Everything remains different

This time around you’re holding in your hands a new issue which may well look both somehow different and yet still familiar. ZKG International has been the leading technical journal for the binder and construction industries for more than a hundred years, and nothing, believe us, is going to change on that score!

Thankfully, however, the world is shrinking, and we all now travel by plane just as routinely as our parents did by bus. Around the globe, English has become the language that links people and enables them to communicate with each other.

This is the underlying reason for our decision to publish each monthly issue in English only from now on, and to start 2014 with a few numbers of statements from the industry. The authors had complete freedom of choice of statement content, and the result is a wide range of interesting topics which we intend, of course, to share and discuss with you.

This topic diversity, we believe, will also help to guide you through the years in the accustomed manner. As always, we’ll start in the quarry, follow the process route, and will then devote our attentions, after a look at shipping, to the latest R&D results in the cement, lime and gypsum industry. These subjects, and also others, including analysis systems, project management, and some special focuses, such as alternative fuels and raw materials, dry-mix mortars and building chemistry, to name only a few, will also be examined in more detail during the coming years.

And, of course, the same applies this year, as ever: Your wishes and suggestions are always welcome, in order to remain different in the future, too!