Concrete is the most omnipresent man-made material on Earth - and its environmental impact is just as far-reaching. Holcim Australia, a leading supplier of aggregates, concrete, and concrete pipe and products, recognises the importance of their sustainability agenda in reducing the industry’s footprint. Here, Holcim’s Head of Sustainability, Cyril Giraud, explains why transparency is such an important pillar of Holcim’s sustainability agenda - and strong sense of responsibility one of its main enablers.

How long have you been with the organisation?

This year is my 20th anniversary with the company. It’s been a marvellous journey because the industry has evolved so much in those two decades. Since I started with Holcim as an intern, I have always worked in the field of environment, planning approvals, licence to operate and even geology. Without really knowing it I was already working on sustainability - in this kind of industry you can’t really escape it.

And what does that look like in practice? What does your role actually entail?

I think Head of Sustainability is one of the most exciting roles at the moment and it’s really about unpacking the values that we, as an organisation, have and bring everyone together to tackle some of those big questions.

We are focused on four different pillars - Climate Action, Circular Economy, Nature and Communities - so my role spreads across all the different functions and business, requiring me to make sense of how we all work together, and how we can make a difference. What I find myself saying a lot is that we all have a role to play - whether it's in the organisation or at home, we can all make a difference.

How important is sustainability to your organisation and how does this commitment manifest through various facets of your organisation?

Globally, Holcim has definitely led the charge in being a leader in sustainability and a strong advocate for significant commitments, and our group strategy for 2025 is called Accelerating Green Growth. Now, I don’t think it could be any more clear that sustainability is at the core of everything we do. We have very strong group targets that are then rolled out at a national level with the structure that allows everyone to be aware, to be accountable, and to make a difference.

Transparency is extremely important for us because there is no doubt that our products - concrete and aggregates, here in Australia - have an impact. Understanding the baseline of our impacts across the organisation, through transparency and tools to measure what our impact is, has really allowed us to have a clear message around how we are going to focus on solutions that are more sustainable - and provide sustainable solutions to our customers.

In line with this commitment to transparency, Holcim Australia was the first to publish an Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) for ready-mix concrete in 2019, providing third party-verified data to measure environmental impact, including CO2 emissions. Similarly, we also were the first to be certified by Climate Active, a government programme for carbon neutral products. For the moment, the use of offsets to get a carbon neutral product is the solution that we have available today as we progress on our journey to net zero by 2050.

We are also active in the circular economy space - we are aiming to have zero waste going into landfill. We are looking at opportunities to increase the reuse of our internal waste first, and at options around construction and demolition waste to be able to integrate into our products and continue to push for sustainable solutions in the future.

Then there is nature and biodiversity - because we do disturb land in the quarry business. We also have enough land ownership that overall, we believe in working towards having a positive impact on biodiversity by looking after the land that is not disturbed very carefully. Our systems are developed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), employed in our quarries to measure biodiversity impact and associated action plans to enable follow-through. We have the same process with water. And then there are, of course, communities - the umbrella under which the other tiers sit, because we have sites that operate near communities.

What does sustainability mean to you?

In this role at Holcim sustainability is about having a strong sense of responsibility. I must ensure that we act and are not afraid to tackle the hard questions. We often need to make strong statements, for instance related to the carbon footprint of our products. We know that some are quite high, but we come to the table saying that our organisation is committed to achieving net zero by 2050 and we’re taking a range of actions to get there.