ECOCycle® enables the world’s first fully recycled concrete building
6,000 tons of natural resources saved
First building with fully recycled concrete in the world
ECOCycle® technology inside
What is fully recycled concrete?
Drawing on its formulation expertise, Holcim’s Innovation Center developed the world’s first fully recycled concrete for this project: a concrete in which all components—cement, aggregates and water—are made of recycled materials.
This unique recycled concrete was produced using ECOCycle®, Holcim’s proprietary circular technology platform to recycle construction and demolition waste (CDW) into new building solutions. Amid rising population growth and urbanization, circular solutions are essential for keeping materials in use to stay within our planet's boundaries while we improve living standards for all.
Overall, the Recygénie concrete with ECOCycle saved more than 6,000 tons of natural resources.
Pushing the limits of circularity
The Recygénie project builds on another world first: a 100% recycled clinker produced by Holcim in June 2022. This clinker was used to produce a fully recycled cement for use in the custom concrete, saving approximately 3,000 tons of natural resources that would have been extracted from quarries.
The concrete was made exclusively with aggregates from recycled CDW, and with recycled wastewater and rainwater.
Scaling up circular solutions
The fully recycled concrete developed for the Recygénie project contains the highest level of recycled material in Holcim’s range of circular solutions with ECOCycle inside.
Because French building standards limited the use of recycled material in new construction, Holcim engaged in a special monitoring program of the French national organization for R&D in the construction industry (CSTB) in order to make Recygénie with this first-of-its-kind concrete possible.
As building standards evolve in Europe, Holcim is ready to deploy circular solutions at scale with ECOCycle.
“Delivering an innovation in sustainable building that has never before been achieved in partnership with Holcim is a major step for Seqens. It is the result of an unprecedented level of collaboration.”
Leading in circular construction
We recycle over 30 million tons of materials across our business every year, making us one of the world’s largest recyclers.
Construction and demolition waste (CDW) accounts for nearly 7 million tons of that, closing the loop in construction. We want to double down on this rate to reach at least 10 million tons of CDW by 2025 to build more new buildings from old ones.
We launched the world’s first cement with 20% CDW inside in Switzerland, and we are scaling up circular construction by deploying ECOCycle technology across our range of material solutions.
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