- The project, which has received a grant from the Missions program of the Spanish Centre for the Development of Industrial Technology (CDTI), seeks to develop new solutions to tackle an existing challenge facing cities and industry: ensuring efficient systems for waste recycling and reuse.
Various ACCIONA business units are taking part in the European ATRIC 4.0 research programme, “Accelerating the transition towards sustainable, digital and circular Industry 4.0, with new processing technologies, AI and industrial symbiosis to maximise the recovery of combustion waste in the infrastructure sector and reduce CO2 emissions”.
The project, which will last just over three years, has a total budget of over €7.2 million.
This project, which has received a grant of more than €4.5 million from the Missions program of the Spanish Centre for the Development of Industrial Technology (CDTI), seeks to develop new solutions to tackle one of the key challenges facing cities and industry, namely the management of wastes and their recovery towards a carbon-free world. The project, which has a circular and digital focus, will tackle the dual problem of increasing volumes of waste and the decline in available resources to develop, maintain and improve infrastructures.
New solutions will therefore be developed that advance the transition of the waste processing industry through the use of industrial wastes and gas streams, to obtain high value-added products for the construction and industrial sectors.
These solutions will primarily be aimed at achieving a higher level of circularity (45%) for new high-value secondary raw materials contained in combustion waste; as well as new processes to obtain base cement materials with a lower carbon footprint. They will also seek to reduce CO2 emissions by 20%, capturing and recovering the carbon as a renewable energy vector and incorporating the use of renewable energy.
Under this project, over the next 37 months ACCIONA will work with a consortium of companies (TIRME, INCEINNMAT, SEMANTIC SYSTEMS, LENZ INSTRUMENTS, CEMENTOS LA CRUZ) and public research bodies (TECNALIA, Universitat Politècnica de València, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, IGME-CSIC e IETCC-CSIC, CEDER, Universidad de Oviedo and Fundación Universidad de Loyola). This will ensure the necessary capacity to generate scientific and technological knowledge, as well as creating future lines for sustainable industrial development in potential markets such as construction, engineering, energy and digital.
ACCIONA’s role
ACCIONA is coordinating this project through its construction business as well as participating through ACCIONA Energía. Through its construction division, the company will play an important role in generating knowledge about waste recovery and will develop new formulas for materials that can be applied in the infrastructure sector that will maximise the use of secondary raw materials. By validating this knowledge, the company will contribute to minimising the construction sector’s environmental footprint. Furthermore, the company’s Industrial Construction area will generate technology and knowledge about carbon capture and recovery as a renewable energy source.
Through ACCIONA Energía, the company will provide innovative, sustainable, long-lasting and economically-viable alternatives for using biomass waste in construction materials.