Irish low carbon cement company Ecocem has announced €22.5 million in equity investment from Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV) and Breakthrough Energy Ventures-Europe (BEV-E), venture capital funds that are part Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy coalition, which seeks to accelerate the global drive towards net zero carbon emissions.
Ecocem, Europe’s largest independent specialist producer of key low carbon building material GGBS (ground granulated blast-furnace slag) cement, has announced a re-brand with the launch of a new logo and tagline.
Ecocem Materials, producer of environmentally friendly cement, has announced that the company has seen an increase in sales and has reached a significant milestone of exceeding one million tonnes of product sold in the last twelve months. Ecocem Ireland is also celebrating its tenth birthday in 2013.
The second Better Building conference will be held on 24 April in the Croke Park conference centre, Dublin. The inaugural conference at Royal Hospital Kilmainham last year sold out with nearly 400 attendees.
Ecocem Ireland announced last week that its plans to create 61 jobs as part of a new three year, €19m investment programme coinciding with the official opening of its new facility at Dublin Port. The new plant will be used to bag Ecocem’s low carbon cement. The company said that the carbon footprint of its product is more than 50% lower than traditional cement.
Green cement supplier Ecocem are giving away €3,000 of low carbon durable concrete in a competition for residential construction projects.
In many ways local authorities have become some of Ireland’s most progressive developers. Jason Walsh visited Ardee, County Louth to look at the latest in a long line of new civic offices that are redefining local government in sustainable terms.
It has long been anticipated that the cost of sustainable building will come down as it enters the mass market, benefiting from economies of scale and greater industry confidence in low impact techniques and technologies as they become more familiar. Jay Stuart, managing director of integrated sustainable design consultants Delap and Waller EcoCo reveals a Kildare housing project which is likely to rapidly accelerate this process, and convince even the most conservative elements of the industry that low energy, low carbon building can be achieved at little or no additional cost
Public private partnership schemes have come to dominate many aspects of Irish infrastructural development, from toll roads to urban regeneration schemes. Jason Walsh asks if they amount to privatisation by stealth and whether they come at too high a social and environmental cost.
The cement industry is well known as being amongst the worst culprits for emitting CO2, a seemingly unavoidable side effect of its production. However, as Peter Seymour, Business Development Manager with Ecocem Ireland Ltd explains, there is a strong, eco-friendly competitive alternative to Portland cement that is being specified in a variety of high profile construction projects in Ireland.