On the beach

French cement and concrete products company Lafarge has delivered 2000t of sand for the Paris-Plage project, set to run between July 21 and August 20, 2004, and which envisages the transformation of the Seine river embankments into a beach-like area.
The sand, comes from the Sandrancourt sand quarry, in Yvelines, near Paris and will be spread over three areas - the square in front of the city hall Hotel de Paris, the Chateaux de sable (Sand castles) area and the Seine embankments. For delivering the sand to the Paris city centre, Lafarge has chosen to use river transport as a more environmentally-friendly method of delivery.

Lafarge hopes that the initiative will also attract the attention of the public on the aggregates, whose annual production in France stands at 400Mt. According to Lafarge, between 100 and 300t of aggregates are necessary for the construction of a small building and 300,000t of aggregates went into the construction of the Paris stadium Stade de France.