Cost-Effective recycling of cdw in high added value energy efficient prefabricated concrete components for massive retrofitting of our built environment
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.