Global Cement News

UK: The planning department of East Lothian Council in Scotland has granted planning permission to an upgrade of Tarmac’s Dunbar cement plant. The work will include building a new cement grinding mill, a new cement storage silo and a rail loading facility. The work will also include a shed, belt conveyors pneumatic pipelines and associated works.

In its supporting statement the company said that the new cement mill was necessary to produce new grades of cement required for modern construction and the cement market. The proposed mill will replace two existing mills on the site and is intended to be more energy efficient and quieter than the existing mills. It added that the plant would benefits from rail sidings on both the south and north side of the East Coast Mainline railway line. At present trains are fed only on the south side using adjacent silos where train capacity is already fully used. Additional products are exported by road.

Ukraine: Ukrcement, the Ukrainian cement association, has found in a study that over 80% of cement with the wrong labelling was counterfeit. The research was conducted on 50 cement bags for the consumer market, according to Interfax. 82% of cement proved to be counterfeit, over 50% of the samples were below the declared weight and 56% had weaker strength and did not comply with the В.2.7-46 -2010 national standard for minimum compressive strength.

The association said that the risks of using counterfeit cement vary from loss of time and revenue in smaller projects to a direct threat to human life in larger projects such as high-rise buildings. Local regulations require that cement bags include five items: the name of the producer, the conventional designation of cement, the designation of the normative document, the net weight and a conformity mark.

South Korea: Ssangyong Cement has launched what it says is the world’s largest waste heat recovery unit at its Donghae plant in Gangwon. The 43.5MWh unit had a budget of US$889m and was originally planned to 2016, according to the
Maeil Business Newspaper. 11 boilers plus turbines and cooling towers have been installed on six cement kilns at the site. The new system will also work in conjunction with an energy storage system (ESS) that was installed in April 2017.

Republic of Congo: Cement producers have expressed concerns about government plans to increase Value Added Tax (VAT) on cement to 18% from 5%. Cement prices are expected to rise as manufacturers pass the extra cost on to consumers, according to the Central African Information Agency. An industry source quoted by the agency said that local cement plants are doing badly due to a capacity utilisation rate of 10 – 20%. The country has five cement plants with a production capacity of 3.2Mt/yr but cement consumption was only 0.7Mt in 2017.

Kenya: The Mombasa county government has ordered the closure of a clinker storage plant run by Corrugated Sheets due to the accusation that is has emitted large amounts of dust. Stephen Wambua, the head of the National Environment Management Authority (Nema) in Mombasa said that operations at the Mikindani-based unit had been stopped and would not resume until it was in full compliance with environmental regulations, according to the Business Daily newspaper. The closure followed complaints by local residents.

Wambua said that imported clinker via the Port of Mombasa is stored in a number of premises locally. Dust is emitted during loading and offloading of consignments. Nema is also investigating claims that other companies are storing ‘toxic’ materials in the Jomvu area. In August 2018 the Kenya Star newspaper linked the Corrugated Sheets site to widespread respiratory illness in the local neighbourhood, including some suspected fatalities since clinker storage started in 2010.