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HEIndividual fellowship2023–2025

Eco-Mortar 2.0 · Eco-friendly and high-performance thermal insulating fibre reinforced mortar to be applied on walls as a coating or panel

Horizon Europe — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Duration
2023-10-02 → 2025-10-01
EU contribution
€156,779
Participants
1
Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF

Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.

Results in brief

Eco-friendly and high-performance thermal insulating fibre reinforced mortar to be applied on walls as a coating or panel

The European construction industry faces a critical dual challenge: it is responsible for high energy consumption and generates massive amounts of waste. To meet the strategic goals of the EU Green Deal and the Circular Economy Action Plan, the sector urgently requires solutions that decouple growth from resource extraction. Eco-Mortar 2.0 addressed this need by developing a new generation of eco-friendly, high-performance rendering mortars, designed for wall exterior retrofitting (applied as coating or panel). The project’s innovation lies on the synergistic combination of waste from three industrial sectors—diabase sludge (stone industry), recycled cork (forestry industry), and waste fibres (textile industry)—together with aerogel granules from the nanotechnology sector. The overall objective was not only to create a technically valid material but also to demonstrate a pathway to impact in which industrial by-products replace non-renewable resources. By successfully controlling shrinkage cracking and enhancing thermal insulation, the project intended to provide a scalable solution to improve energy efficiency in the EU building stock while transforming a waste management burden into a valuable raw material.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union

Project objective

One of the priorities of the 2030 Agenda is to achieve a sustainable development path to balance environmental, social and economicneeds for present and future generations. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are the blueprint to achieve abetter and more sustainable future. The Green Deal is the roadmap towards the application of the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs in allEuropean policies. In this context, the European construction industry faces great challenges that need real solutions. On theenvironment side, it is clearly a sector with an unsustainable environmental profile that will need to overcome the traditional linearpath of production and consumption to adopt a Circular Economy model and Energy Efficient solutions. The number of studies onnew sustainable solutions to minimize the incorporation of processed raw materials or improve thermal insulation properties ofmortar have increased. Examples relate to the use of stone sludge waste from the cutting process as filler in rendering mortars orfibres from textile waste to reduce its cracking or to the increased insulation of rendering mortars through the incorporation of cork(recycled by-product of the cork industry) or silica-based aerogels (nano-structured material) as lightweight aggregates. However,studies focused on combination stone sludge waste, textile waste, recycled cork together with aerogel in mortars have not beenfound in the current literature.The main objective of the Eco-Mortar 2.0 project is to develop an eco-friendly and high-performance thermal insulating fibrereinforced rendering mortar for wall exterior retrofitting or wall panels coating of buildings by using diabase sludge from stonecutting as filler, recycled cork and aerogel granules as lightweight aggregates and textile waste as fibres. This mortar will decrease theuse of non-renewable natural resources, improve thermal insulation and allow shrinkage cracking control.

Original text from CORDIS.

Participants

  • INSTITUTO SUPERIOR TECNICO · LisboaCoordinatorPortugal

Links

Data: CORDIS, © European Union