At Las Vegas convention, industry pros tout concrete in colorful, creative forms
Concrete, that bland and gray material poured to fill your driveway, can be used to create beautiful, colorful interior designs.
That’s what this year’s World of Concrete, or WOC, is hoping to chisel home to industry professionals.
World of Concrete, which kicked off its 43nd annual show Tuesday in Las Vegas at the Las Vegas Convention Center, has for the first time set up an outdoor section dedicated to live, ongoing demonstrations in a houselike setting to demonstrate creative uses of concrete.
Contractors will not just watch but also get their hands dirty learning to create polished or stained living room floors and fireplaces with wood and stone features alongside 63 decorative specialists from around the country, said Bent Mikkelsen, who helped organize the Decorative Concrete Live section of WOC and runs an industry magazine.
“Cement is like the pottery clay of the construction industry. It’s uses are limited only by the imagination,” Mikkelsen said. “It has the ability to mimic other building material finishes as well as have its own unique looks.”
Stained concrete floors, which can be found in strip malls and Starbucks, are popular because of their low maintenance and elegant look, said Mikkelsen, who expects 10,000 of the 60,000 WOC attendees to visit the outdoor decorative section.
About one-third of WOC is related in some form to decorative concrete, compared with almost nothing 20 years ago, said Chris Becker, product and technology innovator at Anchor Wall Systems Inc. Becker was giving classes at WOC on decorative concrete uses.
“There is a trend of people taking this utilitarian, commodity type of material and fashioning it into their home, using different colors and different textures to suit their environment,” Becker said, adding that concrete floors and countertops are gaining in popularity.
WOC started in 1975 in Houston as 77 companies presented their goods to 1,550 attendees. This year, roughly 1,500 companies, including big names like Caterpillar and Liebherr Group, will showcase their latest products and services, which range from eye-catching objects like cranes, cement trucks and drills to the less sexy, such as accounting software, GPS tracking and cloud services.
“This is a good show for us. We expect to generate a couple of hundred solid leads,” said Steve Antill, director of sales for Foundation Software, which focuses on the construction industry. Antill said his company is promoting new mobile suite enhancements such as field time cards and daily reports capabilities.
Over the course of the four-day event, WOC will host a range of 90-minute and three-hour continued education classes and workshops on topics such as field leadership, strategic thinking and safety.
WOC is underway amid good times for the U.S. cement industry. Domestic demand is expected to rise 3.1 percent in 2017 and 4 percent in 2018, according to forecasts by Ed Sullivan, chief economist at the Portland Cement Association.
Nevada demand will likely rise as the state’s population and economy grow, boosting demand for housing and construction materials. Nevada cement consumption is still about 50 percent below its 2006 peak of 2.7 million metric tons, according to Portland cement data.x
Contact Todd Prince at 702 383-0386 or tprince@reviewjournal.com. Follow @toddprincetv on Twitter.
