News

Making concrete more sustainable

  • Faculté des Sciences, des Technologies et de Médecine (FSTM)
    Université / Administration centrale et Rectorat
    28 juin 2021
  • Catégorie
    Recherche, Université
  • Thème
    Ingénierie

Engineers from the University of Luxembourg with European partners are working on innovative concrete precast products made of recycled aggregates and sands. On 25 June 2021, Minister for Energy and Spatial Planning Claude Turmes together with representatives from Interreg and Contern Lëtzebuerger Beton visited the Laboratory of Solid Structures on Belval campus.

Prof. Danièle Waldmann, Head of the Laboratory of Solid Structures at the University of Luxembourg, welcomed the participants and presented the two Interreg projects: SeRaMCo “Secondary Raw Materials for Concrete Precast Products” and CO2REDRES “Treatment of secondary raw materials for the reduction of CO2 emissions in the construction industry”. Then, participants had the opportunity to visit the laboratory and exchanged with doctoral students working on the projects.

SeRaMCO: making concrete circular

Initiated in 2017 for a 4-year period with a 7.28 million euros budget and involving 17 partners from 5 European countries, SeRaMCo aimed 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 project has generated a new computational methodology, a market study and several prototypes of an entirely innovative nature demonstrating the potential of concrete precast products from recycled aggregates.

CO2REDRESreducing CO2 emissions:

Gathering 18 partners from the Greater Region for the period 2020-2023 with a budget of 1.24 million euros, CO2REDRES aims to propose a novel and sustainable binder concept for concrete mixes based on the revalorization of industrial wastes and by-products originating from the Greater Region and their use as substitute materials to cement. The final outcome will be the mapping of the aforementioned materials in the region, the recommendation on the feasibility of their use as substitutes to cement, and the industrial scaling of possible material activation techniques studied during this project.