Innovations
Sustainable Construction - Walking the Talk
The concrete industry is engaged in a critical battle for mind share with other building products. We see this most clearly in our battle with wood but the dimensions of competition for the selection of all building materials is becoming increasingly intense and the rules of the game are different.
As an industry we are talking about the many advantages of concrete and making claims about our environmental and sustainable attributes. TCA wants to demonstrate in the real world that concrete truly is the best choice for sustainable construction so we are pursuing certification for our new office under the Living Building Challenge (https://living-future.org/lbc/)
TCA’s Board of Directors has approved this bold initiative and in 2020 we were able to complete our design process, identify and retain our contractor (DPR), and submit our building plans for preliminary review. Our office will be completely concrete with both ICF and Cast-in-Place walls, a precast concrete roof, and of course concrete floors.
We will use our project to showcase the best methods of reducing concrete’s embodied carbon as a construction material, and to physically demonstrate concrete’s superior advantages for energy-efficiency, resilience and durability. If we are successful in achieving full LBC certification for our project (and we have to prove the claims made in the design phase by actually meeting the performance requirements over a full year of building operation) TCA’s office will become one of less than 50 such buildings in the United States.
While our Board could have chosen a less challenging path to construct our new office they instead chose a path that will provide maximum benefit to our entire industry as we battle competitive materials. Innovative, Courageous and Visionary!
Finding New Ways to Assure & Connect Thru Covid: Video Messages from the Executive Director
The early days of Covid 19 left us all feeling a bit rudderless with changes happening at warp speed. At TCA, we decided to use our most valuable asset, the face and personae of our respected Executive Director Alan Sparkman, to push out video updates to our members to help them feel like some things,
like our commitment to our members, were very much the same during this time of crisis. These video updates served our members by keeping them abreast of rapidly changing regulations statewide. TCA used them on our social media channels and on our emailed updates that we sent out with more frequency throughout the initial more turbulent phase of Covid.
EPD Program for TCA Ready Mix Producers
NRMCA has done excellent work on behalf of the concrete industry to enable the creation of Environmental Product Declarations (EPD’s) for concrete mixtures. However, the vast majority of ready mix concrete producers have not yet done the work required to issue EPD’s for their concrete mix designs.
One reason for this is that EPD's are rarely required or requested on construction projects today. Moving forward this is likely to change and to change much more rapidly than many expect.
Another big reason is that the process required for an individual company to produce EPD's for their concrete mixtures is both complicated and costly. TCA has partnered with a Tennessee-based sustainability company to directly address this objection.
First announced at our November 2020 Virtual Concrete Conference TCA is pleased to offer our member companies the ability to issue mix-specific EPD's from individual batch plants quickly and economically. Our partner for this endeavor is WAP sustainability. WAP has deep experience as a sustainability consultant to a wide range of companies including some tied to the construction industry. They have leveraged this experience to bring an attractive EPD solution to TCA members.
This solution allows Ready Mix producers to add individual batch plant locations as needed rather than going through an extensive, often expensive, process for all of their locations. Batch plants can be up and issuing mix specific EPD's in a matter of weeks not months. The cost per plant will be less than $3000.
Two TCA members are currently piloting this program at batch plant locations in Tennessee, and one has already completed the process to allow them to issue EPD's for nearly any mix design in their system.
We believe this innovative system will give TCA members an important competitive advantage for sustainable construction projects in Tennessee and it will further concrete’s reputation as a vital - and sustainable - building material.
TCA Virtual Concrete Conference
Virtual has become a worn out word to describe meetings in 2020. Most of us would admit to being “Zoomed-out” so we did not want to do a virtual conference that was just another online slide presentation. Having reviewed several potential online platforms we felt that the environment created by Virbela offered a better and more engaging online experience so we decided to hold our meeting in this virtual environment.
While certainly not a replacement for a true in-person experience we felt that this environment offered attendees the chance to connect much more naturally than most virtual platforms. It was actually possible to engage other persons in the space in a (mostly) normal conversation – without typing!
TCA has created a virtual office in the Virbela campus known as The Aggregate. The Aggregate campus was created by our friends at the Tilt-up Concrete Association and the Concrete Foundations Association to hold their events, and to host other industry events such as NRMCA’s Global Concrete Conference. This campus is open 24/7 and accessible to anyone who has attended events previously. TCA has created a branded office on The Aggregate campus and we plan to use this space for things like TCA staff meetings, TCA committees and customer lunch and learn presentations.