ASCENT DESIGNING WITH PRECAST ® INSIGHT A STRUCTURAL AND ARCHITECTURAL SOLUTION Greetings from Indianapolis, Ind.! Home to the NCAA, Eli Lilly, and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, where every Memorial Day weekend you will find the greatest spec-tacle in racing, the Indianapolis 500. For Hoosiers, it is a rite of spring and the entire month of May is celebrated as we finally exit the doldrums of winter and head into the promise of summer. Springtime brings new beginnings, and 2024 is definitely a year of new beginnings for me. In Feb-ruary, I started my first term as chair of PCI’s Marketing Council. Then on May 1, I became the general manager of Coreslab Structures’ plant in Indianapolis, where I have been the sales manager for 18 years. I am also currently engaged to be married, and our nuptials are planned for this year. Precast concrete is in a season of new beginnings as well. Ultra-high-performance concrete contin-ues to develop as a viable solution for shallow-depth structural solutions in the transportation and commercial building markets. Joint American Concrete Institute–PCI Committee 319 is developing the first precast concrete building code in the United States. And PCI’s producer members collaborated this spring to update the environmental product declaration (EPD) for precast concrete by October so that it can replace the current 2019 edition, which expires on September 29, 2024. By completing this process through WAP Sustainability Consulting, each plant receives its own plant-specific EPD for architectural and structural precast concrete, and they will have the option to drill down further to create product-specific EPDs. COREY GREIKA VICE PRESIDENT/GENERAL MANAGER OF CORESLAB STRUCTURES (INDIANAPOLIS) INC. CHAIR OF THE PCI MARKETING COUNCIL A Market Share Tool Plant-specific EPDs are the most important tool to maintain precast concrete’s market share in the construction industry. The demand for sustainable building practices from designers and owners, both public and private, has become the norm across the country, including in my Midwest region. Plant-specific EPD requirements are increasingly appearing in structural and architectural precast specifications for new construction projects. Recently, an architect desired to use precast concrete on a new elementary school in Oklahoma but selected another material because they could not find three precast producers who would bid the project with plant-specific EPDs. This cannot happen. As we see in the Silver Ranch Elementary and Elk Ridge Elementary School projects featured in this issue (page 27), precast concrete is a wonderful struc-tural and architectural solution for schools. Designers should be able to get the material they want and not be derailed because we cannot tell them what the environmental impact of our product is. This is especially true when we have what we know to be the most resilient and durable building system available to the market, which is the essence of sustainability. Precast concrete bridges, build-ings, and façades consistently have lifespans longer than 40 years, and precast concrete is the product of choice for many hardened structures such as storm shelters, data centers, and state and federal government buildings designed according to Federal Emergency Management Agency requirements. If your plant has not completed their own EPD, please visit https://thetaepd.com/signup/pci to get signed up with WAP. The fee pales in comparison to losing a project to another material. I look forward to serving as the PCI Marketing Council Chair. Corey Greika is vice president/general manager of Coreslab Structures (Indianapolis) Inc. and chair of the PCI Market ing Council. Email cgreika@coreslab.com.
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