On 28-29 November 2018, the University of Luxembourg hosted the mid-term conference of the Interreg North-West Europe project SeRaMCo “Secondary Raw Materials for Concrete Precast Products”. More than 80 participants from academia and industry attended this event on Belval campus.
Initiated in 2017 for a 3-year period with a 7.28 million euros budget and involving 17 partners from 5 European countries, SeRaMCo aims to replace primary raw materials with the high-quality materials recycled from construction and demolition waste (CDW). Although CDW represents the largest waste stream in the EU, accounting for 1/3 of the overall waste, only 4% of the recycled CDW are currently used. The mid-term conference was a great opportunity to show first results of the project and to exchange with invited expert speakers.
During his welcome speech, Prof. Jens Kreisel, Vice-Rector for Research at the University of Luxembourg, underlined the importance of materials research. Indeed, the European Union has identified “Advanced Materials” as one of the key enabling technologies and consequently as a priority for the industry policy. “With the ambition to recycle 100% of concrete, SeRaMCo represents a very strong challenge and will enable to prepare the future,” adds Prof. Kreisel.
Then, Prof. Danièle Waldmann, Head of the Solid Structures research group at the University of Luxembourg presented the context in which the project was launched. “As coordinator of the “Construction Materials” group of the University of the Greater Region (UniGR) since 2013, we discussed and worked on different topics but construction and demolition waste (CDW) was a recurrent theme among the partners. Thus, we decided to better analyse and improve sorting of CDW, to develop and test new concrete mixes and to place these new recycled products on the market: SeRaMCo was born!”
Nicole Skirde-Vural, INTERREG National Contact Point in Luxembourg, expressed her enthusiast and confidence about this promising project and encouraged the stakeholders to pursue their efforts in order to create, test and put on the market new recycled products.
As coordinator of the SeRaMCo project, Christian Glock, Professor at the University of Kaiserslautern, presented the first results. “Since its start in March 2017, the project has generated 17 deliverables (technical reports, publications, etc.), some best practises on material treatment, recycling methods and manufacturing, a new computational methodology, a market study and several prototypes of an entirely innovative nature.”
Over the two days of the conference, participants had the opportunity to exchange with different experts to tackle the different challenges arising from “circular concrete”. They also visited Belval campus to discover the various buildings and in particular the Hall des Essais with the Laboratory of Solid Structures.
More information: https://seramco.uni.lu