Pakistan: Fauji Cement’s board of directors has approved the installation of battery energy storage systems (BESS) with a total capacity of 50MWh, alongside 10MW of solar power capacity, at its Nizampur and Jhang Bahtar plants. The company said that the project would be completed within 10 months from its start date.

World: Cambodia, Ethiopia, Ghana, Tanzania and Uganda have each signed up to the Intergovernmental Council for Buildings and Climate's initiative (ICBCI), a coalition of governments that support lower-carbon blended cement. This means that 12 governments, which also include Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Kenya, Luxembourg and New Zealand, now back the ICBCI. Participating countries must commit to prioritising blended cement in public procurement and updating national standards, as national governments are often the most significant users of cement and concrete, helping to drive decarbonisation across the whole sector.

UK: Hepworth Clay has achieved independent certification for its HepCem calcined clay, confirming conformity with BS 8615-1:2019 and A1:2026 for use as a pozzolanic material with Portland cement. The certification was awarded by Construction Products Certification (CPC) and applies to calcined clay manufactured at its Crow Edge manufacturing site in Sheffield. Hepworth said that HepCem gives cement and concrete producers a reliable, UK-manufactured alternative to clinker.

CEO Daniel Hannappel said "Achieving certification to BS 8615-1 is a significant milestone for HepCem and gives our customers independent assurance around both the product and the controls behind its manufacture. We have decades of experience working with clay materials and calcination, and HepCem allows us to apply that expertise to one of the most important challenges facing the construction industry: reducing the embodied carbon associated with cement and concrete.

The company said that it is now ready to work with cement and concrete producers that may be looking to evaluate calcined clay within lower-clinker cement formulations.

Australia: Cement Australia plans to upgrade and expand its Port Kembla Harbour operations to replace its Glebe Island facility, which is slated for closure by 2030, according to local press. In February 2026, the New South Wales (NSW) government announced that the Glebe Island facility would close by December 2030. The company has been operating a grinding mill at Port Kembla’s outer harbour since 2014. It currently produces 1.4Mt/yr of cement, slag and fly ash, on a 2.5 hectare site.

Cement Australia said in a scoping report tendered to the NSW Planning, Housing and Infrastructure Department that it intends to upgrade the existing Port Kembla terminal and build an import facility to enable it to despatch a further 1.4Mt/yr into the local market. It also plans to build an export facility to ship up to 0.6Mt/yr of cementitious materials to other Australian states. The project will increase the throughput and storage capacity of the Port Kembla facility to 3.4Mt/yr.

“With the announcement of closure of the Glebe Island facility, Cement Australia is proposing to replace its Glebe Island facility with a suitable facility at Port Kembla,” the report said. “The project is necessary to offset the impact of the closure of the Glebe Island facility in December 2030, to ensure no disruption to NSW’s cementitious products supply and to increase the use of supplementary cementitious materials.”

The report said that Cement Australia was strategically located in the heavy industrial heart of Port Kembla, which allowed heavy vehicle access to major arterial roads, access to shipping facilities at the adjacent No 6 jetty in the outer harbour and access to granulated blast furnace slag from the BlueScope Steelworks, as well as limestone and gypsum suppliers in the region.