September 2025

India: Antony Waste Handling Cell Limited (AWHCL) has won a US$124m contract for construction and demolition waste management services in Mumbai. Press Trust of India News has reported that the contract covers nine municipal subdivisions of the city and will last until 2044. AWHCL said that the contract will enable it to develop the circularity of cement and concrete within the local economy. It expects to commission 600t/day-worth of waste processing capacity by March 2023. The waste management company expects a recovery rate of 25% recyclable materials.

AWHCL chairman and managing director Jose Jacob said "This sub-segment of solid waste management provides tremendous growth opportunities given the number of infrastructure development projects underway, and the government's push to accelerate the economic growth with infrastructure being one of the important growth pillars."

Bangladesh: The European Union (EU) and Spanish ambassadors and Swiss chargé d'affaires to Bangladesh have formally requested that Bangladeshi authorities lift all restrictions on LafargeHolcim Bangladesh's sale of crushed limestone in the country. The Financial Express newspaper has reported that Bangladeshi court previously ruled in favour of LafargeHolcim Bangladesh's right to sell its crushed limestone 'on the open market' on 5 January 2022. Limestone Importers and Suppliers Group had challenged the legal status of such sales, given that the raw limestone used in LafargeHolcim Bangladesh's produces its crushed limestone production is imported from India.

The Bangladesh government granted LafargeHolcim Bangladesh, a subsidiary of Switzerland-based Holcim, a temporary licence to resume its crushed limestone operations on 27 March 2022. This resulted in protests by local limestone producers.

Germany: Aumund Group has reported that its chair Franz-Walter Aumund died on 4 February 2023. He was 78 years old. He was the third generation of the Aumund family to run the company after his grandfather Heinrich Aumund founded Aumund Patente in 1922.

A farewell ceremony will be held at Aumund Group’s headquarters in Rheinberg, North Rhine-Westphalia, on 14 February 2023.

Philippines: Cemex Philippines has secured a contract with Manila Water Company for the supply of biosolids from sewage processing for use as alternative fuel (AF). Cemex Philippines has already taken receipt of 10t of biosolids at its Antipolo cement plant in Luzon's Calabarzon Region.

Cemex Philippines’ sustainability and public affairs director Christer Gaudiano said “As pioneers of the use of biosolids as AF in the country, we have just signed what will now create the series of significant steps towards making circular economy a reality."

Sustainability initiatives form one arm of Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the ASEAN Capital Markets Forum's Golden Arrow award for good management, which Cemex Philippines won for the second time on 9 February 2023.

India: Shree Cement recorded a 20% year-on-year rise in its consolidated sales to US$1.55bn in the first nine months of the 2023 financial year, from US$1.29bn in the first nine months of the 2022 financial year. The group's total expenditure rose by 36% to US$1.29bn from US$952m. Thus, Shree Cement recorded a 56% drop in net profit, to US$90.1m from US$203m.

Japan: Taiheiyo Cement recorded a net loss of US$135m during the first nine months of its 2023 financial year, compared to a net profit of US$226m during the first nine months of the 2022 financial year. Nikkei Financial News has reported that the group lowered its financial forecast for the full 2023 financial year accordingly. Taiheiyo Cement now expects to record a loss of US$199m, compared to a US$221m profit in the 2022 financial year. The producer previously revised its earnings and profit forecasts downward following its first-half 2023 financial year results on 10 November 2022.

During the first nine months of the 2023 financial year, Taiheiyo Cement recorded sales of US$4.58bn, up by 14% year-on-year. The producer said that new US acquisitions during the year so far helped it to increase its cement volumes in that market.

Japan: Sumitomo Osaka Cement recorded sales of US$1.15bn during the first nine months of the 2023 financial year. The figure corresponds to an increase of 9.9% year-on-year from nine-month 2022 financial year levels. The producer made a loss of US$13m, compared to profit of US$63.3m in the corresponding period of the 2022 financial year.

Pakistan: A court has ordered a report by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) into alleged breaches of emissions rules at Kohat Cement's Kohat Cement plant in Babri Banda, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The Dawn newspaper has reported that alleged dust and chemical emissions from the plant have contributed to a local rise in cases of cancer, asthma and lung diseases, according to complainants.

Residents have filed a petition for contempt proceedings against the EPA and Kohat Cement, as well as local and provincial government authorities. The court previously ordered the EPA to monitor Kohat Cement's emissions in 2018. At that time, it also instructed Kohat Cement to operate its electrostatic precipitators system at all times that cement is being produced. Local residents claim that the plant has continually failed to operate the system.

India: JK Cement has announced a planned investment of US$60.6m in construction of a new 2.5Mt/yr grinding plant at Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh. Asian News International has reported that the producer hopes to strengthen its presence in Eastern India. The project increases JK Cement's total investments in Uttar Pradesh to US$145m. It previously inaugurated its 2Mt/yr Hamirpur grinding plant in the state in October 2022. It also operates a 1.5Mt/yr grinding plant at Aligarh.

JK Cement's deputy managing director and CEO Madhavkrishna Singhania said "We are proud to be a part of this dynamic state that not only offers us a geographic advantage but also gives a plethora of opportunities for investment and expansion. With its favourable business environment, abundant resources, and highly skilled workforce, Uttar Pradesh is undoubtedly an ideal location for our expansion plans."

Cement 2 Zero (C2Z) has officially launched in the UK this week. The project is an industrial scale pilot of the Cambridge Electric Cement (CEC) process. The Materials Processing Institute will lead on this stage with two-year funding of around Euro7m provided by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). Partners include the University of Cambridge, Atkins, Balfour Beatty, Brewster Brothers, Celsa Group, Day Aggregates and Tarmac.

CEC’s method uses recycled concrete paste in place of lime-flux in steel recycling. Slag is formed as the steel melts and this is then used in place of clinker to make more cement. This way of making cement cuts out the decarbonisation of limestone step from conventional clinker production. If renewably-sourced electricity is used to power the heating and grinding parts of manufacture, then cement production in this way could potentially cut out most of its CO₂ emissions. The first phase of trial melts by C2Z will be conducted by the Materials Processing Institute using a 250kg induction furnace and this will be scaled up to 6t in an electric arc furnace (EAF). Later, industrial scale melts will be tested in Celsa Steel's EAF in Cardiff, Wales.

CEC is taking a similar approach to HeidelbergCement with its research into using recycled concrete paste. However, HeidelbergCement says it is using the paste to help capture CO₂ in an enforced carbonation step it is testing at cement plants. It too though wants to create a secondary cementitious material (SCM) afterwards. There are also links here to construction and demolition waste and electric cement kilns as covered by Global Cement Weekly previously. The latter is different with regards to what CEC is doing because it is recycling concrete waste to produce an SCM (slag) rather than using an electrically powered kiln to make clinker from limestone. Coolbrook, VTT and the like have had to build electric kilns effectively from scratch or adapt technology from elsewhere for their approaches whilst CEC appears to be about to use existing EAFs in its industrial scale pilot.

Figure 1: Projection of how the Cambridge Electric Cement production process could be used at scale in the UK. Source: UK FIRES. Click to view larger version.

CEC’s forecast of how its process could be used at scale in the UK can be seen above in Figure 1. If the majority of the country’s steel scrap was recycled in this fashion each year then 2.4Mt/yr of CEC cement could be produced. This would represent a quarter of the c10Mt of cement sales reported by the MPA in 2021. Assuming the EAFs were powered by renewables then this could reduce the cement sector’s CO₂ emissions significantly. Although it would still leave the industry looking for other decarbonisation routes for the other three-quarters of cement demand.

C2Z and CEC offer a novel spin on cement production by recycling concrete waste, using an electrical heating step and dodging the process emissions associated with normal ordinary Portland cement (OPC) clinker production. If it did progress to a commercial stage then it would see a continued relationship between steel and cement producers. Currently this is mainly centered around iron and steel slag usage as a SCM. One point of interest here would be how much higher levels of steel recycling and a process like CEC being used regularly would affect existing slag usage as an SCM. It doesn’t look like CEC could solve the cement sector’s CO₂ emission problem all on its own but it could certainly make a difference if it progressed to a commercial stage. As ever with cement sector decarbonisation there appear to be a range of options available to producers.