OtherHopefulCardiff6 Oct 20261 min read

Cardiff steelworks give old concrete a new life as cement

Old concrete from demolished buildings is finding a new use in Cardiff: helping make the cement for future construction.

Reclinker has completed industrial trials at 7 Steel UK’s plant and secured its first commercial sales, Nation.Cymru reports. A new £10 million investment will help it expand production.

The process recovers cement paste from demolition waste and feeds it into electric furnaces already used to recycle steel. It replaces material normally added to remove impurities, producing a substance that can be processed into new cement.

A loader moves crushed concrete beside a large pile at a recycling site — Illustrative archive image: crushed concrete at a US recycling site in 2005. ChicagoConcrete / Chicagoland Concrete, Inc.; edited by Junkyardsparkle, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Cambridge researchers demonstrated the approach in earlier furnace tests. Their work explains why sharing steelmaking equipment could avoid building separate cement kilns and reduce the need for newly quarried limestone.

The company expects an initial emissions reduction of 50%; that is a projection for its blended products, not an independently verified saving reported here. Its ambition to reach 120,000 tonnes annually is also still ahead.

The encouraging step is that the process has reached industrial trials and paying customers. Cardiff now has a practical way to give demolition waste another useful life.