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12/2025
pour date
Southern Germany
Industrial floor slabPaebbl, Holcim, and GOLDBECK have delivered the first industrial floor slab in Germany to use carbon-storing ready-mix concrete at commercial scale.
Paebbl, Holcim, and GOLDBECK have delivered the first industrial floor slab in Germany to use carbon-storing ready-mix concrete at commercial scale.
Context
By bringing together a general contractor, a building materials and solutions provider, and a material innovator, the project combined three distinct capabilities across the value chain. Paebbl supplied the carbon-storing supplementary cementitious material (SCM), permanently locking 886 kg of CO₂ into the floor. Holcim's Offenburg plant produced the ready-mix concrete, integrating Paebbl Rebond as a partial cement replacement within a standard CEM II/B-M mix design, and GOLDBECK managed construction and placement on site.
The entire process, from initial concept to completed pour, took approximately six months. This demonstrates that carbon-storing materials can move through a standard industrial supply chain without requiring bespoke processes or equipment.
The challenge
New materials face a fundamental test in construction: they must perform identically to what they replace, under real job-site conditions, without disrupting established workflows. For an industrial floor slab, this means the fresh concrete must behave the same way during transport, placement, and finishing, and harden to the same strength within the same timeframe.
GOLDBECK's construction schedules are built around these parameters. Any deviation in workability, setting time, or finishing behaviour would delay the programme. The concrete needed to arrive at site ready to pour and perform exactly as a conventional mix would.
"At Holcim, we are committed to our industry-shaping decarbonisation roadmap that is advancing the future of sustainable construction. This collaboration with Paebbl and Goldbeck proves carbon-storing materials can be integrated seamlessly into our building solutions, without any compromise in the performance our customers demand."
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"As a general contractor, our priority is ensuring that new materials meet the performance, warranty, and scheduling requirements of our projects. The carbon-storing concrete performed exactly as needed: same workability, same strength class, same construction timeline. That is what gives us confidence to deploy this at a greater scale."
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Our approach
Paebbl Rebond was integrated at 15% cement replacement into Holcim's ready-mix production at the Offenburg batching plant. The mix was designed and validated in advance through laboratory testing, confirming that compressive strength, curing behaviour, and fresh concrete properties met project specifications.
On site the concrete was placed and finished using conventional methods. Fresh concrete properties, including workability, setting time, and surface finish, were equivalent to the reference mix, allowing GOLDBECK's team to work to their standard programme with no adjustments.
On top of the performance achieved, the result combines two distinct climate benefits. Embodied carbon was reduced 13% relative to the CEM II/B-M reference. Beyond that, 886 kg of CO₂ is permanently locked into the floor itself, in stable mineral form.
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