Cement and Cementitious Materials

Together with our affiliated brands, Lehigh Hanson is among the leading producers of cement in North America. With 19 cement plants and more than 70 distribution terminals strategically located across the United States and Canada, we manufacture and distribute a variety of cements. Lehigh products cover a range of ordinary portland cement for traditional uses as well as blended cement (slag, fly ash, limestone), masonry products,  custom-colored or specialty cement and supplemental cementitious materials (SCM) like slag and fly ash. Products may vary by location. All Lehigh Cement products are manufactured to comply with applicable CSA, ASTM, AASHTO or API Standards and are fully represented by industry Environmental Product Declarations. 

To get a perspective on how much cement society consumes in any given year, globally, roughly 4 billion tonnes of cement is manufactured annually; roughly 14 million tonnes comes from Canada and 100 Million tonnes from the United States.

Cement is manufactured through the process of grinding: blending and melting limestone, iron, silica, and shale to form a lava like substance called clinker. The clinker is then ground into the fine powder we call cement.

Cement is often confused with concrete. Sometimes you'll hear the term "cement sidewalk" or "cement slab" when the product being referred to as actually concrete, a composite material. Cement is just one ingredient in the mixture that creates concrete, but it is the most chemically active ingredient and crucial to the quality of the final product. Cement is a finely ground, usually grey colored mineral powder. When mixed with water, cement acts as a glue to bind together the sand, gravel and crushed stone to form concrete, one of the most durable and widely used construction materials in the world.