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.

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.

Germany: Research by the FEhS Building Materials Institute has concluded that steel slags are environmentally safe to use as aggregates, even when impurities exceed limit values. The research concluded that slag samples with ‘excessive’ heavy metals content nonetheless released no contaminants when contained in finished concrete.

The institute called for an amendment to MVV technical building specifications to reflect real substance release rather than the amounts of substances contained.

The full report in German is available online here.