ARTBA honour

The America Road & Transportation Builders Association (ARTBA) has honoured 681 Astec Industries founder Don Brock with a lifetime award as a leader in the transportation design and construction industry. As a result ARTBA’s annual innovation event and awards programme has been renamed the, “Dr J Don Brock TransOvation Workshop & Awards Programme.”

In 2011, the ARTBA-TDF created the TransOvation event to help foster innovative thinking within the transportation design and construction industry and publicly recognising its proven innovators. The event includes an annual two-and-a-half day workshop led by world-renowned innovators from both within and outside our industry and an annual awards programme. The awards honor innovative transportation infrastructure-related products, services, technologies and techniques introduced over the past five years that can be documented to provide a high return on investment. These can be through improving transportation safety, saving transportation users and taxpayer’s time and/or money or making transportation infrastructure more environmentally sustainable.

“The many pioneering products and technologies that Don Brock developed in his long career have touched virtually every phase of road building and related construction activity,” says ARTBA Foundation chairman Leo A Vecellio, Jr, the chairman and CEO of West Palm Beach-headquartered Vecellio Group. “He led the way, spurring industry-wide innovation to improve not only roads but road construction itself, making the process safer and the equipment more durable, efficient and environmentally friendly.”

Brock started Astec Industries in Chattanooga, TN in 1972 and became the holder of over 90 US and foreign patents on construction machinery and drying equipment.