1. The king of materials: Portland cement concrete

At around 1 m ³ per capita per year, concrete is the world's most widely used industrial material. Alongside oil for energy and silicon for information and communication technologies, concrete – for construction – is one of the three material pillars of today's society. Generally speaking, concrete is a composite material made up of aggregates and a glue, or binder, designed to ensure the cohesion of the aggregates (figure 1 ). Compacted raw earth can be considered a natural concrete, with the fine clay fraction acting as a binder for the coarser fractions of silt, sand and pebbles. But the best-known concrete is undoubtedly what we call "concrete", in which the glue is none other than Portland cement, the basis of which was developed over a century and a half ago by...