Abbreviation | MPA |
---|---|
Formation | 2009 |
Legal status | Not for profit company |
Purpose | Trade association for the UK mineral products industry |
Location |
|
Region served | UK |
Chief executive | Jon Prichard |
Website | mineralproducts.org |
The Mineral Products Association (MPA) is the United Kingdom trade association for the aggregates, asphalt, cement, concrete, dimension stone, lime, mortar, and silica sand industries.
The MPA, with the affiliation of the British Association of Reinforcement, British Calcium Carbonates Federation, Eurobitume UK, and United Kingdom Quality Ash Association, has a growing membership of 520 companies and is the sectoral voice for mineral products. [1] MPA membership is made up of the vast majority of independent SME quarrying companies throughout the UK, as well as the nine major international and global companies. It covers 100% of UK cement production, 90% of aggregates production, 95% of asphalt and over 70% of ready-mixed concrete and precast concrete production. Each year the industry supplies £22 billion worth of materials and services to the UK economy and is the largest supplier to the construction industry, which has annual output valued at £144 billion. Industry production represents the largest materials flow in the UK economy and is also one of the largest manufacturing sectors. [2]
The MPA was formed in March 2009 from the merger of the Quarry Products Association, the British Cement Association and The Concrete Centre. It was officially launched in June 2009. [3]
The MPA has offices in London, Glasgow and Fron in Wales.
QPA Northern Ireland is affiliated to the MPA and has offices in Crumlin, County Antrim. [4] The British Precast Concrete Federation (BPCF), the trade association of precast concrete manufacturers, is a member of the MPA and is based in Leicester. [5]
The MPA has regional divisions, for London & South East, South West, East Anglia, Midlands, Wales, North, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
The Concrete Centre was formed in 2003 and since 2009 has been part of the MPA. The Concrete Centre promotes the use of concrete in construction through the provision of resources to enable designers to follow best practice for the design of concrete and masonry. The Concrete Centre publishes a journal, Concrete Quarterly which was first published by the Cement and Concrete Association in 1947. The journal showcases the use of concrete in construction projects in the United Kingdom and worldwide. The CQ archive is available online. [6]
Concrete is a composite material composed of aggregate bonded together with a fluid cement that cures over time. Concrete is the second-most-used substance in the world after water, and is the most widely used building material. Its usage worldwide, ton for ton, is twice that of steel, wood, plastics, and aluminium combined.
Portland cement is the most common type of cement in general use around the world as a basic ingredient of concrete, mortar, stucco, and non-specialty grout. It was developed from other types of hydraulic lime in England in the early 19th century by Joseph Aspdin, and is usually made from limestone. It is a fine powder, produced by heating limestone and clay minerals in a kiln to form clinker, grinding the clinker, and adding 2 to 3 percent of gypsum. Several types of portland cement are available. The most common, called ordinary portland cement (OPC), is grey, but white portland cement is also available. Its name is derived from its resemblance to portland stone which was quarried on the Isle of Portland in Dorset, England. It was named by Joseph Aspdin who obtained a patent for it in 1824. His son William Aspdin is regarded as the inventor of "modern" portland cement due to his developments in the 1840s. The term portland in this context refers to a material or process, not a proper noun like a place or a person, and should not be capitalized.
CRH plc is an international group of diversified building materials businesses whose headquarters is in Dublin, Ireland. It manufactures and supplies a wide range of products for the construction industry. The group was formed through a 1970 merger of two leading Irish public companies, Cement Limited and Roadstone Limited (1949). CRH's primary listings are on the London Stock Exchange and on Euronext Dublin, but from 25 September 2023 its primary listing will be on the New York Stock Exchange.
Vulcan Materials Company is an American company based in Birmingham, Alabama. It is principally engaged in the production, distribution and sale of construction materials. Vulcan is the largest producer of construction materials, primarily gravel, crushed stone, and sand, and employs approximately 12,000 people at over 400 facilities. Vulcan serves 22 states, the District of Columbia, Mexico, Canada, Bahamas and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Vulcan's innovative Crescent Market project led to construction of a large quarry and deep water seaport on the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico, just south of Cancun. This quarry supplies Tampa, New Orleans, Houston, and Brownsville, Texas, as well as other Gulf coast seaports, with crushed limestone via large 62,000-ton self-discharging ships.
Construction aggregate, or simply aggregate, is a broad category of coarse- to medium-grained particulate material used in construction, including sand, gravel, crushed stone, slag, recycled concrete and geosynthetic aggregates. Aggregates are the most mined materials in the world. Aggregates are a component of composite materials such as concrete and asphalt; the aggregate serves as reinforcement to add strength to the overall composite material. Due to the relatively high hydraulic conductivity value as compared to most soils, aggregates are widely used in drainage applications such as foundation and French drains, septic drain fields, retaining wall drains, and roadside edge drains. Aggregates are also used as base material under foundations, roads, and railroads. In other words, aggregates are used as a stable foundation or road/rail base with predictable, uniform properties, or as a low-cost extender that binds with more expensive cement or asphalt to form concrete. Although most kinds of aggregate require a form of binding agent, there are types of self-binding aggregate which do not require any form of binding agent.
Tarmac Group Limited was a British building materials company headquartered in Wolverhampton, United Kingdom. It produced road surfacing and heavy building materials including aggregates, concrete, cement and lime, as well as operating as a road construction and maintenance subcontractor.
Aggregate Industries, a member of the Holcim Group, is a company based in the United Kingdom with headquarters at Bardon Hill, Coalville, Leicestershire. Aggregate Industries manufactures and supplies a range of heavy building materials, primarily aggregates such as stone, asphalt and concrete to the construction industry and other business sectors. Aggregate Industries also manufactures and imports cement, and provides a range of aggregate-associated goods and services, these include the manufacture of masonry and reconstructed stone items for construction industry and domestic applications, the manufacture of pre-cast concrete items, the supply of ready-mixed concrete, design and project management consulting, and resurfacing contracting services.
Somerset is a county in the south west of England. It is a rural county and transport infrastructure has been significant in industrial development. There is some heavy industry particularly related to the defence technologies and the county has several centres for stone quarrying, although the coalfield is now closed.
Crushed stone or angular rock is a form of construction aggregate, typically produced by mining a suitable rock deposit and breaking the removed rock down to the desired size using crushers. It is distinct from naturally occurring gravel, which is produced by natural processes of weathering and erosion and typically has a more rounded shape.
A concrete plant, also known as a batch plant or batching plant or a concrete batching plant, is equipment that combines various ingredients to form concrete. Some of these inputs include water, air, admixtures, sand, aggregate, fly ash, silica fume, slag, and cement. A concrete plant can have a variety of parts and accessories, including: mixers, cement batchers, aggregate batchers, conveyors, radial stackers, aggregate bins, cement bins, heaters, chillers, cement silos, batch plant controls, and dust collectors.
The Leiths Group is a group of construction-related companies based in Cove, Aberdeen, Scotland. The group includes the following companies:
Mining in the United Kingdom produces a wide variety of fossil fuels, metals, and industrial minerals due to its complex geology. In 2013, there were over 2,000 active mines, quarries, and offshore drilling sites on the continental land mass of the United Kingdom producing £34bn of minerals and employing 36,000 people.
Concrete is produced in a variety of compositions, finishes and performance characteristics to meet a wide range of needs.
Hanson Australia is a premixed concrete, aggregates and precast company. Founded in 1949 as Pioneer Concrete and later re-branded to Pioneer International, it was taken over by Hanson in 1999.
Nass Corporation B.S.C. is a Bahraini public joint-stock company established and listed on the Bahrain Stock Exchange since the year 2005. The paid-up capital is currently BHD 22 million.
Tarmac is a British building materials company headquartered in Solihull, England. The company was formed as Lafarge Tarmac in March 2013, by the merger of Anglo American's Tarmac UK and Lafarge's operations in the United Kingdom. In July 2014, Anglo American agreed to sell its stake to Lafarge, to assist Lafarge in its merger with Holcim and allay competition concerns.
Hope Construction Materials was a producer of cement, concrete and aggregates in the United Kingdom, founded on 7 January 2013 by entrepreneur Amit Bhatia. Before 1 April 2014, Hope Construction Materials was the trading name for the two entities, Hope Cement Limited and Hope Ready Mix Concrete Limited. It was acquired by Breedon Aggregates in August 2016. Assets included Hope Cement Works, the largest cement plant in the United Kingdom at Hope, Derbyshire, and a network of 170 ready-mix concrete plants, as well as aggregate extraction and logistics operations.
Akkord Industry Construction Investment Corporation OJSC is an Azerbaijani company that does construction work and produces construction materials. The company builds infrastructure projects in Georgia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkey.
Breedon Group plc is a British construction materials company which has its headquarters at Breedon on the Hill, Leicestershire, England. The current chairman is Amit Bhatia, son-in-law of Lakshmi Mittal, the billionaire steel magnate who became a Breedon shareholder following the acquisition of Hope Construction Materials. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index.
Oldcastle Materials Inc. is a supplier of asphalt, concrete, and other building materials, and also offers construction and paving services. The Atlanta-based company is a subsidiary of CRH plc, a publicly traded international group of diversified building materials businesses, and has approximately 18,000 employees at 1,200 locations, as of March 2018.