page_title: Ketton Cement Works
section_title: Modern day
hierarchical_section_title: Ketton Cement Works / Modern day
caption_attribution_description: English: Ketton cement works Visible for miles around. But nevertheless, an important local industry recently celebrating 75 years production at this site.
context_page_description: Ketton Cement Works is a large cement plant and quarry based in the village of Ketton in the county of Rutland in the United Kingdom. Now owned by HeidelbergCement, the plant produces around one tenth of the UK's Portland Cement needs. Ketton works employs around 220 people and is at the forefront of sustainable cement production, namely through the increasing use of non-fossil fuels for the kilns.
context_section_description: As production increased, the transport of limestone and silica clay from the quarry to the plant needed to become more efficient. The standard gauge railway that had operated since the opening of the factory was replaced initially by dump-trucks, before being superseded by conveyor belts. New, larger crushers were installed in the quarry to reduce the size of the limestone before mixing with the clay. Kiln 7 was completed in 1975 at a cost of £10m. This kiln produced clinker by the dry process, as opposed to Kilns 1 – 6 which heated the crushed lime and clay as a slurry mixture. Dry process kilns were much more efficient as there was no water to evaporate first. Kiln 7 also featured a Preheater which heated the raw meal using the kiln exhaust gases to around 800 Degrees before entering the main Kiln. By the late 1970s, Ketton was producing around 700,000 tonnes of cement per annum from all seven kilns.
  In the early 1980s, Thos W Ward became part of worldwide group Rio Tinto Zinc, and Ketton Cement was rebranded as Castle Cement. With an increasing market share, Kiln 8 was designed and built in the mid 1980s. At a cost of £70m, the kiln is 68m long and the preheater tower is around 80m high. Two large stores with capacity of 43,000 and 10,000 tonnes each were constructed to enable storage of raw materials to feed the kilns. This enabled working hours in the quarry to be reduced to a five-day week, mostly to reduce disruption on the local community. Once Kiln 8 was operational and initial faults were rectified, Kilns 1 – 4 were closed in 1986, followed by Kilns 5 & 6 in 1987. These have now been demolished and the area where they stood now grassed over. The workforce at Ketton was reduced from around 520 to 310 mostly through compulsory redundancies. In 1989, Castle Cement passed into the ownership of Scancem, which was a cement and building materials manufacturer operating across Europe and Africa.
caption: Ketton cement works
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