The Tilt-Up Concrete Association will honor longstanding Executive Director Ed Sauter at its Winter Tilt-Up Jubilee during next month’s World of Concrete in Las Vegas. Sauter has entered part-time retirement effective 2015, capping a 23-year tenure that began as a result of his 1992 World of Concrete participation.
Results from a survey gauging staff sentiments on daily work activities, impressions of management and company direction earned one of the Midwest’s premier ready mixed producers inclusion in the Chicago Tribune’s Top Workplaces for 2014.
Two months after entering the Texas market for volumetric mixer-delivered concrete through a deal for Custom-Crete, U.S. Concrete Inc. subsidiary Redi-Mix LLC bolted on the fleet and sites of Scofield Construction Services, LLC and Mobile-Crete of South Texas, LLC. Operated collectively as Mobile-Crete, assets acquired include five volumetric ready-mixed concrete facilities and 47 mixers servicing Austin, San Antonio, and south Texas markets. They join Custom-Crete’s 60 volumetric mixers and 11 plants Redi-Mix took over in October, netting site-mixed production in Austin, San Antonio and Dallas/Ft. Worth.
A proposed ASTM International standard, WK47030, Practice for Evaluating Concrete Floor Systems to Receive Resilient Flooring, follows World Floor Covering Association and Floor Covering Installation Contractors Association endorsement of dryness testing and slab evaluation by third parties. Once approved, WK47030 can be specified in construction documents or contacts as a way to require such oversight.
Read MoreNewly published ASTM C1792, Test Method for Measurement of Mass Loss Versus Time for One-Dimensional Drying of Saturated Concretes will enable engineers and producers to characterize how hardened mixtures dry. “The information can be used to directly assess the drying rates of a given concrete mixture,” says ASTM member Dale Bentz, chemical engineer for the Materials and Structural Systems Division in the National Institute for Standards and Technology Engineering Laboratory. “[It] could be valuable for industrial flooring applications, for example, where quick drying is often desirable.”
The U.S. Green Building Council and Business Council for Sustainable Energy (BCSE) have joined the Global Energy Efficiency Accelerator Platform, a program of United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon’s Sustainable Energy for All initiative.
Leading to the 2018 International Building Code and International Residential Code, the 2015/2016/2017 Code Development Cycle will be the first full interval to use cdpACCESS, the International Code Council’s cloud-based system for code change proposals and public comment submittals, floor modification submissions and online voting.
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New requirements to further reduce energy and environmental impacts in buildings’ construction and operating phases—site vehicle idle time thresholds and stormwater management guidelines among them—are detailed in the 2014 version of the green building standard from ASHRAE, the U.S. Green Building Council, and Illuminating Engineering Society.