Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics IBP

Inorganic raw materials and recycled materials

We convert inorganic raw materials and recycled materials into buildings materials

Every year, around 350 million tons of waste is generated in Germany. The construction industry is responsible for more than 50 percent of this amount. At the same time, people in Germany consume three times as many raw materials as can be obtained from natural deposits. It is therefore high time to plow valuable waste flows back into the production process. We develop sustainable recycling concepts for building rubble, slag from steel mills, as well as ash from waste incineration processes and other inorganic residues and, together with our customers, transform them into marketable products. Innovative processing methods enable us to generate building materials from slag, ceramics, landfill waste and mining residues.

Building rubble

The first thought that often comes to mind when the word rubble is mentioned is demolished buildings. For us, however, it is a versatile secondary raw material which we use to develop new, high-quality building materials for our customers.

Ash and slag

From yesterday's waste, we are developing today’s sustainable building materials for tomorrow's urban living spaces - such as paving stones for pedestrian zones. In the process, we always bear environmental and legal requirements in mind.

Technical ceramics

We breathe new life into refractory concretes and ceramic residues from industry and recycle them for use in demanding industrial applications.

Gypsum and clay

We make sure that the increasingly-scarce building material gypsum does not end up as landfill waste but is returned to the product cycle as a high-quality raw material. Besides gypsum, clay minerals are an important group of raw materials used in the construction industry. We utilize the chemical diversity of clays to develop and manufacture building materials with application-specific properties.

Bricks

People have been using bricks as a building material for 10,000 years, continuously developing them over the passage of time. The idea of recycling waste brick material after the “end of its life” has so far been almost completely ignored. We therefore use broken bricks to develop new, sustainable building materials, for example to specifically influence the hydrological balance of building materials.

Mining and landfills

Processing ore-bearing or waste rock to develop building materials is a challenge that we approach in a solution-oriented manner. With our know-how, to the benefit of society we can recover materials by “mining” landfills as well as safeguard existing landfills.