ATLANTA (Oct. 21, 2009) – The QUIKRETE® Companies was honored through the POPULAR MECHANICS 2009 Breakthrough Awards. POPULAR MECHANICS announced the winners of its fifth annual Breakthrough Awards at a ceremony on Thursday, Oct. 8 at the Hearst Tower in New York City. The Breakthrough Awards celebrate “innovations poised to change the world, and the passionate, smart creators behind them.”
The QUIKRETE Companies, the largest manufacturer of packaged concrete and cement mixes in the United States and Canada, and an innovative leader in the commercial building and home improvement industries, received a dual Breakthrough Product Award for its development of a general use concrete mix and a high-performance patching material composed in a large part of recycled materials. They were named to the magazine’s “10 Most Brilliant Products of 2009.”
“Every year in the U.S., old pavement generates as much as 45 million tons of pulverized asphalt, which goes mainly to landfills. Another 81 million tons of fly ash and slag are produced as coal is burned in power plants. The QUIKRETE Companies has started putting that waste to work in construction supplies. By using recycled roadway material in its Asphalt Cold Patch and coal-burning byproducts in Green Concrete Mix, the company increases efficiency while helping to clean up other people’s messes,” POPULAR MECHANICS noted.
“With the Green Concrete Mix and Asphalt Cold Patch, we’ve been able to engineer quality materials that live up to the standards required on the job,” said Jack Winchester, QUIKRETE chief operating officer. “We felt it was important, both socially and economically, to offer our customers these choices based on their needs and interests.”
“From flying cars to robots to wind turbines for homes, the innovations honored by the
2009 POPULAR MECHANICS Breakthrough Awards not only capture the imagination,
they hold the potential to improve and even save lives,” said James B. Meigs, editor-in-chief of POPULAR MECHANICS. “We are pleased to honor this year’s diverse list of visionaries and applaud their efforts to address such concerns as climate change, pollution, energy shortages and medical care in the developing world.”
Criteria and Evaluation
In selecting the candidates and winners of the 2009 Breakthrough Awards program, the editors of POPULAR MECHANICS canvassed a large range of experts and academics to come up with a list of worthy nominees. Members of POPULAR MECHANICS’s Board of Advisers reviewed the nominations to help the editors of POPULAR MECHANICS choose the winners.
