US: The Slag Cement Association (SCA) has presented its 2017 Project of the Year Awards at the American Concrete Institution (ACI) Convention in Salt Lake City in late March 2018. Each project was selected by the SCA’s Technical Marketing Committee because of its exemplary and innovative uses of slag cement in concrete mix design. Nine awards were presented in categories for architecture, durability, green design, performance, innovative application and sustainability. Member companies involved in the winning applications included Lehigh Hanson, LafargeHolcim, Votorantim St Marys Cement, Ash Grove Cement, Skyway Cement Company and Argos USA.

“The SCA’s awards program does a great job of showcasing how versatile slag cement can be, and how it can help create stronger, more durable and sustainable concrete structures,” said Ed Griffith, president of the SCA.

India: The Ministry of Steel has asked that the Ministry of Agriculture examine using slag from steel and iron production as a fertilizer. The government is particularly interested in using slag in areas with acidic soils, mostly in the eastern part of the country where productivity is lower, according to the Financial Express newspaper. 49M hectares of the country’s arable land has acidic soils from a total of 142M hectares total land that can be farmed.

Ireland: Eocem Ireland has introduced new corporate branding following growth in the Ecocem Group across Europe. The rebrand has been timed to tie in with group integration and new product launches. The ground granulated blast furnace slag (GGBS) producer has adopted a new logo with a company tagline – ‘Innovation Powering Sustainability’ – to accentuate the group’s innovation and environmental sustainability. Ecocem says that the rebrand of Ecocem Ireland, which is tied in with a rebrand across the group, is an indication of the revised focus of the group over the coming years.

“It is an exciting time for the Ecocem Group as there are many areas that we are working on with our innovation teams that will bring targeted solutions to customers across Ireland and the UK enabling them to benefit from using increased percentages of GGBS within their market offerings,” said Micheál McKittrick, the Managing Director for Ecocem Ireland.

Ecocem says it is Europe’s largest independent specialist producer of GGBS cement with a capacity of 2.4Mt/yr. Developments in the organisation have seen a growing interaction across its operating regions in Ireland, Holland, France, UK and Sweden, as well as the emergence of new products. Ecocem Ireland is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Ecocem Materials and it operates a slag grinding plant in Dublin Port.

India: The Rourkela Steel Plant has more than tripled the price it is receiving for blast furnace granulated slag since early 2017. Previously the steel plant was selling its slag to a local cement producer, according to the New Indian Express newspaper. However, since moving to using online auctions to sell the by-product the prices have risen. In early 2017 the Union Tribal Affairs Minister Jual Oram alleged that the price of slag was being fixed. However the steel plant countered that it lacked railway infrastructure.