Central Concrete would like to nominate the project team of Prologis, Whiting Turner, HSA Structural Engineers, and Bradley Concrete for a concrete innovation award for the Prologis Nexus project.

Prologis partnered with Central Concrete Supply, Whiting Turner, Bradley Concrete, and HSA Structural Engineers to create a state-of-the-art 260,000 sqft, 40ft clear height industrial building in San Leandro, CA. Prologis Nexus, is a very innovative and sustainable industrial building with embodied carbon emissions reduced by over 40% without relying on carbon credits.

This achievement is due to a unique concrete mix design, an innovative structural design, and notably, three core strategies:
1) Reuse: approximately 65% of existing concrete walls and foundations (1960s vintage) were reused. This concrete resilience added value to the whole building LCA.
2) Design optimization: slab on grade (SOG) design was optimized using a high-performance concrete mix with steel fibers type I Bekaert Dramix® 4D 80/60 BG, reducing slab thickness from 9 inches to 6 inches. The Prologis Nexus slab outperfomed the industry norm of 2,000 lbs pallets (typical measurement of industrial slab capcity is measured by weight of pallets in a fully racked building) with a slab capacity of 2,700 lbs pallets.
3) Low carbon mix design: meets high-performance needs while being 12% below the NRMCA 4,000 psi Pacific Southwest regional benchmark for global warming potential (GWP). The mix design contains 30% slag, Vulcan Material Company’s low-shrink, high durability Orca aggregates, and steel fibers type I, which enabled joint spacing of the slab to be extended from 15’ OC to 50’ OC. .

These initiatives yielded a remarkable 40% reduction in embodied carbon from a traditional Prologis warehouse baseline (see attached whole building LCA). Specifically, here is the breakdown when analyzed per concrete component:
• Slab (optimized design + low carbon mix): 54% reduction
• Exterior Walls (partial reuse + low carbon mix): 54% reduction
• Foundations (partial reuse + low carbo mix): 71% reduction


This noteworthy project, funded and developed by Prologis and executed by Whiting Turner and Bradley Concrete, benefits from Central's development of the low carbon mix and HSA's structural and new slab design. Central Concrete Supply, a subsidiary of Vulcan Materials Company, is a NRMCA producer member and provided the ready-mixed concrete and product specific EPDs.