Global Cement News

India: Udaipur Cement Works has commissioned a 1MWp floating solar unit at its Dabok mine in Rajasthan. The project was supplied by Oriana Power, according to the Press Trust of India. Udaipur Cement Works is a subsidiary of JK Lakshmi Cement.

Anirudh Saraswat, the co-founder and chief business officer of Oriana Power, said "The state has vast untapped potential in terms of intense solar radiation, one of the highest numbers of sunny days in a year and availability of vast barren and uncultivable, unutilised government and private land. This has the potential to make Rajasthan a highly preferred destination for solar energy at the global level."

Oriana Power is an India-based solar energy products provider that finances, constructs and operates solar projects for industrial and commercial customers.

Holcim launched its formal take on construction and demolition waste (CDW) this week with the unveiling of its ECOCycle technology platform at the BAU architecture fair in Munich. This amounts to managing the distribution, processing, grinding and recycling of CDW back into new building material products. It claims that its concrete, cement and aggregate products can contain 10 - 100% of CDW with no drop in performance.

It is hard to gauge whether this is marketing for existing operations or the start of something new. Yet, in its 2022 Sustainability Report, Holcim said that it recycled 6.8Mt of CDW back into building products and that it is on track to meet its target of 10Mt by 2025. This target was neatly put into words as wanting “to build more new buildings from old ones.” Ahead of the announcement of the launch of ECOCycle, it added that it was going to roll out its Susteno product around Europe. This product, made from 20% CDW, was originally released in Switzerland in the late 2010s. Notably, recent acquisitions by Holcim that connect to its growing focus on CDW include Poland-based Ol-Trans in July 2022, UK-based Wiltshire Heavy Building Materials in October 2022 and UK-based Sivyer Logistics in April 2023.

As covered by Global Cement Weekly in February 2023, Holcim is not the only heavy building materials company pivoting to CDW. The European Union (EU) set a 70% recovery target for it in 2020 and various cement company sustainability reports have described the region as being receptive to moves into this sector. Cemex set up a global waste management subsidiary called Regenera at the end of January 2023. This division covers both alternative fuels, CDW and industrial by-products, so it is more general than Holcim’s current effort, but it shows intent in the same direction. Cemex previously set a target of recycling 14Mt/yr CDW by 2030.

Heidelberg Materials has been working on developing recycled concrete paste and its ReConcrete-360° concrete recycling process. As of its last sustainability report, this process had been tested at the pilot scale and is now being developed and scaled for industrial application. In addition to acquiring UK-based Mick George Group in December 2022 Heidelberg Materials has also purchased Germany-based RWG Holding in January 2023 and Germany-based SER Group in February 2023. All three companies operate in the CDW sector.

The other notable contribution that Heidelberg Materials has been making is as a partner of the ‘Circular City - Building Material Registry for the City of Heidelberg’ project. When Heidelberg Materials announced its involvement in the initiative in mid-2022 it said it was the first city in Europe to apply the principles of urban mining. The goal of the project is to take an inventory of the city’s buildings and then compile it in a digital material registry. The basis for the registry is the Urban Mining Screener developed by EPEA (Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency). This programme can estimate the composition of buildings based on building data such as location, year of construction, building volume or building type. Circular economy supply chains can then act accordingly when a building is retrofitted, demolished or deconstructed. So, for example, at the start of the project it worked out that a former US Army housing estate conversion site was calculated to contain approximately 466,000t of material, with about half in the form of concrete, a fifth in the form of bricks and 5% as metal.

That last example compares to a European Commission estimate that, as a whole, Europe generates around 450 - 500Mt/yr of CDW. A third of this is concrete. As with alternative fuels and slag previously, this may be money going into the ground. Recycling building materials is not new but any significant increase in reusing CDW that can reduce the clinker factor of cement (and the cement factor of concrete) offers a potentially cheaper route to building materials decarbonisation than carbon capture and utilisation/storage at current costs. Hence the continued interest.

China: China Resources Cement (CRC) has appointed Jing Shiqin as its chief executive officer. He succeeds Ji Youhon, who will continue to work as the chair of the board, an executive director, the chair of the strategy and investment committee and the chair of the nomination committee.

Jing, aged 42 years, joined China Resources Group in July 2003 and worked as the Deputy General Manager of the Human Resources Department of China Resources Group from 2018 to March 2021, as well as a non-executive director of both the company and of China Resources Gas Group at around the same time. He joined CRC in mid-2021 and was its Vice President until April 2023. Other roles have included being responsible for the management of the Marketing Management Department, the Smart & Information Technology Department and the Technology and Innovation Department. Jing holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the Changsha University of Science and Technology and a master’s degree in business administration from the Nanjing University.

India: Adani Cement has appointed Praveen Garg appointed as its Chief Logistics Officer. He previously worked for Vicat for over a decade in a variety of logistics roles. Before this he worked for ACC in logistics and shipping positions. Garg is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Management in Calcutta and the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur.

Portugal: The first batch of clinker has been manufactured on the new upgraded production line at Secil’s Outão plant. Construction and start-up teams from ThyssenKrupp Polysius reached the milestone in mid-April 2023 after a heating period of 72 hours. Germany-based ThyssenKrupp Industrial Solutions was appointed by Secil to work on the Clean Cement Line project in 2020. It said it was going to modify the existing rotary kiln and preheater tower, install a new calciner and add a new grate cooler. Once finished it will produce Portland limestone cement (PLC). It is scheduled for commissioning in mid-2023.

Italy-based CTP Team was contracted in mid-2020 to supply and install a 29MW waste heat recovery (WHR) unit for the project. It planned to use an organic rankine cycle (ORC) unit using a 7.2MW turbine supplied by Turboden.

Italy-based Bedeschi also revealed in early April 2023 that it was in the cold commissioning phase for a new pipe conveyor at the plant to handle different kinds of alternative fuels. The conveyor has a diameter of 250mm and conveying length of 350m and will transport alternative fuels at a rate of 300m³/hr.