Circular Business Model

To ensure the long-term success of its businesses, LafargeHolcim aims to minimize its environmental impact and maximize its positive contribution. We implement a business model making the best use of water, recovering energy from waste and biomass sources, and enhancing biodiversity preservation.

 

Our cement, concrete, and aggregates activities and manufacturing processes require natural resources, such as water and energy. But such resources are becoming scarce, and the competition for their use is increasing between domestic purposes, agriculture, and industry. Our quarrying operations can also have an impact on ecosystems.

 

This is why LafargeHolcim constantly works to optimize its use of natural resources by managing its environmental footprint effectively and creating value where possible by using recycled materials or incorporating other actors in the management of common watershed basins.

 

We implement a circular and resource-optimized business model, which covers:

• Substituting fossil fuels with industrial or municipal waste and biomass to power our cement plants. This allows waste to be recovered safely and in an environment-friendly way, which also provides solutions to waste generators while reducing our consumption of fossil fuels.

• Managing our own water use through best practices such as rainwater harvesting, reuse of waste water, and water recycling.  In addition, we influence other actors across the entire basin to promote community access to safe water and sustainability of local water supplies

• Implementing consistent and robust rehabilitation and biodiversity management at all extraction sites, in cooperation with experts and local stakeholders. Our objective is to deliver a net positive change in biodiversity by creating, preserving, and restoring natural habitats and contributing to species conservation.

 

In addition to reducing LafargeHolcim's environmental footprint, our natural resource preservation actions aim to meet our local communities' needs:

• We provide more water to communities in water-scarce areas by, for example, building check dams and reservoir pits.

We create local jobs by developing pre-processing and direct sourcing of waste    

In attractive markets with high energy prices, significant quality and quantity of waste, and a favorable regulatory framework, LafargeHolcim develops a business activity called "Geocycle." It offers industries, farming cooperatives and cities a unique and sustainable service that consists of recovering, reprocessing and recycling their waste (chemical waste, foundry sand, other industrial waste, household waste, or rice husks) to turn them into alternative fuels for our kilns and raw materials for the cement production process.