US silicon and germanium producer Lattice Materials has broken ground on an 80,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Bozeman, Montana, backed by an $18.5 million US Department of War investment to expand domestic photonics-grade optical materials capacity. Scheduled to start construction in May 2026 and complete in 2027, the plant will more than double Lattice’s footprint and add large optical boule growth, expanded internal processing, and higher-precision machining and metrology. New recycling lines will convert scrap into seed crystals, cutting reliance on imported silicon and germanium feedstock.

Neo Performance Materials has produced its first separated terbium and dysprosium oxides from mixed rare earth carbonate at the newly commissioned solvent extraction line at its Silmet plant in Estonia, now running at nameplate capacity. The heavy rare earth output is designed to feed Neo’s sintered magnet plant in Narva, which opened in September as Europe’s first mass-production facility with an initial capacity of 2,000 tonnes per year. Neo is now concentrating on stabilising product purity before ramping to routine production, while maintaining full traceability across its European light and heavy rare earth value chain.

Approval of a 60 per cent Supplementary Cementitious Material (SCM) concrete mix by VicRoads for road and transport projects across Victoria marks a major shift in allowable low-carbon binders for state infrastructure. The mix, developed and trialled with Geoquest Australia, replaces the majority of Portland cement with SCMs such as fly ash and slag, cutting embodied carbon while maintaining performance to VicRoads specifications. Designers and contractors can now specify substantially higher SCM contents on VicRoads projects without seeking project-by-project exemptions.