Exhibitor Spotlight: ConSpare

Sutton-in-Ashfield based ConSpare is a family-run business supplying concrete batching plant equipment and spare parts. ConSpare has been the market-leading supplier to the industry for nearly 50 years and work with a large majority of the UK’s 2,000 concrete batching plants.

Priding themselves on knowing what the industry needs, ConSpare is led by CEO James Bullock who recently celebrated his 40th anniversary at the business.

In more recent years, the company has started to use its knowledge to help the industry to address key pain points in a more proactive way. And in doing so, help its customers find the bottlenecks in their processes, and foster that sense of process improvement at every step of the production process to maximise efficiency.

Sustainability is a key concern for the company and wants to help the industry achieve its sustainability goals, through reducing environmental impact and improving the working lives of site teams. By analysing its case studies from an environmental perspective, the company found that CO2 can be cut by improving the performance of concrete batch plants and employing smart maintenance solutions. It published these findings in a white paper on the topic that explores how reducing the use of raw materials, power and maintenance interventions can go a long way to progressing the industry’s collective journey to net zero.

“The environmental challenges are clearly huge; however, we’ve seen a recent shift towards the Social impact of the industry, or the ‘S’ of ESG, in our conversations with industry partners and stakeholders,” said James.  “I would say that this is one of the biggest challenges for the concrete industry, but I also believe this is an area where we can make a real difference.”

As a further commitment to sustainability, ConSpare also assessed its own operations and delivered a project to install a 100kW solar array on its building, to see firsthand how this has reduced its carbon footprint. Consequently, the company won the Solids Handling and Processing Association (SHAPA) sustainability award for the project and is working with other businesses and local supply chain to support them in implementing similar installations.