extract 2.8 million tonnes of dolerite on a site of high ecological importance. The proposal site has a complex mosaic of habitats comprised of purple moor grass and rush pasture and lowland acid grassland, which are habitats of principal importance under section 41 of the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act 2006. It is also home to grassland fungi including waxcaps, which are globally endangered and particularly vulnerable to physical disturbance at the surface. White-clawed crayfish, which are a species of principal importance and are also globally endangered, are present in the nearby River Wansbeck to which the Site drains. The Wansbeck is one of their last strongholds, containing a population of international importance. 

Plantlife and Buglife, two highly respected national conservation charities, submitted objections to the development. When assessing the development, Plantlife cited research estimating that acid grassland can hold 90 tonnes of soil carbon per hectare, which is sensitive to land use change. This carbon had the potential to be released into the atmosphere during the course of development from soil disturbance, and that these carbon emissions had not been assessed in the Environmental Impact Assessment. 

Despite these major environmental impacts, Northumberland County Council formally granted permission to the development at the beginning of February. With the help of Jessica Allen of No.5 Chambers, ELF sent a Pre-Action Protocol letter to Northumberland County Council which, in particular, pointed out that the failure to assess the climate effects of the development was an error in law. This is a point that has been made particularly salient following the landmark case of Finch last year. The Council conceded that they had erred in law on this basis, and agreed to enter into a consent order to quash the decision. Preventing the quarry development was a massive win for the environment and, thanks to Jessica’s assistance, our enquirer was able to achieve justice without having to go through the long, arduous and expensive litigation process.
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Friday, 20 September 2024

Aggregate Industries’ parent draws climate criticism


The Swiss-based company has failed to cut direct emissions from its plants or spend enough to reduce materials or energy waste, said Industrious Labs, a U.S.-based environmental nonprofit. 

Industrious Labs, which is part of a campaign called Concrete Change to reduce the sector's environmental impact, gave Holcim a grade of "D" - the second-lowest rating - for its sustainability performance. 

It said the spinoff, due to take place in the first half of 2025, hides mounting costs and a failure to adapt to growing demand for cleaner cement. 

"Markets are brutal and don't reward incumbents which are slow to respond to customer demand," Nachy Kanfer, a partner at Industrious Labs, told Reuters. "We see multiple net zero cement projects under way, and Holcim is being left behind."

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‘We’re still in the 1970s with cement’

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Monday, 29 April 2024

Holcim’s climate legacy laid bare in Carbon Majors database

Climate scientists are alarmed, reported the Guardian earlier this month:
This is the 10th consecutive monthly record in a warming phase that has shattered all previous records. Over the past 12 months, average global temperatures have been 1.58C above pre-industrial levels. 
For those looking to apportion blame, the Carbon Majors database was helpfully relaunched a few days before: 
The Carbon Majors database traces 1,421 GtCO2e of cumulative historical emissions from 1854 through 2022 to 122 industrial producers, the CO2 portion of which is equivalent to 72% of global fossil fuel and cement CO2 emissions since 1751. Over 70% of these global CO2 emissions historically can be attributed to just 78 corporate and state producing entities. 
Cement producer Holcim – parent company of Aggregate Industries – is one of them, 63rd on the list:
What might the legal consequences of this be? 
The Carbon Majors dataset has played a pivotal role in holding fossil fuel producers to account for their climate-related impacts in academic, regulatory, and legal contexts. Examples include quantifying the contribution these entities have made to global surface temperature, sea level, and atmospheric CO2 rise; and establishing corporate accountability for climate-related human rights violations.

Indeed, Holcim has already found itself at the sharp end of climate litigation, as previously posted.


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Tuesday, 16 April 2024

Aggregate Industries resumes sustainability reporting

... go to Aggregate Industries’ Sustainability Reports and Policies page and what do we now find? Not the back catalogue of sustainability reports previously there, nor a shiny new one for 2019. 

What we find instead is parent LafargeHolcim’s 2019 report – while Aggregate Industries’ CO2 numbers are suddenly nowhere to be found. 

We can obviously help with the back catalogue of reports – 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2000 – plotting Aggregate Industries’ CO2 journey: a company now emitting in the region of 1.3 million tonnes of CO2 each year, more than 5 times the amount it did in 1999. 

But has Aggregate Industries really given up reporting carbon emissions? 

Is it because the numbers stubbornly refused to fall despite best efforts, or is it because the company stubbornly refused to embrace more sustainable ways? 

Aggregate Industries' application to quarry Straitgate Farm would of course indicate the latter.
This time last year, aggregate.com/sustainability was still not showing a sustainability report, although the company had in fact been burying CO2 figures for 2020, 2021, and 2022 in financial reports lodged at Companies House.

So, is Aggregate Industries now ready to report its sustainability figures publicly again? Is the company ready to broadcast how much CO2 it is emitting? Are the figures at last going in the right direction? Does it finally have a positive story to tell?  

Clearly, the company thinks it does. In August last year, before leaving the company for sunnier climes, the then sustainability director issued these two reports:


 

The sustainability report for 2022 claims: 
Investments within our cement plant and efficiency improvements across all business areas have helped to reduce emissions compared to our 2020 baseline. 

On nature, the report is proud to tell us: 
Our Hillhead Quarry, near Cullompton in Devon, has a new woodland after we teamed up with a group of local residents and members of local environmental group the Uffculme Green Team, to plant around 1,100 trees. Native species including English oak, hornbeam, hazel, blackthorn, hawthorn and holly were planted to provide more wildlife-friendly habitat in the area. The scheme will benefit all species, but in particular the hazel dormouse, an elusive and declining species whose numbers have dropped by 50 per cent since the millennium and for which the south-west is somewhat of a stronghold. 
Bravo. But of course, that’s the same elusive and declining species prevalent in the ancient hedgerows at Straitgate that Aggregate Industries has earmarked for destruction. 

In the company’s Sustainability Strategy 2023 Update, the buzz word is community – which is as it should be, given the invasive nature of the company’s business model:
We will strive to make a positive impact on those communities where we live and operate.

We also recognise that our operations can have a negative impact on some of our neighbouring communities and we are committed to proactively eliminating or minimising this impact, wherever possible. We already have stringent planning obligations in place at many of our sites, which limit operating hours, number of truck movements, noise levels and dust emissions. However, we are committed to going above and beyond legal compliance which we see as our minimum requirement. We already do this in many cases and proactively engage with our local communities through meetings, open days and school visits. We also recognise that we are able to contribute to our neighbouring communities by donating staff time for volunteering activities, materials to help with local projects as well as monetary contributions. We are not only committed to continuing this but we will build on these successes. 
So, let’s see what happens at Straitgate. 

Let's see how far above and beyond the company is prepared to go.

Let's see how the company proactively engages with this neighbouring community, that has so far seen nothing but blight and aggravation. 

Let's see how much the company is able to contribute.

Let’s see if Aggregate Industries can walk the walk.
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Wednesday, 3 April 2024

UK company directors may be personally liable for climate impacts, say lawyers

A legal opinion published this week found that board directors had duties to consider how their business affected and depended on nature. These included climate-related risks as well as wider risks to biodiversity, soils and water. 

The analysis said directors of UK firms faced serious personal consequences for breaching these duties, potentially including claims for damages or compensation by their shareholders.
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Monday, 12 February 2024

‘New Holcim boss faces long road to decarbonisation’

Miljan Gutovic, the new CEO at Holcim, parent of Aggregate Industries, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, claimed: 
We are working on decarbonising Holcim, the construction industry, making our cities more sustainable and we are also driving circular construction.
New CEO. Same old story. 
Some industry executives question Holcim’s commitment to decarbonising the “whole construction industry” when its M&A activity has not solved the notoriously “hard-to-abate” carbon footprint problem facing cement. 

Despite Gutovic’s efforts to refocus Holcim’s business, the negative impacts of the legacy business will be hard to avoid. In an ongoing legal case filed last year against Holcim in the Swiss canton of Zug, where it is headquartered, residents of the Indonesian island of Pulau Pari affected by rising flood waters demanded Holcim pay compensation for the costs of their water damage and flood protection measures. 

Holcim is responsible for 0.42 per cent of global fossil fuel and cement emissions in the atmosphere since the mid 18th century, according to a study by the Climate Accountability Institute research group.
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Thursday, 25 January 2024

Government commits to more timber construction


Investing in timber is investing in growth and levelling up. The built environment is responsible for a huge proportion of UK carbon emissions, and using home-grown timber in construction is key to reducing emissions.
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‘Companies regularly set ambitious climate goals... that often quietly fizzle away’


While companies often gain positive media attention by trumpeting plans for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, many are failing to reach their climate goals, and the media rarely picks it up. There is little accountability and transparency on the outcomes of these goals, where various stakeholders, like investors and rating agencies that measure environmental, social, and governance (ESG) risk, do not penalize firms for missing these targets
Once upon a time, Aggregate Industries trumpeted ambitious plans for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In 2018, we posted The CO2 emissions that AI ‘forgot’ in 2016 and wrote: ...
we've heard about establishing baselines before – in 2012, 2008, 2003 – and the company has consistently failed to achieve any progress against them. Let's look, for example, at how AI fared against its 2012 baseline: 
2013: "Absolute process carbon emissions have increased against the 2012 baseline" 
2014: "Absolute carbon process emissions continue to rise and are now 13% higher than the baseline year" 
2015: "Absolute process carbon emissions continue to rise and are 20% above the 2012 baseline" 
2016: No mention of baselines 
AI has talked about reducing its CO2 emissions for more than 15 years, and has achieved exactly the reverse. 
Since then, Aggregate Industries has given up reporting its CO2 figures. In 1999, the company reported 228,267 tonnes of CO2. In 2019, in the post Climate emergency? Not at Aggregate Industries. CO2 emissions increase again, we estimated the company was emitting more than 5x that amount – somewhere in the region of 1.3 million tonnes of CO2 each year. 

Aggregate Industries is part of cement conglomerate Holcim. Last year, the company claimed that for 2022, "we delivered on all our net-zero levers", and that for 2023: 
We are accelerating our net-zero journey to decarbonize Holcim. Taking a science-driven approach, we upgraded our climate targets to align them with the 1.5°C framework and validated them with the Science Based Targets initiative
Bravo. But who's checking whether any of these targets are achieved?

Perhaps these Indonesians will. As previously posted, they are taking legal action against Holcim.

 


ECCHR, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, claims Holcim is "among the top 50 largest CO2 emitters in the world", and that its climate strategy is "Too little – too late": 
Climate change is happening. The clock is ticking. The global consensus is that global warming must not go beyond 1.5°C. Yet, to stand a chance of achieving this 1.5°C limit, the remaining carbon budget must be distributed fairly among all actors. Currently, the global cement industry contributes up to 8% of the global annual carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, since the production of cement is extremely CO2 intensive. The Swiss-based cement group Holcim Ltd. is the biggest player within the cement and concrete industry, and among the top 50 largest CO2 emitters in the world. Since 1950, Holcim has emitted over 7 billion tonnes of CO2, which accounts for 0.42% of all global industrial CO2 emissions, or twice as many emissions as produced by the whole of Switzerland during the same period. Holcim has published a climate strategy which includes the ambition to become a net zero corporation by 2050. However, as this report shows, Holcim’s climate targets and business strategy are not in line with the 1.5°C limit and are therefore further exacerbating the climate crisis. 

This report looks at Holcim’s past, current and future climate impact through assessing its past and present emissions, as well as its future emission reduction plans. It explains that Holcim has largely contributed to the climate crisis due to its enormous historical emissions. The corporation’s 2021 emissions still account for three times the annual emissions of Switzerland and have risen in recent years. The report concludes that Holcim’s emission reduction targets are incompatible with the 1.5°C limit. According to the latest climate science, to stand a 50% chance of achieving the 1.5°C limit with no or limited overshoot, absolute emission reductions of 43% until 2030, 69% until 2040 and 84% until 2050 from a 2019 base year are required.
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Thursday, 21 September 2023

Could Holcim ever be a ‘CO2 hero’?

Holcim – cement conglomerate and parent company of Aggregate Industries – has been entertaining members of the press at its new Innovation Hub in Lyon, which the company has apparently set up to "showcase its sustainable building solutions and serve as a co-creation lab to accelerate low-carbon, circular and energy-efficient building worldwide."

Remarkably, somebody has come away thinking Holcim is a CO2 hero. How – given that the company has annual CO2 emissions more than many countries – could that possibly be?

Has Holcim dramatically cut its CO2 emissions to net zero – rather than just talk about it? Not according to its 2022 Sustainability Report, where we find Holcim pumped some 78 million tons of CO2 (scope 1 emissions) into the atmosphere in 2022 alone. Holcim claims: 
We reduced Scope 1 emissions to 562 kg CO2 net per ton of cementitious materials, which represented a decrease of 2% on a like-for-like basis versus the prior year. 
Of course, continued progress at that rate and the game’s over. 

Dig a little deeper though and we find that the press at Lyon were briefed by Nollaig Forrest, Holcim’s new chief sustainability officer. Her background is not in science, climate or sustainability, but – according to this article – in "communications and corporate affairs at multiple industrial companies". It’s clearly important to Holcim, with such glacial progress in emission cuts, to at least tell a good story. 

So how did Holcim persuade this journalist of its hero status?


Towards the end of his article, the author in question writes this paragraph: 
What strikes me most about Holcim is how a company can go from villain to hero by embracing the future. When I spoke to Jenisch, [Holcim CEO] he was adamant that the concrete industry wasn’t anything like the tobacco or car industry, fleeing from its responsibilities. And Holcim itself is a future-oriented company, he said, that wants to do its part. "Now that we know the harmful effect [of CO2], we are fully on it," he said. "We are part of the solution." Though the past is "interesting," he said, "it’s more important what action we take now. This is where we want to be part of. It’s more important that we accelerate climate action, with speed and transparency. We don’t want to be greenwashing." 
So, embrace the future, forget about all the damage caused by your past emissions and providing climate reparations for affected communities, keep selling cement at more than 0.5 tons net of CO2 for every ton produced, and become a CO2 hero. Easy. 

But let’s unpack that paragraph above.  

Holcim's CEO claims the concrete industry isn’t fleeing from its responsibilities, however that is exactly what Holcim is doing in the case of Indonesian islanders seeking proportionate compensation from the company for damage to their livelihoods due to repeated flooding as global warming has driven up sea levels, arguing that the company is responsible for 0.477% of global industrial emissions from 1950 to 2021. A spokesman for Holcim said: 
We do not believe that court cases focused on single companies are an effective mechanism to tackle the global complexity of climate action. 

And as far as accelerating climate action, we only have to look at this tiny corner of East Devon, and subsidiary Aggregate Industries' plans for an unsustainable multi-million mile haulage scheme for Straitgate Farm, to tell us all we need to know. But NGOs backing the islanders’ action also claim the company is not doing enough to cut its emissions: 
There is some support for this position from a new report by Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitor, which ranked Holcim high relative to most of the other 23 companies studied for its net-zero ambition and transparency, but said its strategy only had moderate integrity because it hinges on energy intensity targets, low-quality renewable energy certificates and extensive use of carbon capture storage and usage. 
Finally, when it comes to "we don’t want to be greenwashing", Holcim appears to have put a brake on its Twitter account, but this was one of its last tweets. Greenwashing? You decide.

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Holcim ‘received EU emission allowances for idle cement plant’

Holcim, the parent company of Aggregate Industries, is one of five cement companies to have received €88 million in free EU emission allowances – according to research by the Oil Price Information Service – despite plants sitting idle or only emitting relatively small amounts of CO2.

As Global Cement reports, the companies would have been able to sell the permits or use them to subsidise emissions costs at other plants. 

Nice work if you can get it.

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Monday, 13 February 2023

Holcim targeted by climate activists

Last week, Holcim – parent company of Aggregate Industries, the company who recently won permission to trash Straitgate Farm – was targeted by climate activists. The company’s Zurich HQ was daubed with the German word "Klimazerstörer", or "climate destroyer".
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Industrial trials start on zero-carbon cement production

The Cement 2 Zero project aims to demonstrate that concrete can be recycled to create a slag forming addition that could, when cooled rapidly, replace Portland cement.  

The two-year industrial trial will test each stage of the production process, bringing together the Materials Processing Institute, the University of Cambridge and industry partners – Atkins, Balfour Beatty, Celsa, Day Aggregates and Tarmac. Eventually the zero carbon cement – known as Cambridge Electric Cement – will be used in a real UK construction project.  

Philippa Horton of the University of Cambridge, who created the project consortium, said: "If Cambridge Electric Cement lives up to the promise it has shown in early laboratory trials, when combined with other innovative technologies, it could be a pivotal point in the journey to a zero-emissions society."
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Friday, 3 February 2023

Indonesian islanders file climate lawsuit against Holcim

Residents of an Indonesian island, at risk of losing their livelihoods due to the rise in sea level and flooding, have filed a lawsuit against the parent company of Aggregate Industries seeking damages for its role in climate change. One of the plaintiffs warned: 
Our existence is under threat. We want those responsible to now finally take action. 
Not our problem, says Swiss cement giant Holcim: 
We do not believe that court cases focused on single companies are an effective mechanism to tackle the global complexity of climate action.
Well they wouldn’t, would they? This the company that claims climate change is a "top priority", but whose cost to society in 2021 was 156 million tons of CO2 emissions – up from 146 million tons in 2020.

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