Projects

Waste management is one of the main challenges modern society must face due to its increasing generation and significant environmental, social, and economic impacts. Waste represents a substantial loss of resources, both material and energetic.

The ATRIC 4.0 project, ” Accelerating the transition towards sustainable, digital and circular Industry 4.0, with new processing technologies, AI and industrial symbiosis to maximise the recovery of combustion waste in the infrastructure sector and reduce CO2 emissions,” will provide solutions for the transition of the process industry. This will be achieved through the use of industrial waste and gaseous streams to obtain high-value products in construction and industry. From a circular and digital approach, it will address the dual problem of increased waste production and the depletion of resources available for the development, maintenance, and improvement of infrastructures. It will incentivize value chain stakeholders, enhancing data transparency and fidelity to achieve maximum resource efficiency.

The project will aim to achieve a higher level of circularity (45%) for new high-value secondary raw materials contained in combustion waste and new processes to obtain base cement materials with a lower carbon footprint. They will also seek to reduce CO2 emissions by 20%, capturing and recovering carbon as a renewable energy vector and incorporating the use of renewable energy. This is a step towards a greener, more sustainable future.

The consortium formed for developing the ATRIC 4.0 industrial research project is multidisciplinary, multisectoral, and interregional. It includes companies capable of developing the research lines proposed in this project, thereby increasing the value of current products and services. The consortium comprises eight companies (4 large enterprises, two medium-sized enterprises, and two tech SMEs) and nine top-tier research organizations that will support the companies.

The ECLIPSE project aims to explore innovative technological pathways that enhance the recycling and revalorization of complex polymeric waste. This initiative aims to significantly advance the current separation, recycling, purification, and chemical synthesis methods to produce new polymers fit for reuse.

In addition to researching three recycling technologies—thermal, biological, and chemical—the project will investigate complementary solutions to recycling processes. These solutions are designed to achieve circularity in the overall process, ensuring a significant waste reduction directed to landfills. The focus will be on stages such as identification and separation (achieving high purity in waste streams), purification and isolation of valuable chemical units, synthesis of speciality chemicals, and formulation.

Ultimately, the goal is to establish a sustainable, circular, comprehensive system for recycling and revalorizing complex plastic waste. This system should be versatile, tested in the automotive sector, and applicable to all strategic industrial sectors.

The ECLIPSE project will be carried out over 38 months by a consortium comprising eight companies and seven research entities, including the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV). The consortium’s strategy is rooted in a multidisciplinary and multisectoral approach, aiming to implement new circular economy models, promote recycling complex plastic waste, and reduce dependence on petroleum-derived materials.

The ECO2CAL Project aims the transformation of conventional carbonate calcination processes to improve their sustainability, energy efficiency and achieve zero CO2 emissions.

The result of the project will be the development of a microwave thermal decarbonation and chromophore reduction technology and CO2 capture and storage system to be applied to industrial waste and by-products.

The I+D+i project FUSER (INNCAD/2021/42), to be developed in the period 2021-2023, has a global budget of € 330.541,12€ co-financed by the Valencian Agency of Innovation(AVI) under the call Consolidation of the business valor chain in the modality of individual project.