More than 60 technicians share experiences for the valorisation of industrial waste at the “Turning steel waste into value” workshop

Organised within the RESLAG EU project, the meeting has gathered international experts on industrial waste and thermal storage systems.

“Turning steel waste into value” workshop has been held on the 14th and 15th of November in Vitoria-Gasteiz with the aim of approaching current challenges and future directions for eco-innovation and circular economy in the field of steel slag.

The workshop has been also an opportunity to present some of the developments done in the RESLAG European project. Researcher Erika Garitaonandia, member of the Environment and Sustainability area of IK4-AZTERLAN, and Jeal-Luc Roth, from the company Optimum Cement, introduced the 3 transformation methodologies that have been studied to obtain 10-30 mm diameter steel-slag pebbles that include pouring and moulding of liquid slag, machining forming and sintering. The following characterization of the particles obtained demonstrated that sintered and mechanized pebbles are suitable to work as thermal storage material for both, thermo-solar systems and industrial heat recovery systems. As presented in the workshop “these slag pebbles are in a competitive position among the materials that are nowadays used or under study to storage heat in the compact-bed thermocline system” due to their high storage energy and their low transformation costs.

The program of this outstanding technical event also counted with the participation of organizations and companies like CEA (Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives), DLR (German Aerospace Center), ENEA (Agenzia Nazionale per le Nuove Tecnologie, l’Energia e lo Sviluppo Economico Sostenibile), VTT (Technical Research Centre of Finland), Renotech Oy, LCE ( Life Cycle Engineering), Fraunhofer IWKS, SPIRE, FEHS,  Tecnalia,  MAX AICHER, SINTEF and CIC EnergiGUNE.

About European RESLAG Project

RESLAG “Turning waste from steel industry into a valuable low-cost feedstock for energy” is a European project financed by the H2020- WASTE (2014). Its main target is to valorize and reuse the black slags of steelworks in 4 innovative applications:

1. Extraction and revalorization of high value non-ferrous metals.
2. Development of thermal energy storage materials for heat recovery applications in industrial sectors.
3. Development of thermal energy storage material for solar energy concentration plants.
4. Feedstock for the manufacture of refractory materials.

The demonstration of each one of the applications is being carried out through the design and construction of demonstrators at pilot level.

RESLAG project is formed by a consortium of 19 participants from seven different European countries as well as from Morocco.