NEW!!! Intro to Concrete
This online course is $150 pp for members and $250 pp for non members and the expected duration of the course is 4 hours.
Perfect for onboarding new employees, students, contractors or anyone interested in learning the basics of concrete in this online course.
Learn about product knowledge, plant operations, environmental overview, basic safety, customer service and employee roles.
INSTRUCTIONS - Contact the Concrete Atlantic office to receive your registration key. Then click here to register!
This 4 hour online course is designed to provide participants with:
- a basic and fundamental knowledge of concrete;
- an introduction to roles, responsibilities at a concrete plant and job site;
- an understanding of basic safety practices around plants and construction sites;
- helpful customer service practices & understanding how to mitigate workplace challenges
- an awareness of Industry environmental challenges and ways to alleviate them
Learn more about: Watch Video
product knowledge, how is concrete made, properties of concrete, handling concrete, personal, concrete and job site safety, what to expect on job sites, environment responsibility, important of reporting, employee roles, how to deal with problems, customer service an relations.
Register by obtaining a registration key and instructions from the Concrete Atlantic.
To help offset the fluctuating and rising cost of diesel needed for transportation, fuel surcharges are being implemented throughout the transportation sector, including the concrete industry.
Fuel surcharges enable businesses within the transportation industry to protect themselves from fuel price volatility and to remain profitable. They are based on fuel prices that will likely fluctuate, and thus, the rates may change from month to month. Sometimes weekly.
Many Canadian shippers use the Freight Carriers Association percentages to index their own surcharge, which matches an increase/decrease in the price to the surcharge to each increase/decrease in fuel prices over the baseline price. They use three variables for the fuel surcharge calculation: the baseline fuel price, the current price for fuel, and fuel costs as a share of operating costs. (Canadian Fuel Surcharge Calculator, Home Page | Canadian Fuel Surcharge Calculator)
In Atlantic Canada, there are many organizations offering fuel surcharge calculations. You can find recommended transportation industry surcharges through:
- Free! Nova Scotia Government website,
- Membership Required! Freight Carriers Association of Canada
- Free! Trucking Associations Nova Scotia
- Membershipship Required! Atlantic Provincial Trucking Association
Please note: you need to become a member to some of these organizations to gain the most current fuel surcharge recommendation.
Canadian industry average environmental product declaration for ready-mix concrete
DOWNLOAD Environmental Product Declaration document
IMPORTANT
The Athena Sustainable Materials Institute has updated the Canadian industry average environmental product declaration for ready-mix concrete. Environmental product declarations, or EPDs, have quickly become the industry standard for communicating the environmental performance of construction products, and concrete particular.
The Canadian federal government and Cement Association of Canada recently issued a joint plan to reduce the carbon footprint of concrete products through low carbon concrete procurement. EPDs are the cornerstone to the Greening Government Strategy and are anticipated to become a requirement for procurement of concrete by the federal government and provincial and local jurisdictions that follow their lead.
Participating in the industry average EPD has the additional benefit that participants in the study are automatically on-boarded onto Athena’s concrete EPD platform. This means that at the conclusion of the study that participating companies are set up to start producing their own company-specific EPD's if they choose to subscribe to Athena’s EPD on-demand service. Company specific EPD's for specific mixes are increasingly being specified into development specifications and this trend is expected to continue with the current push by the federal government and others.