VEEP

Cost-Effective Recycling of CDW in High Added Value Energy Efficient Prefabricated Concrete Components for Massive Retrofitting of our Built Environment

Growing interest in green buildings and circular economies is encouraging the consumption of high-grade secondary raw materials in the building sector. In particular there is clear consensus that compulsory material inventories of EoL buildings materials and subsequent selection of waste materials at source constitute key actions to guarantee high purity and quality C&DW recycled resources. In this context the main objective of VEEP is to develop and demonstrate a series of technological solutions for the massive retrofitting of our built environment, aiming at cost – effectively reducing building energy consumption. It leads to higher resource efficiency in 2 novel multilayer Precast Concrete Elements (PCEs) through the combination of concrete and superinsulation material manufactured by using, at least, 75% (by weight) of C&DW recycled materials, as raw materials. The 2 PCEs solutions will be conceived both for new building envelope and for building refurbishment. The ambition of the VEEP project relates to different aspects, both to the technological & new processes development and to new materials & products development as described in the following.

VEEP aims at developing the following advanced recycling technologies:

Advanced Drying Recovery (ADR) redesigned for modular construction and efficient onsite transportability and light weight (LW) concrete recycling;
Innovative mobile Heating-Air classification System (HAS) Pilot Plant (3ton/hour);
Combined ADR + HAS technology for simultaneous production of recycled concrete particles;
Ultra-fine wet grinding and health-safety refining technology.

Abstract

Around 461 million ton/year of C&DW are generated in EU28. Recent studies on the characterization of C&DW samples at European level revealed a predominant fraction of concrete (52% average). Over the last years, novel technology has been developed aiming to guarantee high quality recycled concrete aggregates for use in new concrete, thereby closing the concrete loop. The most advanced concrete recycling technologies currently produce coarse (>4mm) recycled concrete aggregates by removing cement paste from the surface of the aggregates. However, the fine (0-4 mm) fraction, ca. 40% of the concrete waste, still faces technical barriers to be incorporated into new concrete and consequently, is often down-cycled. At the other extreme, there are minor (e.g. glass) and emerging (e.g. mineral wool) C&DW materials, currently accounting for 0.7% of the total, but revealing growing rates as consequence of European regulations. Those emerging C&DW streams have not yet found technological and business solutions, being mostly landfilled. On the other hand, concrete is the most widely used material in building, with a growing trend towards prefabrication. The European precast concrete sector faces diverse needs for resource efficiency improvement (reduction in natural resource consumption and metabolization of waste materials, reduction in carbon footprint and embodied energy, design for reuse, increase in process efficiency and waste minimization, lighter solutions, enhanced thermal performance through novel cost-effective insulating materials). Aiming at facing these challenges, VEEP main objective is to eco-design, develop and demonstrate new cost-effective technological solutions that will lead to novel closed-loop circular approaches for C&DW recycling into novel multilayer precast concrete elements (for both new buildings and refurbishment) incorporating new concretes as well as superinsulation material produced by using at least 75% (by weight) of C&DW recycled materials.