Kayasand chief executive officer Bram Smith offers insights into the future of sand, sustainability and Australia’s construction industry.
What has been the most important lesson from 2024?
The growing realisation that quarries can play a big part in lowering emissions from concrete production. By producing high quality concrete aggregates quarries can enable significant reductions in cement usage. Results from trials using engineered sand in Australia and New Zealand have shown that we are well on our way to reducing the amount of cement in concrete by up to 20 per cent.
I recently attended an international concrete conference in Christchurch where sustainability was high on the agenda. Each country has set out a pathway to net zero emissions concrete by 2050. The go-to solution is supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs) such as slag and fly ash to reduce cement. These are already widely used in Australia and the CCAA estimates improved use of SCMs could reduce emissions by 3 per cent in Australian concrete. Meanwhile, our results already show quality engineered sand can reduce concrete emissions by 10-15 per cent. This is an untapped opportunity for the quarry industry to provide substantial emissions reductions in construction, downstream of their own operations.
Has there been a shift in perception around manufactured sand?
Manufactured sand is such a broad term – people use it to describe everything from washed sand to raw crusher dust. As a result, it gets a bad reputation for highly variable quality.
Kayasand enables quarries to turn crusher dust, often considered a byproduct of quarry operations, into a consistently high-quality sand that offers several benefits for concrete. We call it Engineered Sand because it’s designed to meet specific quality standards around the shape, grading, contamination and consistency of sand required for use in concrete.
What is a trend you have spotted in 2024?
The industry is transitioning from headline grabbing sustainability initiatives to data backed sustainability outcomes. Many companies are now publishing Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs), so everyone can see the emissions associated with their products. You get what you measure, and this sort of data helps focus the construction industry on technologies that will have the biggest impact. Particularly as building developers and specifiers are increasingly demanding evidence backed low emissions products to give them a competitive edge.
What is the biggest issue facing the quarrying industry?
There are a variety of issues, but the increasing difficulties around regulatory approvals for quarry expansions is a major one. The long time and substantial investment required to get consents for quarry expansions was a topic at the IQA conference this year. If you have a long resource life, you can invest in good equipment.
Streamlining the consenting process would mean that same time and money could instead be invested in equipment to produce high-value and sustainable quarry products. For fine aggregates, this means quality sand from quarries that reduces dependence on mined natural sand.
What are you looking forward to in 2025?
There has been a surge of new interest in Australia and New Zealand over the past year. We’re looking forward to getting more of our plants up and running and more people seeing the impact that good quality engineered sand has on concrete.
What do you think the industry will look like in 2025?
We see challenges around the sourcing of sand getting more acute, and the demand to demonstrate sustainability rising. Plus, quarries must maximise business efficiencies and utilisation to drive profitability.
We want quarries to see that pile of crusher dust in the corner in a new light. That crusher dust could be the key to more sustainable building materials and increased quarry profitability. For many quarries, the coarse aggregates have been the most profitable products. We want to see the fine aggregates (0.1-7mm) materials become a key profitability driver for quarries. Then we’ll focus on the ultrafine (<0.1mm) materials to achieve true 100 per cent quarry utilisation. •
For more information, visit kayasand.com
.jpg)
