Ste Genevieve County
The largest cement plant in North America is here
Genevieve plant at Bloomsdale is the largest cement-producing facility in North America, and it runs the largest single-kiln line in the Americas. Cement capacity is 4.50 million metric tonnes a year, clinker capacity 4.83, on one kiln, dry process with a preheater, in operation since 2009. It reports 256 employees, which makes it the biggest single site in this entire body of research.
It changed hands recently: Global Energy Monitor records the plant moving from Holcim to Amrize Cement in the 2025 spin-off, and the federal mine record carries the new operator.
A plant that size is a different kind of employer to sell a truck out of. It runs continuously, keeps a written specification and a maintenance department, and works to a replacement cycle — so its machines tend to leave with records attached, which is the opposite of the one- and two-person registrations that make up most of this data.
But that tonnage does not tell you how many trucks ran
Those 4.50 million tonnes work out at roughly 180,000 loads a year at 25 short tons, about 720 a working day — if every tonne moved by road. It almost certainly does not.
So treat 720 a day as a ceiling rather than a figure. The record carries no information about how the product leaves, and a plant of this scale in this county, on the Mississippi, has water and rail available to it. Calling that number an estimate would be the mistake; it is an upper bound and nothing more.
That gap matters more here than the size of the plant does. Employment does not predict output, output does not predict trucking, and what predicts trucking is which modes are available — which is exactly the field this data does not carry. If you ran one of these trucks you know what the real number was.
The same river logic runs through the whole corridor. Ste Genevieve and Cape Girardeau counties face the Mississippi across the Illinois line, and limestone has been quarried and shipped by water along it since the eighteenth century. Where the long hauls leave by barge, the truck fleet does short local delivery, and employment and tonnage stop predicting truck mileage altogether. No barge loading is claimed for any operation here.
And the second operation here
That smaller operation is a four-person limestone site, according to the Mine Safety and Health Administration.
The roads here are quiet by comparison with the rest of the state. Within ten miles there are 53 structures, three carrying a posting and two rated below legal loads, neither county-maintained, the nearest 5.56 miles out. Ste Genevieve County restricts 1 of 35 county-maintained structures — 2.9 per cent against a state county rate of 12.7.
- Bring them. A site that size runs a written specification and a replacement cycle, and a documented fleet machine is a very different proposition from a two-person registration. Both get bought; the records make it quicker.
Yards around the Amrize Cement end of the river, and across Ste Genevieve County, usually have one waiting.