SUSTAINABILITY
HEIDELBERG GEARS UP IN DRIVE TO DECARBONISE
BMJ chats to Andy Simpson, Packed Products Director, Heidelberg Materials UK about the building products company’s latest sustainable moves.
W
e’ve made significant progress on our journey to carbon neutrality having cut our CO2 emissions in the UK by almost 50 per cent between 1990 and 2020.
We follow a clear, science-based approach to reducing our carbon footprint through product and process innovation as well as industrial-scale carbon capture and storage.
We’re also working to conserve natural materials, promote the circular economy and decarbonise our products. As part of this, we announced the creation of a new recycling business line in 2023 which will allow us to provide the most sustainable products to our customers through circularity and innovation to enable building more, with less.
We were delighted to receive the Caring for the Environment award from the Worshipful Company of Builders’ Merchants at its annual City and Awards lunch recently.
We’ve made significant investment in new 18
plant and equipment to improve efficiency and reduce production emissions. We’ve also increased the use of alternative fuels using waste paper and plastics, waste liquid fuels, biomass and other fuel types to power our cement kilns. We’re involved in a number of different industry-leading trials, including a carbon capture and storage (CCS) project at our Padeswood cement works in North Wales. Once operational it would capture up to 800,000 tonnes of CO2 a year, preventing it from entering the atmosphere, and could produce evoZero®
carbon captured net
zero cement as early as 2029. Hydrogen mix
We also successfully completed a world-first demonstration using hydrogen as part of a net zero fuel mix used to operate the cement kiln at our Ribblesdale works in Lancashire. We already offer merchants lower carbon products including 40N concrete, which includes Regen GGBS, a readily available lower carbon
cement replacement. And, all our packed grey cements, like General Purpose cement, are CEM II A-LL blends, meaning they contain less clinker and more limestone, reducing embodied CO2. We’ve made
significant progress to reduce the amount of plastic and develop more sustainable
Above: Andrew Simpson, packed products director, Heildelberg Materials UK
packaging options. Some of our heavy building products, particularly those that contain aggregates with sharp edges, are harder to supply without plastic packaging and, where this is the case, we have increased the recycled content of the bags while ensuring they are still 100 per cent recyclable.
But, for other products, a stronger paper A supplement to builders merchants journal June 2024
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