Asphalt has a haul radius. Hot mix has to reach the paver at temperature, which in practice means a plant serves maybe 30 or 40 miles of road, and that geography is why the Justice Department treats a single county as a market. In Shelby County, Tennessee, the department found that APAC-Tennessee buying Standard Construction Group would leave one company owning five of the seven TDOT-approved hot-mix facilities in the area.
What was filed, and when
DOJ’s Antitrust Division and Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti sued to block the deal and filed a proposed settlement at the same time, in United States and State of Tennessee v. CRH plc, et al., No. 2:26-cv-03012 in the Western District of Tennessee before Judge Thomas L. Parker. The complaint and proposed final judgment were filed August 7. The Federal Register notice published August 19 starts the Tunney Act’s 60-day public comment clock, which has to run before the court can enter final judgment.
APAC signed a letter of intent on October 7, 2024 to buy Standard for at least $133.9 million. Per the complaint, the transaction would have eliminated head-to-head competition between two of the three suppliers bidding TDOT-purchased work in the county.
The remedy names the plants
Consent decrees in materials cases usually turn on whether the divested assets can actually compete, and this one is specific. APAC has to sell its plant at 4765 Tuggle Road in Memphis and Standard’s plant at 7666 Raleigh Millington Road in Millington to Dunn Construction Company of Birmingham, Alabama. Naming the buyer up front, rather than leaving it to a later approval, is how the department avoids the outcome where a divested plant ends up with someone who can’t run it.
CRH plc, APAC’s Irish parent, operates around 1,200 U.S. locations across 44 states with 18,500 employees and $37.4 billion in 2025 global sales, roughly $10 billion of it in the U.S. Standard, based in Cordova, owns four hot-mix asphalt plants and six sand-and-gravel plants and did about $81 million in 2024 sales. All of those figures come from the complaint, which is an allegation rather than an adjudicated finding.
Why paving contractors should read this one
Aggregate and asphalt consolidation has run hard for a decade with very little antitrust friction, largely because the deals were geographically scattered. The theory here is narrow and replicable: count the certified plants a state DOT can actually buy from within a haul radius, and if a merger leaves one owner holding most of them, the remedy is divestiture with a named buyer.
Tennessee’s own public works pipeline gives that some weight. Federal work in the state, including the Chickamauga Lock replacement at Chattanooga, buys materials through the same regional plant network, and DOT and Corps schedules assume competitive bids on mix. That assumption is what the department just moved to protect.