Q&A: a smarter way to recycle fire bricks
Liesbeth Horckmans of Vito explains how a pilot sorting and recycling facility in Genk can have economic and environmental benefits
Lasers and spectrometers
Liesbeth Horckmans, project co-ordinator at Vito, talks about ReFraSort, the pilot refractory sorting and recycling facility that recently opened in Genk (pictured).
Why is recycling refractory bricks important?
Worldwide, about 40 million tons of refractory material are produced each year, leading to an estimated 28 million tons of refractory waste. Recycling expended refractory bricks can reduce waste as well as the need to import valuable raw materials, but recycling these bricks is no easy task.
An incoming load of spent bricks contains a range of brick types, and the current method is to manually sort them. Manual sorting is prone to error, and some chemical differences simply cannot be seen. Even a minor incorrect classification could be enough to ruin the quality of an entire lot.
How does ReFraSort solve these problems?
ReFraSort is an automated sorting system equipped with the machinery to handle large and heavy bricks. It uses a unique laser technique, laser induced breakdown spectroscopy, that allows bricks to be sorted according to their chemical composition. A laser vaporises a small section of a brick’s surface and a spectrometer then analyses the chemical composition. So ReFraSort is able to sort a mixture of refractory bricks into pure fractions that can be recycled to produce new refractory material.
Could ReFraSort be a boon for the economy?
The production of refractory materials in Europe is vital for the metals, cement, ceramics and many other industries. Raw materials account for about half the cost of making refractory bricks and have a big influence on the quality of the finished products.
Today, roughly 40-90% of the raw materials needed to produce refractory bricks must be imported, and prices for these raw materials have risen dramatically in recent years. With ReFraSort, we could save on primary raw materials and not only realise cost savings but also create a sustainable circular economy less dependent on imports.
Photo courtesy Vito
