Quarry Products

Sales of cement in Romania for Lafarge, the French firm, fell by 15% in the first nine months of 2013 compared with the same period a year earlier because of lower infrastructure investments and a higher level of competition in the construction market.

Sales of cement and clinker in the first nine months of 2013 for Holcim, the Swiss building materials producer, in Romania fell by 2.4% compared with the same period in 2012 but sales rose by 15.5% in Bulgaria in the same period.

British independent concrete supplier Hope Construction Materials has launched a new range of ready-mixed concretes. HOPEFlow is a suite of high-performance, self-compacting concretes and flowing screeds that can be placed in a fraction of the time of conventional concrete, says the company. The range, which is available nationwide, is said to be ideal for any situation where conventional concrete could be used, from foundations and floors to walls and columns.

Marble has for centuries been used to build some of the most iconic structures in the world. Patrick Smith reports

Little has changed over the years, or is likely to, as the stone - quarried, cut, shaped and polished - is still the building material of choice for impressive buildings such as the Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi; the Uzbekistan parliament building and parts of the new Ground Zero structure in New York. In Makkah (Mecca), Saudi Arabia, the holiest city in the religion of Islam, it is not only s

The cement plant which Mexican cement company Cemex has in the Spanish town of Alcanar will restart operations shortly, with two of the three furnaces there reopening already.

The facility has been shut for a year, which resulted in the redundancy or relocation to other sites of 136 of its 166 workers.

Most of the cement produced in Alcanar will go towards export, and there will be 70 or 80 people working at the plant, but they will have a 25% wage cut in accordance with terms agreed previously.

In France, a crushed solid waste unit has been inaugurated at the Lafarge cement- orks in Saint-Pierre la Cour.

The unit allows non-hazardous waste, such as plastics, papers and textiles, to be transformed into fuel. The waste is used to power the furnace during the cement production process. With the new unit, the use of traditional fossil fuels at the cement-works will be cut in half. By 2015, the aim is to reach 75%.