Ireland: Researchers at the Technological University Dublin are leading a project to assess the potential to reduce the amount of cement used in concrete blends in Ireland. Led by Dr Niall Holmes, Discipline Lead (Structural Engineering), the Alternative Irish-based Materials Suitable as Cementitious Binders project is partnering with numerous industrial partners – including cement producers Breedon and Mannok. It will assess the potential to use fly ash, calcined clays, recycled glass powder and imported slags to partially substitute for cement in concrete products.

The project has received funding from Construct Innovate, part of Enterprise Ireland, which is the Irish government’s enterprise development agency. As well as assessing the quantities of available alternative raw materials, the project will also advocate for the adoption of performance-based standards at the national and EU levels so that alternative concrete blends can be brought to market rapidly and be exported from Ireland to elsewhere in the EU.

The project is running from January 2025 until December 2025. Any party wishing to contribute should contact the publisher in the first instance.

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: Ozinga has broken ground on a 1Mt/yr alternative cement grinding plant in East Chicago, Indiana. The plant is equipped with a Gebr. Pfeiffer MVR5300-C6 vertical roller mill. It will produce ASTM C989-compliant slag cement and other blended cements. When operational in 2026, it will be the largest of its kind in North America, and avoid 700,000t/yr of CO₂ emissions from conventional cement production. Its location offers strategic rail, road and shipping access to large markets in the US and Canada.

East Chicago Mayor Anthony Copeland welcomed an anticipated 150 new jobs resulting from construction and subsequent operations at the plant.

India: During the fourth quarter of the 2025 financial year (which ended on 31 March 2025), premium products constituted 16% of Shree Cement’s sales mix, up from 12% one year previously. During the period, the company further diversified its offering with the launch of two new premium cements, Bangur Marble Portland slag cement and Extra White Portland slag cement, in Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal. Both products are designed for maximum brightness and smoothness within their category of CEM-II Portland slag cements. The company says that its growing portfolio helped it to increase its full-year financial realisation per tonne by 5% year-on-year.

Business Today News has reported that managing director Neeraj Akhoury said "In the 2025 financial year, 74% of our cement output was blended, avoiding over 7.2Mt of CO₂ emissions."

Shree Cement crossed 60% consumption of energy from renewable sources in May 2025, Construction World News has reported. It has 582MW of installed renewable power capacity and is currently in the process of building a 1MW battery storage system at one of its cement plants in India.