TOP AMERICAN CONCRETE INSTITUTE EXECUTIVES VISIT SA

selected ACI publications via our information centre. In addition, last year the winners of CCSA’s prestigious biennial Fulton Awards were entered into the ACI Awards for Excellence, as will the winners of the Fulton Awards in 2024 be.”

After his visit to SA, Nmai said the ACI’s discussions with CCSA had covered “a myriad of topics”, including sustainability, concrete industry productivity and dissem - ination of concrete knowledge. He congratulated CCSA on the publication of the 10th edition of the globally acclaimed concrete reference book, Fulton’s Concrete Technology and said that CCSA had a key role to play in helping to advance the quality of concrete construction in Africa.

The South African coatings sector is being severely affected by load-shedding, with massive unexpected burdens heaped on already high production costs, says Tara Benn, executive director of the SA Paint Manufacturing Association (SAPMA).

Benn says manufacturing members are losing millions of rands having to work around power outages in production, especially for energy-intense chemical reaction paint products which require a continuous process for the dispersion phase of the manufacturing process.

“In addition to planned load-shedding, sudden outages or related substation failures are major problems. If a production batch is spoilt by a sudden loss of electricity, the results can be catastrophic and there are now increasing cases of end-products having to be dumped or regarded as sub-standard because of loadshedding occurring without prior notice. There are also reports of new clauses in insurance which would exempt the insurers from damages to goods resulting from issues related to the power grid,” she explains.

“SAPMA members have had to add diesel costs, the provision of inverters to home-based sales staff and the costs of back-up systems for their servers to running expenses. Our members feel they can’t pass these costs on to