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,…

The Politecnico di Milano is leading an international consortium developing metal 3D printing techniques to help construction save energy and cut waste. The consortium, “ConstructAdd”, believes that printing customised components…

Scientists at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa) have created “biochar”, a plant-based insulation material that can capture and bind carbon dioxide. The material is made…

European construction will be hit by a shortage of building materials as companies cut production because of energy costs and “chaotic” EU policies, according to the head of the world’s biggest brickmaker.