The cement industry is desperately looking for waste

If you want to burn cement, you need a lot of energy: The cement industry’s huge kilns have temperatures of over 2000 degrees Celsius. In the past, this was mostly done with fossil fuels, especially coal. This costs money and is nothing short of climate friendly.

Now the industry wants to get rid of its reputation of being a climate sinner. Swiss plants will be completely CO by 2050₂-Be neutral. An important step on this path: Industry needs to move away from coal and fire their furnaces differently. Currently, 70 percent of the fuel is already waste. And the industry wants more: “The cement industry wants to fire up their kilns only with waste,” said Stefan Vannoni, Director of “NZZ am Sonntag” Cemsuisse.

This means that the cement industry is desperately looking for more waste. Because despite all efforts to recycle waste and packaging instead of throwing it in the garbage bag, the mountains of waste in Switzerland have long stopped rising into the sky.

Now there’s a garbage fight

That’s why the industry complains about not getting enough waste in Switzerland: “We’ve been fighting for better access to waste fuels for years,” says Vannoni.

Public waste incinerators (KVAs) have a monopoly on municipal waste and are not willing to deliver the material. Therefore, the cement industry now has to import plastic waste on a large scale. “For us, this is also not an optimal solution from an ecological point of view,” emphasizes Vannoni.

To date, the industry has not found another way to handle the waste. Politics must now deal with it. There are proposals in parliament on how the amount of waste in Switzerland should be redistributed in the future – again in favor of the cement industry.