Durability, sustainability, and profitability

The cement industry is known as an industry that changes very slowly, but during the twentieth century it succeeded in going from a modest industry producing, annually, only 10 million tonnes of Portland cement at the beginning of the century to a global industry producing about 2.5 billion tonnes, annually, at the end of the century. In reality, the consumption of cement started to increase significantly only after the end of the Second World War (Aïtcin, 2007a).