That was my main takeaway from Evolving Concrete last week, a brilliant event by Claire Ackerman and The Concrete Society. The talks on calcined clay from Nina Cardinal, Fragkoulis Kanavaris and Dr Ana Pavlović were a highlight, and a clear reminder of how much real innovation is already happening across our industry.
The biggest barrier to low-carbon concrete isn't the chemistry. It's the speed of adoption.
That was my main takeaway from Evolving Concrete last week, a brilliant event by Claire Ackerman and The Concrete Society. The talks on calcined clay from Nina Cardinal, Fragkoulis Kanavaris and Dr Ana Pavlović were a highlight, and a clear reminder of how much real innovation is already happening across our industry.
Here's the pattern I keep seeing: most of the materials we need to decarbonise concrete already exist. What's missing is the route from a promising lab result to a slab poured on a real project, on a real deadline.
That's exactly where the PrīmX R&D Centre can move the needle.
We start ahead Primekss | PrīmX® Industrial Concrete Flooring & Structural | PrīmX technology cuts embodied carbon by 40–55% before a single SCM is added. And we shorten the adoption curve: once we validate a material and develop a project-specific mix, our engineers build it into the structural design and our teams deliver it on site. Owning design, materials and execution is what turns an innovation into a finished floor, not a finding that stays on paper.
That's the shift from integrator to accelerator.
No single player gets there alone. Researchers, suppliers, engineers, contractors and clients each hold a piece of the puzzle: testing and collaboration across the value chain are how we connect them.
Thank you to everyone who shared their work. I left more optimistic than ever about where concrete is heading.
What's the biggest barrier you see to adopting low-carbon materials faster?