Ozinga Opens Million-Ton Slag Cement Mill in East Chicago

Ozinga held a ribbon cutting October 13 for its new slag cement mill in East Chicago, Lake County, billed as the largest of its kind in North America at one million tons of annual capacity. The plant runs on granulated blast furnace slag processed at Ozinga's Burns Harbor operation inside the Cleveland-Cliffs steelworks, uses a Gebr. Pfeiffer vertical roller mill, and is projected to create about 50 permanent union steelworker jobs. Advocates including Governor Mike Braun and the company position the mill as a domestic alternative to the roughly 30 million tons of cement the U.S. imported last year and say it will offset more than 700,000 metric tons of CO2 annually. The opening came roughly six months behind Ozinga's original second-quarter 2026 target, worth asking about if you're negotiating a long-term offtake deal with a newly commissioned mill. The bigger question is feedstock: Cleveland-Cliffs lost $229 million in the first quarter of 2026 and has Burns Harbor's Blast Furnace C scheduled for relining in 2027, meaning Ozinga's entire million-ton run depends on slag from one aging, financially pressured steel mill next door. A new 50 percent tariff on Canadian cement, effective August 22, 2026, and rising Vietnamese import freight costs give Ozinga pricing room even as the broader U.S. cement market is forecast to shrink 2.5 percent in 2026.