A concrete resolution

Waste fuel could help clean up cement production.

A team of Catalan engineers have pioneered the re-use of waste from cities in order to power a cement plant.
The team have – they claim – demonstrated that burning excess waste mud has both negated the need to dispose of it and provided a successful alternative fuel for the plant.

Speaking in the latest issue of the journal Environmental Science and Pollution Research, José Luis Domingo, lead author of the study and director of the Toxicology and Environmental Health Laboratory at the Rovira i Virgili University (URV) said: “As this mud is already waste, burning it does not enter into the atmospheric CO2 emissions assigned to each country under the Kyoto Protocol”.

Cement production is one of the most environmentally harming industries in terms of CO2 production, as well as for the production of other harmful waste products such as heavy metals.

This new approach, the engineers say, could save up to 20 per cent of fossil fuel energy used at the plant as well as having positive health implications for the population of the surrounding areas. The research indicates that the use of the alternative fuel could decrease the cancer rate by 4.56 per million.

The team plan to carry out further research at different cement plants.

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