The 104th annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) was held from January 7 - 11 in Washington, DC. More than 13,500 transportation professionals, academics and industry officials attended the event which featured more than 6,300 presentations at over 500 sessions and workshops.
In a full-day workshop titled Toward Low-Carbon Concrete NRMCA’s Brian Killingsworth and Karthik Obla presented Strategies to Acceleration Decarbonization in the Cement/Concrete Industry which summarized progress made by NRMCA and other project stakeholders. Killingsworth also participated on a panel in Session 1051 titled Roads, Tracks, and Runways: Life-Cycle Assessment in Civil Infrastructure Policy and Practice where he covered NRMCA’s development of benchmarks that are being used by federal agencies to assess low carbon construction materials.
In the technical sessions, several papers were presented on the following concrete materials topics: low-carbon concrete, conductive concrete, concrete durability and recycled materials. TRB committees organize technical sessions, workshops at the annual meeting, webinars, research needs statements and research synthesis topics. These are listed on the committee websites and, from time to time, some projects are funded by NCHRP and other agencies.
This year, the committee discussed the following topics for future workshops: Durability of Low-Carbon-Concrete and Internal Curing Using Light Weight Aggregates. Future topics for research needs include Durability of Non-Portland Cements, Constructability of Low-Carbon Concrete, Variation of Concrete Ingredient Materials and Their Impact on Concrete Variability, Particle Size Characterization of Cementitious Materials and Rehabilitation of ASR-Impacted Structures.
There is a current NCHRP 18-22 request for proposals on Concrete Shrinkage Measurement and Crack Mitigation. In 2024, NCHRP published three research reports on concrete materials: #1083 on ASR Test Methods; #1105 on recommended revisions to the AASHTO specification for fly ash to permit the use of marginal and unconventional sources; and #1086 on rating concrete water permeability based on resistivity measurements. Webinars are planned later this year on some of these completed projects.
MIT CSHub also had four presentations on research funded by NRMCA sister organization the Concrete Advancement Foundation, including the MIT CSHub’s new streamlined life cycle assessment tool for pavements, performance-based specifications and mix optimization for state DOTs, and benchmarking and diversifying treatment actions for GHG emissions reductions. Learn more at cshub.mit.edu.
The 2026 TRB meeting will be held January 11 - 15.
For more information, contact Brian Killingsworth at bkillingsworth@nrmca.org.
National Ready Mixed Concrete Association