Sustainability Series
Week 4: Integrating circularity
Welcome to Week 4
To round off this year’s Sustainability Series, we are focusing on how project teams can ‘integrate circularity’. This can mean a number of things, but is often associated with using secondary or recycled materials, and our two live webinars this week focus on just that. The first looks at the closed loop recycling of concrete into aggregates to be used in concrete with a deep dive into the Channel View regeneration in Cardiff. The second explores the latest development in cements including both emerging materials such as reclaimed fly ash, and how standards are evolving to enable their use. Sign up for these webinars below.
But integrating circularity is much more than just maximising recycled content, as showcased in UK Concrete’s recently published Circular Economy Action Plan, which targets the whole life cycle of concrete considering its efficient use, avoiding waste and retaining value. And speaking of retaining value, the article in this year’s Concrete Futures magazine on the ‘reuse of extracted concrete’ gives a glimpse of some of the ways this can happen. I’ve linked to these and signposted other useful resources produced by The Concrete Centre below.
I’m also excited that this week is aligned with ReLondon’s Circular Economy Week 2026, which aims to showcase and celebrate the work being done to accelerate cities' transition to a low carbon circular economy, across all sectors. Do also check out their wider programme of events.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this year’s Sustainability Series. Please let us know your highlights.
Andrea Charlson, Head of Sustainability, The Concrete Centre
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Recycled aggregates in concrete - A Cardiff case study
Date: Tuesday 13 October 2026
Time: 13:00 - 14:00
Venue: Online
Join the project team behind Channel View regeneration in Cardiff’s Grangetown as the concrete supplier and demolition materials processor share their experiences of delivering closed loop concrete recycling. The speakers will explore the decisions made throughout the project, the challenges encountered, the ingredients of success and the practical lessons learned.
If you want to explore using recycled concrete aggregates in your projects, there’s further guidance in the Application article from CQ Winter 2025.
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The evolution of circular cements
Date: Thursday 15 October 2026
Time: 13:00 - 14:00
Venue: Online
The UK construction industry is increasingly looking to use recovered materials to support a more circular cement and concrete production. This webinar explores some of the latest developments, from reclaimed fly ash and recycled concrete fines to recycled brick dust and examines how evolving standards are helping to enable their use.
Through expert presentations, the webinar will provide practical insights into the opportunities and challenges associated with these materials, and what architects, engineers, and specifiers need to know about them, specifically as it relates to standards and specification practices.
The session will be hosted by Dr Sam Ghazizadeh, Technical Lead for Cement at the MPA, and features presentations from Jack Sindhu, Capital Concrete, Rob Nicholson, EP Power Minerals and Danielle Dawson, Holcim UK, followed by a live Q&A session.
Join us to learn more about the role of circular cements in the transition to a more circular built environment.
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Spotlight on: Retaining value
Retaining value is a cornerstone of the circular economy. The best way to do this is to keep concrete in use as long as possible, and there’s loads of examples of exciting refurbishments and transformations of concrete buildings. But when concrete is no longer needed, the range of options is increasing. Recent research has paved the way for recycled concrete fines to be used as a constituent in new concrete. And project teams are pushing the boundaries of concrete reuse by exploring how to extract concrete elements are reuse them in new structures as explored in our recent Concrete Futures article, Cut out and keep.
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Spotlight on: Putting circularity into practice
Circular economy is about designing out waste at every point within a product or building’s life cycle. This not only affects which materials are used, but how long they perform and what happens to them next. The recently published UK Concrete Circular Economy Action Plan reflects this by setting out how to enable greater circularity across the built environment while retaining the value of concrete throughout every stage of its life cycle. Covering manufacturing, transport and logistics, design, construction and demolition and reuse, it provides an evidence-based framework of objectives, actions and measurable outcomes designed to help the industry continue leading by example. You can hear more about the CEAP and examples of it being put in action in this webinar: Circular Concrete in Action.