Producer
Lhoist Group
World's largest lime producer (family-owned); lime, dolomite and high-purity limestone for glass, steel and environmental uses.
3
Inputs supplied
3
Goods downstream
0
Facilities
0
Stories
What they make
3 inputs Lhoist Group supplies
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Goods downstream
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What else they do
Business segments
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Steel & Metallurgy
35%Environmental & Flue Gas Treatment
25%Glass & Glass Raw Materials
15%Food, Sugar & Agriculture
15%Paper, Chemical & Other Industrial
10%
Intelligence
What's known
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Did you know2024
Quicklime (CaO) is simultaneously the flux that creates steel AND the treatment chemical for the pollution generated by making steel. Steel plants consume quicklime in basic oxygen furnaces to form slag (which absorbs phosphorus, sulfur, and other impurities from the molten iron), while the same or nearby lime plants supply hydrated lime (Ca(OH)₂) to the flue gas desulfurization systems that scrub the SO₂ and particulate emissions from steel production. Lhoist Group, as the world's largest lime producer, sells lime to steel mills for steelmaking AND lime to the environmental control systems that reduce steelmaking emissions. The same product serves both the production of a polluting industry and the mitigation of its environmental impact. This dual role extends to coal power plants (lime in the flue gas desulfurization units that reduce SO₂ from burning coal), waste incineration (lime scrubs acid gases from burning waste), and cement plants (lime for their own emission control).
Lhoist Group ↗Origin2024
Lhoist Group was founded in 1889 by Charles-Albert Berghmans near Liège, Belgium — in the heart of Europe's industrial cradle, where limestone deposits interlace with coal seams and the steel industry created insatiable demand for flux. The company has remained in the Berghmans family for five generations, making Lhoist one of the rare cases of a truly global industrial commodity leader that is still privately controlled by a single founding family. The family has consistently reinvested capital in geographic expansion (US operations acquired in the 1980s-90s, Australian and Latin American expansion), technological development (lime kiln efficiency), and environmental product applications — growing from a regional Belgian lime company into the world's largest lime producer without a public listing or private equity ownership. Family control has allowed multi-decade investment horizons and resistance to short-term capital extraction that characterizes many commodity producers.
Lhoist Group ↗