Circular construction in action at our flagship Swiss recycling center
As our cities grow and we build the equivalent of New York City every month, we need to make space for new buildings by demolishing the old ones. This generates billions of tons of construction demolition materials (CDM) each year, more of which needs to be recycled.
Recovering CDM to build new from old is essential to create a circular economy that preserves primary resources and accelerates the shift towards a net-zero built environment.
As part of Holcim’s net-zero journey, circularity is at the core of everything we do, and we aim to turn every metropolitan area where we operate into a recycling hub. In 2023, we recycled 8.4 million tons of CDM, and we're on track to recycle 10 million tons per annum.
To achieve this, Holcim is creating a network of CDM recycling centers across Europe. One of these sites, Recycling Center Ostschweiz (RCO) in Niederstetten, Switzerland - which we operate through a joint venture with Zürcher Kies und Transport AG - opened its doors in May 2021, and is making a significant contribution to sustainable, circular construction.
Inside the RCO
Modern and highly automated process
Upcycling of materials
Up to 200,000 tons processed per year
Upcycling over 200,000 tons a year
RCO processes unpolluted mineral excavation and demolition materials using a dry mechanical process, but since 2022 the site has gone further.
Using a new wet mechanical process, we can recycle additional materials that would otherwise be sent to landfill, such as mixed and concrete rubble, track ballast and excavated materials – both contaminated and contaminated.
The fully automated process involves two innovative twin-shaft crushers, material washing, removal of foreign matter, classification, sand processing and material storage in a silo. Rainwater is treated in a circuit and fed in as washing water, with the resulting fine materials de-watered in a filter press.
Currently, RCO can recycle around 200,000 tons of material every year to produce high-quality, sustainable building materials – gravel or mixed granules for use in everything from certified concrete or certified aggregates.
That’s enough to build over 500 single-family houses entirely from recycled material, and the aggregates can even be used to produce concrete at Holcim’s nearby plant in Niederstetten, which is only 200m away from RCO.
Scaling with circular construction with ECOCycle®
Using our proprietary ECOCycle® technology we can build cities from cities, upcycling up to 100% of CDM into new solutions thanks to Holcim’s proprietary advanced processing technology so resources get reused and nothing is lost. This reduces waste sent to landfill and our dependence on primary materials.
With ECOCycle®, we are able to efficiently distribute, process, grind and recycle construction demolition materials into new building solutions with no performance compromises. By 2030, we will have over 150 ECOCycle® platforms in operation in Europe alone.
Contributing to SWITZERLAND'S
circularity efforts
According to Switzerland’s Waste Ordinance, mineral construction waste should be sorted and recycled as far as possible into secondary raw materials, and RCO is making a significant contribution to sustainability and circularity efforts in its region.
In 2020 the canton of St.Gallen, where RCO is based, committed to recycling mineral construction waste and using it as construction material in order to achieve the sustainable closure of material cycles. By recycling a wide range of polluted and unpolluted material, RCO helps the canton save landfill space and natural gravel resources.
The Niederstetten site is also home to RCO’s new company building constructed entirely from recycled building materials. In addition to office space, this serves as a showroom to show customers and the public all of the advantages of sustainable and circular building materials.
Our highly digital, state-of-the-art facility is designed to take in a greater variety of waste material than most other processing centers and close the material loop by almost 100%.
In Switzerland, we are rolling out circular construction at our cement plants and continuing to grow in this space through M&A, with four European acquisitions in 2024 to date, one of which, Cand-Landi, is in Switzerland.
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