The HARITZA 2 project (Oak, Quercus robur in Latin, a symbol of strength and perseverance) researches the recovery of complex waste from the metallurgical sector, including solid, liquid and gaseous waste. It prioritises the streams that take up the most landfill space and those that are less inert. The project responds to a real need for the metallurgical industry to rethink waste treatment from both an environmental and economic point of view, especially in a region where foundry activity is a significant industrial driver.
Metal recycling in the European Union, and particularly in the Basque Country, helps reduce dependence on imported materials and secures supply for the manufacture and maintenance of essential infrastructure in sectors such as construction, communications and transport.
Scrap from end-of-life steel, iron, aluminium or copper components can be remelted to create new products through foundry processes. However, this industry still has a notable environmental impact: recycling metal generates waste and emissions that must be captured, recycled and recovered.
For example, some solid waste streams still go directly to landfill, including foundry sands, slag, shavings, scale and oils. HARITZA 2 addresses this challenge by using zero-carbon technologies to recover these complex materials economically and valorise them within metallurgical companies and other sectors, either for reuse in the plant itself or for inertisation and use in other industrial applications. One example is the inertisation of scale and slag so they can be used as raw materials for new refractory products in low-temperature furnaces.
The project's main objectives
Create a new hybrid technology to recover all waste generated by the metallurgical industry, prioritising waste streams that are currently likely to be sent to landfill.
Ensure that the by-products generated have the necessary quality to be reused.
Identify alternatives for each waste stream from every perspective of the circular economy.
Guarantee enough flexibility for the solutions to be implemented in different industrial processes and adapted to each type of industry.
Prioritise solutions by economic cost and implementation time, so they remain below the current cost of landfilling.
The consortium participating in this project is led by FUNSAN and also includes COMERCIAL DE LAMINACION (CDL), GUIVISA, ARCA, VIAL, SUMINISTRO Y CALIBRACION INDUSTRIAL, FUNDICIONES SEIAK, VOLBAS and Saitec Offshore Technologies.
Our role in the project is to contribute the experience and knowledge gained during the construction of DemoSATH and apply it to the eco-design assessment of the decarbonised concretes developed in the project, studying both circularity and the reduction of the carbon footprint of these new materials.
This project has received support from the budget of the Department of Industry, Energy Transition and Sustainability of the Basque Government and from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).
