Archive for category: General News

Nottingham-based startup secures investment from Zacua Ventures and Counteract to scale its breakthrough process of mineralising CO2 in concrete for permanent sequestration.

23 January, Nottingham, UK: Concrete4Change (C4C), an advanced materials company that permanently captures and utilises CO2 by mineralising it in concrete, has raised £2.5 million in seed funding. The round was led by Zacua Ventures, an early-stage venture fund focused on the built environment and Counteract, a carbon removals focused venture fund, with participation from the family office of Goldbeck. This brings the total investment raised to date to £4.5m including £1.5 million in grant funding. C4C will use the investment to scale its technology from the lab environment to pilot projects with strategic investors that include some of the world’s leading concrete manufacturers, Goldbeck and Siam Cement Group.

Founded by Dr. Sid Pourfalah, Dr. Michael Wise and Dalraj Nijjar, C4C has developed a novel proprietary technology that permanently captures CO2 and mineralises it in concrete. CO2 is captured by C4C’s carrier material, and the loaded material is mixed in fresh concrete as an additive. The CO2 in the concrete undergoes a chemical reaction and is permanently mineralised. The result is concrete that is not only 20% stronger but becomes a CO2 sink that prevents any leak, even after demolition of the concrete.

Approximately four billion tonnes of cement is produced annually which creates three billion tonnes of CO2 per year, equating to 8% of global CO2 emissions. C4C plans to create localised supply chains by taking advantage of low-cost waste streams such as the CO2 emitted at cement production sites. C4C’s technology for CO2 mineralisation is completely novel in the market – using a carrier material medium to transfer CO2 into concrete with the aim of making it stronger and greener as a result. It is applicable to all types of cement and concrete including pre-cast and ready-mix concrete and can be easily incorporated into existing supply chains.

Dalraj Nijjar, Co-founder & Chief Commercial Officer, Concrete4Change, said:

“Concrete4Change’s technology offers a viable route to turn an emission problem into an emission solution and set in stone a path for the construction industry to achieve net-zero concrete. This fresh injection of funding from specialist investors with deep sector expertise means we can now go from successful demonstrations in the lab and small-scale trials to real-world pilot projects.”

Prof. Sid Pourfalah, Founder & CEO, Concrete4Change, said:

“Concrete can naturally absorb a small amount of CO2 in its lifetime, but its full potential can never be reached in nature. The concrete industry needs scalable, long-term solutions, and this is where Concrete4Change comes in with our novel and easy-to-adopt approach. We are the first company in the world to create a technology that harnesses chemistry to efficiently mineralise CO2 and enhances the properties of concrete while enabling it to become the safest form of CO2 sink in the world. The cement and concrete industry are struggling to use the CO2 they produce and we want to convert their CO2 emissions into concrete.”

Commenting on the investment, Juan Nieto, General Partner, Zacua Ventures and former investor at Cemex Ventures added:

““When we first met the C4C crew, we just clicked – their team brings the right skills to the table, turning their breakthrough mineralisation tech into a real game-changer. C4C’s approach has major potential to green up concrete without altering its existing production process, capitalising on the established supply chains. And here’s the kicker – no extra cost for going green, plus it’s already playing nice with regulations, it’s a total win-win for everyone on board. We are particularly enthused by its commendable brief time-to-market, which markedly surpasses alternatives we have encountered elsewhere.” 

Richard Barker, Partner, Counteract, added:

“We really like C4C’s innovative solution for decarbonising cement. The utilisation of a carrier that contains captured CO2 creates a potential drop in solution for a long-standing industry with well-established supply chains. The solution is also complementary with a range of the industry’s other decarbonising pathways currently in development. We also love the C4C team and have been impressed by their deep domain knowledge and tenacious approach to developing the business. ”

More young people look set to live with their parents as buying a home becomes increasingly expensive, the government’s housing accelerator Homes England has warned.

Office of National Statistics has revealed the cost of a home is rising quicker than earnings with affordability ratios increasing from 4.92 in 2002 to 8.28 in 2022.

“Many young people cannot afford to buy homes in their local communities where they have grown-up, due to worsening affordability,” Homes England said in its latest factsheet The Need for Homes.

Alongside this Homes England has quoted Census statistics which forecast the UK population soaring to more than 60m by 2045.

Home Builders Federation, HBF, executive director Steve Turner said:

“Amidst an already acute housing shortage in this country house building is falling sharply. Whilst the government may say it wants to be building 300k homes a year, the policy environment is resulting in us getting further away from that target.”

The National House Building Council’s latest quarterly statistics published last November showed a year-on-year drop of 53 per cent in new registrations with completions down by 15 per cent.

Last financial year just 234,000 new homes were built, down by six per cent on figures for 2019-20 and below the government’s 300,000 new homes a year target.

More infrastructure help and better-resourced planning authorities needed

The housebuilding industry has criticised the government over an anti-development planning system, lack of support for house buyers and under-resourced council planning departments.

“The social and economic implications are stark, and unless the constraints are addressed urgently decent housing will become even more inaccessible, and thousands of jobs will be lost,” said Mr Turner.

The National Federation of Builders, NFB, head of policy and market insight Rico Wojtulewicz said:

“Planning for housing is just one part of the puzzle because we also need the infrastructure to support good placemaking, and this means greater land use. Unfortunately, the government has played planning politics for far too long and this has cost the British public affordable and enough housing, better jobs, regional connectivity and levelled up places.”

Homes England has quoted Office of National Statistics data revealing the cost of a home is increasingly more quickly than earnings. In 2002 the average house price in England was £102,000 and the average salary was £20,739. However, in 2022 this climbed to £275,000 with the average salary rising to £33,208. London was the least affordable place to live with the average house price more than trebling to £525,000 in 2022 compared with an average house price of £174,000 back in 2002.

Conveyancing solicitors Bird & Co said the number of enquiries it received from first-time buyers had slumped from 68 per cent in 2023 compared with 72 per cent in 2020.

Partner Daniel Chard said:

“Constructing new homes loses its purpose if they remain unaffordable, particularly for aspiring first-time buyers striving to step onto the property ladder.”

 Brokers Hank Zarihs Associates said development finance lenders were worried that the current tough sales environment might dissuade housebuilders from developing sites.

By David Norman of Davon

For smaller and medium-sized developers, 2023 was the year that everything took longer. It took longer to find and acquire land, longer to obtain bank funding and longer to get materials delivered but most of all, it took longer to get planning permission.

There was barely a day all year when I didn’t have a discussion with a client involving planning. The industry’s frustration with the ponderous UK system is palpable.

It’s particularly galling for the SME residential developers who are typically our clients because they have fewer resources to deal with the bureaucracy and face more intense financial pressures than the big hitters, notably on cashflow. When you are stretched on a project having shelled out for a parcel of land, planning delays pile up your bank interest. Time is money.

And it is not just delays that eat cash. Even a small development of, say, two houses can incur upfront costs of £30-50,000 in planning and professional fees. For more complex projects, that number can easily top £100,000 when you factor in consultancy fees for a broader raft of planning hurdles such as right to light and environmental studies. Another big-ticket pre-planning bill can be option fees for the landowner.

Unfortunately for developers, banks dislike lending against developments pending planning applications as there are no assets in the project, which means the developer must find the cash.

These pressures have had a cataclysmic effect on smaller to medium residential developers.

According to the Federation of Master Builders, 40 years ago SME house builders delivered 40% of our homes. Today, this figure is just 12%.

Planning is not the only culprit. The FMB says the sector has been hit hard by successive recessions. They report that SME and custom builders say they struggle to access finance and land, but right up there on their list of complaints is the difficulty of navigating Britain’s complex planning system.

Our experience at Davon talking to SME residential developers throughout last year bore that out, so we were pleased to give our support to the FMB’s campaign for:

• A simplified planning system
• Making more small sites available for SME developers
• Investing in local authority planning departments to speed up the planning process

For years, successive governments have promised action to tackle the housing shortage and streamline the planning system. Yet the industry sees little or no progress and has become at least sceptical if not cynical.

The latest government initiative is the Levelling Up and Regeneration Act which became law in October 2023. It is supposed to speed up the planning system, hold developers to account, cut bureaucracy, and encourage more councils to put in place plans to enable the building of new homes.

The Act promises that new developments will be more attractive with better infrastructure such as GP surgeries, schools and transport links. Development will be shaped by local people’s democratic wishes, enhance the environment and create neighbourhoods where people want to live and work.

That all sounds great, but will it happen?

One feature of the Act that caught my eye is to give councils the power to work directly with landlords to bring empty buildings back into use by local businesses and community groups, “breathing life back into empty high streets”.

Many people in the property and construction world will tell you that converting offices and retail premises into residential is fraught with difficulty, but it can be done successfully.

Take our client, Barker Homes for example. We have provided mezzanine finance for a series of their conversion projects, the latest being a £10.5 million redevelopment to transform a town centre commercial building in Hemel Hempstead into 40 luxury apartments.

If planning policy changes can smooth the path for more of these and other kinds of conversion of redundant buildings, that would be welcome.

It will be necessary if the Act is to deliver on its objectives, which include directing growth to support the regeneration of brownfield sites and renewing and levelling up towns and cities with more homes in Britain’s largest urban centres including in the North and Midlands.

The government says that this will not only make the most of brownfield land but also maximise the use of existing infrastructure, taking advantage of structural change in urban land use and reducing the need for unnecessary travel.

One criticism we often hear is that national and local planning is not joined up. To some extent this is addressed in the Act with new joint spatial development strategies to bring together planning authorities across boundaries where there are strategic reasons to do so.

But at the local level where our clients operate, it is the promise of a speeded up, streamlined planning service that is most appealing.

Previously mooted planning overhauls have met with reticence from the planners themselves but this time, at least publicly, they are being supportive.

The Act has been backed by the planners’ professional association, the Royal Town Planning Institute, although its chief executive, Victoria Hills, said if it is to be successful, the government must engage frequently with planners to ensure that new regulations and policy work as intended and deliver on those promises.

To me, that is the crux of the matter. There have been too many initiatives for change in the system that have fallen by the wayside as well as promises to deliver on housing and regeneration that have been little more than re-hashed versions of existing policies.

What the industry desperately needs is action, and that means ensuring that planners are on board with the spirit of the new law.

Mickling Barf was designed and built be renowned local architects Rex and Jenifer Critchlow

An unusual house built by husband-and-wife architects for themselves and their family to live in has earned “national heritage” status.

Mickling Barf, in Hatcliffe, near Barnoldby-le-Beck, was constructed in three phases between 1962 and 1983 by Rex and Jenifer Critchlow. Laid out to a cranked 30/60 geometric design, with two main wings and an adjoining annexe, the architects’ model shows how the house was planned from the outset to be extended as the family grew, according to Historic England.

“The house retains in its second bathroom a GRP [glass reinforced plastic] pod formed in two halves, designed from a patent by Rex Critchlow which was later sold to Ideal Standard,” Historic England’s description notes. “The garden and landscaping surrounding the house was also designed by the Critchlows and the plans executed over time. The house remained the family home of the Critchlows until 2022.”

Grade two-listed Mickling Barf is among a total of 227 historic buildings, including 16 quirky examples, to be added to the National Heritage List for England in 2023. It has been designated on the grounds of its architectural merit and historic interest.

Rex and Jenifer, who met while studying architecture at Sheffield University and married in 1960, built the main part of the house between 1963 and 1965, added an office and bathroom in the 1970s and an annexe space in 1982. The couple worked in London before moving to Lincolnshire to gradually take over the architectural practice of Jenifer’s father, J. Fred Pye, on his retirement.

Mickling Barf is said to show influences of Frank Lloyd Wright – who adopted a “honeycomb” geometry for his 1930s Hanna House – in its construction and has a hexagonal-shaped sunken living room. Wide use of hexagonal floor tiles throughout echoes the angles of the building.

Though built of simple materials such as timber and brick, the house’s grid design allows for “unusual and interesting spaces” and “fluidity and abundant natural light”, says Historic England. “As an example of a family home built by the architects for themselves, the joint design by husband and wife gives additional interest.”

When the Critchlows moved to Grimsby, Jenifer worked for a local authority before largely giving up architecture, once her children began to arrive, though she maintained an interest in landscaping and wrote a guide to the local church. Rex Critchlow led a Sixties project on what had originally been a small terraced hotel amid houses and shops to help create an expanded Kingsway Hotel, in Cleethorpes.

An application by the Twentieth Century Society (C20), which campaigns for outstanding buildings, led to the designation of Mickling Barf, after it was advertised for sale. C20 said the property was “a strong example of post-war domestic architecture that survives remarkably intact”.

“The house was occupied by the Critchlows until 2022, with this continuity of ownership meaning the external and internal features of the building have not seen significant alteration in 60 years,” C20 said. “The remarkably intact interior of Mickling Barf holds a range of striking original features, with what Rex Critchlow referred to as ‘honest and cheap’ materials used throughout the house.”

Duncan Wilson, chief executive of Historic England, said:

“A range of remarkable historic buildings and sites are added to the list each year and 2023 is no exception. We’ve examined and protected some amazing sites this year, which together give us a window into our rich and varied historic environment.”

Heritage Minister Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay said:

“The striking range of places listed this year are a vivid demonstration of the richness and variety of our national heritage. The great work done by Historic England will ensure that they are protected for future generations to enjoy – and to learn about the fascinating people and stories connected with them.”

Source: Grimsby Live