The Badger Slag Grinding Cement Plant in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is on the western shore of Lake Michigan. Carferry Drive puts the plant directly on the water, at the intersection of Great Lakes shipping and land-based distribution by truck and rail. Material arrives by barge and moves out to our customers across Wisconsin and Illinois. It is a lean, well-positioned operation: specialized in what it does, integrated into a system larger than itself, and dependable in the way that quietly efficient things tend to be.
The Badger plant joined the St Marys Cement network in 2003, deepening the company’s presence in Wisconsin and northern Illinois, two markets already served by terminals in Green Bay, Milwaukee, and Waukegan, Illinois.
The plant operates as a slag grinding facility, one of two in the network alongside Detroit. Together they can process up to 350,000 metric tonnes of slag annually. Slag cement is a high-performance supplementary cementitious material produced from a byproduct of iron production. Used in place of a portion of ordinary Portland cement, it produces denser, more durable concrete with a lower carbon footprint.
In 2023, St Marys Cement received national recognition from the Slag Cement Association for sustainable concrete applications in Wisconsin: projects at 333 North Water in Milwaukee and Excellerate Manufacturing in Appleton. These were technical performance assessments of completed structures. The work holds up because the product does.
The Bowmanville plant publishes its environmental reports, annual compliance reports, assessments, and related documents here for the community to access. Transparency is not a policy at St Marys Cement. It is a practice, and this is part of how that practice works.
For a plant with more than a century of production behind it, these documents represent something specific: proof that the quality this operation has always claimed is now independently measured and publicly available.
Milwaukee is a working city, and the Badger plant has earned its place in it. The team here takes that seriously, investing in the community around the plant with the same consistency they bring to production.
The Badger team focuses on the next generation: supporting youth programs, education initiatives, and local spaces including playgrounds that serve the neighbourhoods closest to the plant. These are the kind of everyday-use, sustained contributions that actually shape a community over time, which is precisely what the Sustainable Legacy principle asks of every operation in the network.
Working to reduce the carbon intensity of cement production is one of the most significant challenges facing the industry, and we are not waiting for the industry to solve it.
The Bowmanville plant is part of St Marys Cement’s active initiatives toward lower carbon production. A share of the traditional fossil fuels used in the kiln process, coal and petroleum coke, is being replaced with energy recovered from non-recyclable industrial byproducts through regulated co-processing. These materials, which would otherwise go to landfills, are processed under strict environmental controls and converted into a fuel source that can reduce both greenhouse gas emissions and waste.
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