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The Nigerian Institute of Building (NIOB) had called for collaborative research and production of alternative building materials to help the Nigerian building industry in particular, and the national economy in general.
The NIOB's past President, Kunle Awobodu made the call when he led a high-powered delegation to Lafarge PLC in Lagos to explore ways to collaborate and promote mutually beneficial goals for the two organisations including the nation’s construction industry.
Awobodu said that the NIOB has a large reservoir of research resources, efforts and outputs, stating that some builders have researched and are researching locally available materials that are not producing inferior performance results to the conventional ones.
“One of such area of research is the use of pozzolana, rice husk ash and corn cob ash as a partial replacement in cement.
Beyond publicising the research efforts and outputs of researchers in building materials, the utilisation of those research outputs in the production of cement will increase affordability, drive costs down and by the law of large numbers even help the profitability and bottom line of manufacturers making it a win-win to all stakeholders and the society at large” he said.
The Chairman of the NIOB Research and Development Committee, who is the immediate past Deputy Governor of Ekiti State, Professor Kolapo Olusola Eleka explained that the development of Nigerian standards for such pozzolanic cement and other alternative but locally available materials is one of the steps necessary in manufacture and utilisation.
The Chairman of the Association of Builders in Academia, Prof Martin Dada explained that using some of these alternative materials would promote profitability.
He painted a scenario to justify sustainability considerations and deconstruction explaining that if a building is demolished, it takes efforts and resources to relocate the waste generated
The Country Chief Executive Officer of Lafarge PLC, Khaled El Dokani, welcomed the proposal and raised the issue of the reuse of items recovered from demolished or deconstructed buildings under some circumstances, thereby promoting sustainability and reduction of carbon footprint or carbon emissions.
The two organisations acknowledged that a major challenge to be tackled in the introduction of new and good products is getting stakeholders' buy-in and managing the perceptions of members of the society to take advantage of such products.
