Industrial equipment maker Atlas Copco has shared pictures of its underwater pneumatic drill being used to break up rocks under Malta’s Grand Harbour. The plan is to lay 800m-long cables…

The state of California will issue new rules limiting the embodied carbon allowed in commercial buildings larger than 100,000-sq-ft in area and school projects over 50,000-sq-ft. Embodied carbon means the…

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have discovered that adding water and carbon black (soot from partial burning of hydrocarbons) to cement turns concrete into an energy storing…

Dutch heavy-lift specialist Mammoet has launched the world’s first electric heavy-lift vehicle for moving bridges, wind turbines, and big power station components. It developed a retrofit kit to electrify its…

Irish building materials company Kingspan has acquired a 51% stake in German insulation company Steico for €251m. The shares were bought from Schramek, Steico’s Austrian parent. Steico runs four production…

The European Commission has decided to refer Hungary to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) for setting fixed prices for building materials such as sand, gravel, and cement. It objects…

Besix Belgium-Luxembourg has won a contract to comprehensively renovate “The Hive”, a 60,147-sq-m office building in central Brussels owned by BNP Paribas Fortis. The client wants to bring more daylight…

A museum is about to open in Madrid housing 160,000 precious items owned by the Spanish royal family. It will exhibit around 650 of them, including paintings by Goya, Velázquez,…

French materials company Saint-Gobain is to acquire Building Products of Canada, which specialises in roof shingles and wood-fibre insulation panels, for €925m. The move comes a year after it purchased…

A recently completed $17m traffic corridor in Rockaway, Queens, has used porous concrete on the pavement to improve drainage. The Beach 108th Street project was designed to accommodate increased pedestrian…

A Swedish municipality has begun work on a kindergarten that will be built using only electric equipment – the first time such a project has been tried in the EU.…

Saudi tourism developer Red Sea Global (RSG) has agreed to lay carbon-negative concrete pavers at its large landscape nursery in Saudi Arabia. The pavers are made by Partanna, which claims…

Mexican cement company Cemex has partnered with French rival Ecocem to test and implement lower carbon construction products in France. The team will work on the production of lower-carbon cementitious…

Canadian contractor Aecon has completed the US$175m cash sale of its Ontario roadbuilding subsidiary to Canadian infrastructure company Green Infrastructure Partners (GIP). Aecon Transportation East (ATE) employs almost 1,000 staff…

Construction technology firm Trimble says a field study it conducted shows that roller compactors in self-steering mode do their job faster and more effectively than when steered by people. Two…

Researchers at Washington State University (WSU) have discovered that adding charcoal to cement can result in a concrete that absorbs more carbon than is created by its production thanks to…

French materials producer Saint-Gobain has begun production of zero-carbon plasterboard at its modernised plant in Fredrikstad, southeast Norway. The company says its decarbonisation of the manufacturing process was made possible…

US President Joe Biden this week pledged to toughen “Buy American” rules to require all federally-funded projects to use materials and products made in the US. “I mean it. Lumber,…