Displaying items by tag: Slag

Japan: Cement producers used 21.9Mt of post-consumer materials and by-products in the 2024 financial year, down by 3% year-on-year, marking the third consecutive annual decline, according to the Japan Cement Association.

Coal ash and blast furnace slag, which together make up over 50% of the total, both declined, although post-consumer plastics increased for a fourth consecutive year.

Cement production, including clinker for export, also fell by 3% to 45.7Mt. The amount of byproducts used per tonne of cement dropped from 480kg in 2023 to 478kg, but remained above 400kg for the 21st year in a row.

Titan Group announced this week that it will build a processing and beneficiating unit for fly ash at Warrington in the UK. The move marks both a trend in fly ash projects in the UK recently and Titan’s own focus in the country.

Titan has struck a deal to use ponded fly ash at the former Fiddler’s Ferry power station in the North-West of England. It aims to process 300,000t/yr of wet fly ash from 2027 onwards with the option to double this capacity if desired. The processed fly ash will meet the BS EN 450 standard for subsequent use in cement or concrete. Crucially, Titan intends to use the technology of its subsidiary, ST Equipment & Technology (STET). This company has a proprietary dry electrostatic process that it uses for fly ash beneficiation. Titan acquired STET in 2002. It says its process is being used at 12 power stations in the US, Canada, the UK, Poland, and South Korea. The project at Fiddler’s Ferry will be the 20th fly ash project developed with STET technology.

Titan has not commented on the specifics of its arrangement with site-owner PEEL Group other than to describe it as a ‘long-term agreement.’ It currently operates a terminal in Hull, on the other side of the country, 160km from Warrington. As for Fiddler’s Ferry, the coal-fired power plant closed in 2020. Prior to this though RockTron Group built a 800,000t/yr unit at Fiddler’s Ferry to process both ‘fresh’ and stockpiled fly ash in the late 2000s. Unfortunately the company entered administration in 2013. Later, Power Minerals was reportedly selling fly ash from the plant at the time that its closure was announced in 2019. A report commissioned by consultants Arcadis for the local council reported that ash including pulverised fuel ash (PFA) was present in the lagoons at the site.

Other companies have also been looking at the fly ash market in the UK. Invicta, a joint venture between Türkiye-based Medcem and Brett Group opened a terminal at Sheerness in Kent in 2024 to import PFA and cement. In April 2025 a ship unloader supplied by Van Aalst was delivered to the port. Then in May 2025 it was announced that Mecem is planning to build a terminal in Liverpool to import cement and supplementary cementitious materials (SCM), such as fly ash and granulated blast furnace slag. The terminal will have a combined storage capacity of 45,000t in four silos in its initial phase and is scheduled for completion in mid-2026. Meanwhile, the Drax power station said in March 2025 that it had signed a 20-year joint venture agreement with Power Minerals to process legacy PFA. A unit at the now biomass power plant in Yorkshire is scheduled to start by the end of 2026 with an initial production capacity of 400,000t/yr.

The background to this interest in fly ash in the UK appears to be a local cement sector struggling with high energy costs and low capacity-utilisation rates. Reports in local media in late June 2025 cited preliminary estimates that cement output may have reached an ‘all-time low’ in 2024. High electricity prices were blamed for the situation by the Mineral Products Association (MPA) and it warned of mounting imports from the EU and North Africa. All of this was timed to coincide with a release of a new Industrial Strategy by the UK government. For more on the UK cement sector in general see Global Cement Weekly in May 2025 and Edwin Trout’s feature in the June 2025 issue of Global Cement Magazine.

Readers will be aware of the growing attractiveness of SCMs for cement and concrete production for both cutting costs and meeting sustainability goals. A report by McKinsey on SCMs for the cement sector in late 2024 forecast that SCMs and fillers in Europe could represent an emerging value pool that could reach €8 – 10bn in 2035 as the price of cement steadily rises. The SCMs being used are likely to change as sources of industrial SCMs such as slag and ash dwindle and others such as clays, pozzolans or limestone become more available. The UK may have closed its last coal-powered power plant in 2024 but ash from ponds can still be reclaimed or ash can be imported if the economics makes sense. Recent investments by Titan, Medcem and Power Minerals suggest that the price is indeed right. The interest of two major cement exporting companies amongst the three names above also indicates changing market dynamics. Expect more of these kinds of deals and investments in the UK, Europe and elsewhere in coming years.

Sweden: Cemvision has developed a patent-pending beneficiation process to upcycle electric arc furnace (EAF) and basic oxygen furnace (BOF) slags into high-performance supplementary cementitious material (SCM), while recovering valuable metals.

Third-party testing found the material performs as well as or better than ground granulated blast-furnace slag (GGBS). Cemvision recovers 99% of the iron oxide content from EAF slag for reuse in steelmaking, as well as other metals like chromium.

The output will support Cemvision’s Re-Ment Massive and Rapid products as clinker-replacing SCMs. The process was piloted with metallurgical research institute Swerim.

Cemvision CEO Oscar Hållén said “This is a game-changer not only for the cement industry but for steel producers as well. Our process enables high-performing cement products from materials that would otherwise be treated as waste. With this innovation, we're proving that decarbonisation and circularity can go hand in hand, and at scale.”

US: Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed an AI tool to compare studies of alternative raw materials for cement production. A collaborative team from the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub and MIT’s recycling research programme, Olivetti Group, published its findings in the Nature journal. The team mined 5.7m academic publications to identify 14,434 alternative raw materials. These belonged to 19 ‘types,’ including bottom ashes, fly ashes, calcined clays and slags, as well as less homogenous types such as biomass ashes, glasses and mine tailings. The study more than doubles the number of fly ashes and slags recorded on a database of this kind. The tool then provides a unified assessment of cementitious reactivity and pozzolanicity, also accounting for variables in particle size and amorphous content.

Türkiye: Oyak Cement will convert Mill 3 at its Darıca integrated cement plant to a slag grinding unit, according to local press reports.

The company has submitted the project to the government and the environmental impact assessment process has reportedly begun. The US$252,000 investment will add 14 jobs. The modified facility will grind 1200t/day (360,000t/yr) of slag, along with 18,000t of limestone in its other mills.

UAE: Emsteel has signed a strategic partnership with Finnish company Magsort to produce decarbonised cement using steel slag. The agreement follows an industrial-scale pilot at its Al Ain plant that used 10,000t of steel slag to produce low-carbon cement. To meet growing local demand, Emsteel will build an integrated line at the Al Ain facility to process steel residue from its Abu Dhabi steel plant.

US: Eco Material Technologies has announced the opening of the Blissville Rail Terminal in Queens, New York. The new terminal will enable Eco Material to distribute approximately 50,000t/yr of fly ash from its national network to support local infrastructure projects in the New York metro area. The terminal will utilise rail transportation to deliver fly ash and cementitious materials, which the company says can replace up to 25% of carbon-intensive Portland cement in standard concrete mixes, with Eco Material's technologies reportedly allowing for up to 100% replacement in select applications.

"The opening of the Blissville Terminal is a major step in our efforts to expand access to low-carbon cement alternatives in all major metro areas, " said Grant Quasha, CEO of Eco Material Technologies. "By strengthening our presence in New York, we can better serve future infrastructure projects with innovative materials that reduce reliance on traditional Portland cement and imported steel slag.”

Ireland: Ecocem has secured €4m in research funding as part of the European Innovation Council’s Pathfinder Challenges 2024 in order to optimise electric arc furnace (EAF) slag for low-carbon cement production. The four-year programme is funded by Horizon Europe and will explore ways to enhance EAF slag reactivity and its suitability as a supplementary cementitious material without compromising cement durability. The project was submitted to the Pathfinder Challenge 2 call: “Towards Cement and Concrete as a Carbon Sink.”

Corporate development executive director Eoin Condren said “For many years, we have been pioneering the use of a range of slags and cementitious materials to create scalable and durable low-carbon cement. Thanks to this grant, we will continue our groundbreaking work as the steel industry transitions to new manufacturing processes, delivering a viable solution for a new generation of waste from steel.”

Australia: Boral will receive US$15.4m in government funding for a kiln feed optimisation project at its Berrima Cement Works, with CO₂ emissions expected to reduce by up to 100,000t/yr, based on predicted production rates. The Powering the Regions grant will support the producer’s installation of a new specialised grinding circuit and supporting infrastructure, which will raise the use of alternative raw materials in kiln feed to 23% from 9%, lowering the amount of limestone used.

Boral will use steel manufacturing by-products and industrial waste, including granulated blast furnace slag, steel slag, cement fibre board, fly ash and recycled fine concrete aggregates. The project will be operational in 2028.

The head of innovation and sustainability at Boral, Ali Nezhad, said “In terms of the resulting emissions intensity of the manufactured clinker, the project will result in up to 11% reduction in clinker emission intensity, 9% attributable to a reduction in calcination emissions and 2% attributable to thermal efficiency gains.”

Türkiye: Cement producer Karcimsa Cement said that it will invest US$30m in a 1Mt/yr clinker and granulated slag grinding facility in Kayseri.

The plant will produce ‘green’ cement with low carbon emissions, according to chair of Karcimsa, Soner Ozbey.

Back in March 2024, Türkiye imposed restrictions on cement to expand the use of low-carbon cement in public procurement contracts from 2025.

"The clinker/cement ratio in the cement to be used in public investments will be a maximum of 0.80 as of 2025 and this ratio will decrease to 0.75 by 2030," Karcimsa said.

The company will reportedly procure slag from Kardemir to be used in production.

Karcimsa is a joint venture between Turkish steel firm Kardemir and concrete producer Beycim Beton Sanayi.