Trade Journals for the Concrete Industry

Rising energy prices are becoming a predominant part of everyday life. The disproportionate growth in costs has not only become a burden when filling up at a petrol station; it affects the heating of apartments, offices and factory halls as well. Governments have now recognised that no lasting improvement will occur without guiding principles. Even if the need for improvement was acknowledged in Kyoto, nothing happened for a long time. But now an increasingly bigger market, supported by new legislation that stipulates more thermal insulation, is coming into being in many countries. This is currently characterised by thermal insulation that is applied to a finished wall on a construction site, i. e, at a very late stage of the building process. Hence, it continues to be the custom, in respect of single-family homes as well as multistorey residential, commercial and industrial constructions, to cover the outside of a building with thermal insulation only once it has been completed. This, however, cuts down any of the advantages of prefabrication; the product that arrives at the construction site must then be finished off there. An undesirable dependency on weather conditions is created and the work is mostly not carried out by the precast component supplier but by other tradesmen.