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Engineering
Last week’s breakfast meeting organized by the Minnesota Concrete Council featured NRMCA Vice President, Technical Services, Karthik Obla as the invited speaker. He spoke on Recycled Concrete Aggregates (RCA), covering code and standard requirements, performance of concrete containing RCA and measures that need to be adopted for effective use of RCA. He also discussed NRMCA research on RCA that was prepared from returned concrete at the concrete plant. The presentation was well received by an audience comprising of about 70 producers, contractors and architect/engineers. For more information, contact Karthik Obla at 1-888-846-7622 or by e-mail, kobla@nrmca.org. NRMCA in conjunction with the with the Georgia Ready Mixed Concrete Association and the Associated Builders and Contractors of Georgia, Inc. is presenting the one-day course, Improving Concrete Quality, intended for concrete producers, ingredient material suppliers, engineers, testing labs and contractors, on Thursday, March 15, in Atlanta.
Course instructors are Kevin MacDonald, Ph.D., FACI, Beton Consulting Engineers LLC, and Karthik Obla, Ph.D., P.E. at NRMCA. Producers will learn readily implementable steps to manage variability and attain a more consistent product; ingredient suppliers will learn how material variation affects concrete variation; engineers will learn the opportunity for improving quality through specifications and testing lab professionals will learn to measure and improve testing quality. Upon successful completion of the course, attendees will earn 8 professional development hours, a certificate of completion and credits toward NRMCA’s STEPS program. Click here for more information. SEO
Registration for NRMCA’s Spring 2018 Safety Course is now open; please note that this course is slated to sell out very soon. The course will take place April 10 - 12 in Orlando, FL. This 2.5-day course teaches participants about OSHA safety compliance. It begins with why safety is so important and details the reasons why an effective safety program actually saves money through loss prevention and control. Participants learn about electrical safety, machine guarding, fall protection, hazard communication, confined spaces, personal protective equipment, firefighting and evacuation, maintenance shop safety, chute handling, fleet safety, pre-trip inspection and more. Click here for location details, registration options and staff contacts. 
Buildings
The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) has adopted a resilience standard developed by the Minneapolis office of the Perkins + Will architecture firm. The RELi standard is a point-based system and includes many LEED-centric credits along with risk mitigation credits at the building and neighborhood scale. The intent is to provide greater adaptability and resilience to weather and natural disasters in the built environment as a compliment to the LEED green Building Rating System. The RELi Standard replaces the LEED Resilient Design pilot credits . The USGBC is currently refining RELi to integrate the LEED pilot credits with RELi’s credits. A new Resilience Steering Committee has been created to make improvements chaired by Doug Pierce, the principal investigator for the RELi 1.0 standard and Senior Associate at Perkins+Will. Alex Wilson will be vice chair. Like LEEDv4, the current standard has many credits that concrete contributes directly and indirectly: Safer Design for Extreme Weather, Wildfire + Seismic Events; Adaptive Design for Extreme Weather, Wildfire, Fire + Seismic Events; Passive Heating and Cooling; Use Regionally Sourced + Manufactured Materials and Products; Low-Emitting Materials; Acoustic Performance; Energy Optimization-Carbon Neutral, Net Zero; Heat-Island Reduction - Roof and Non-Roof. Build with Strength, a coalition led by NRMCA that promotes concrete building systems through communications, project promotion, education and advocacy, can help leverage sustainable standards such as RELi to help place more concrete. Click here for more information or contact Tien Peng at tpeng@nrmca.org or 206-913-8535.
Government Affairs
Media articles on Congress, transportation infrastructure, regulation, taxes and other subjects, each of which relate to the ready mixed concrete industry, are updated each week by NRMCA's Government Affairs staff. To access the most recent compilation of articles for January 15 - 19, 2018, please click here. If you would like to receive this weekly updated link in a separate e-mail, or if you have questions or comments about the roundup, contact NRMCA’s Andrew Tyrrell at atyrrell@nrmca.org. 
March 15, Atlanta March 27 – 29, Silver Spring, MD March 27 – 30, Louisville, KY April 10 – 12, Orlando, FL May 23, Bozeman, MT December 11 – 14, Austin, TX Learning & Development
NRMCA's brand new Workforce Development Committee will holds its first meeting at NRMCA’s Annual Convention on Saturday, March 3, from 2 -4 p.m. Please come to hear about its plans and anticipated direction while sharing your input. The committee’s goals are to address industry-wide recruitment and retention, and employment, labor, regulatory and legislative issues while continuing the work of the former Educational Activities Committee and OES-HR Task Group. It will also assume responsibility for NRMCA’s annual Compensation Survey. It is anticipated producers will participate by sending senior HR and training executives/directors/managers as standing committee members. For more information, contact Eileen Dickson at edickson@nrmca.org or 240-505-7116. Calendar
*Please note that e-mail and direct links to each event listed below can be accessed from NRMCA's Web site. February 5 – 9, Dallas Sold Out Tuesday, February 13, Webinar February 13, Nashville, TN Tuesday, February 20, Webinar February 20 – 22, Nashville, TN February 20 – 23, Albuquerque, NM March 3 - 5, Houston 
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