Build With Strength Meets with Leading AEC Sustainability, Adaptation Firm

Build With Strength Senior Director, Building Innovations, Patrick Matsche met recently with a leading AEC firm determined to lower the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of its projects. Low carbon concrete, once an afterthought or one off, is now a priority for design firms. HDR, founded in Omaha, NE, in 1917, helps rural Midwest towns adapt to a changing world, bringing power to the plains and water treatment systems where they are needed most. Today, HDR has over 14,000 employees with more than 200 offices around the globe.

Matsche (seen here, standing) and Devon Barrett, technical services manager for Lyman-Richey Corp., a CRH Company, hosted a presentation discussing how to achieve low carbon concrete with currently available materials, along with evolving processes, materials and technologies. Industry leading firms are looking to NRMCA to learn more about decarbonization strategies along with how the ready mixed industry is advancing sustainability.

“The road to sustainable solutions and industry innovation starts with collaboration,” Barrett said.

Matsche, assisted remotely by Build With Strength colleague Brandon Wray, presented Low Carbon Concrete: How to Reduce, Quantify, and Specify Carbon and encouraged the use of Build With Strength’s performance- based specification review, NRMCA’s Carbon Calculator tool and consulting services to create low carbon concrete specifications in lieu of unnecessarily prescriptive language that impact the GWP reduction targets and goals of their clients’ projects.

NRMCA’s Build With Strength and Pave Ahead platforms offer design teams a range of education, promotion and execution support. The meetings reinforced the concrete industry's proactive approach to sustainability and the essential role of collaboration in driving forward low carbon initiatives, ultimately transforming the built environment for a greener future while promoting concrete as the building material of choice.

With the generous support of the ready mixed concrete industry, Build With Strength is recognized as a leading advocate, spearheading the effort to reduce and eliminate embodied carbon in buildings, roads and infrastructure. For more information, contact Patrick Matsche at pmatsche@nrmca.org.