On the road with the ZI

Dear readers,

Some of you will be travelling a lot in the coming weeks. The European association Tiles and Bricks Europe will be meeting in Budapest on 5-6 June and the Federal Association of the German Brick and Tile Industry in Leipzig on 2-3 July. In between, a symposium on the management of sediments from lakes and dams will be held in Freiberg on 26 June and the brick and tile museums will meet at the LWL-Museum Zeche Nachtigall near Witten on 29-30 June. This issue of Brick and Tile Industry International hopefully will help to shorten journey times.

We shed light on an unusual success story in an interview with Markus Selbach from ZMB Braun and Andreas Treut from Händle. The die specialist in Friedrichshafen has restructured itself in less than nine months and adapted to the market environment. You can read more about this on p. 29.

The first technical article (p. 6) deals with a successful pilot project to reduce GWP in brick firing using an alternative fuel gas: Green cracked gas, a mixture of hydrogen, nitrogen and a small proportion of ammonia. Project participant Christian Hermle from Ammonigy presents the project carried out at JuWö Poroton and the promising results.

The second technical article (p. 14) focuses on optimising material cycles in view of the increasing heterogeneity of mineral construction and demolition waste, which hinders high-quality recycling methods. Dr Elske Linß, Manik Mehta, Jurij Walz and Patrick Hunhold from MFPA Weimar and Sandra Petereit and Dr Rigo Giese from IZF report on the project for the optical sorting of brick and masonry rubble using machine learning methods.

The third article (p. 22) summarises a study on the observation horizon for building life cycle assessments by Juliane Nisse, Andreas Holm, Christoph Sprengard and Kerstin Lohr. Based on empirical evidence, the definition of 50 years in the context of sustainability certification and the subsidy policy calculation rules according to the Sustainable Building Quality Seal is criticised as being too short.

We also inform you about the British brick industry’s trials with hydrogen, news from Busch Vacuum Solutions, Rotho and the Stephan Schmidt Group.

Finally, in this issue you will find the first edition of EU News, with which we aim to keep you regularly informed about current and relevant procedures at EU level.

I wish you an entertaining and informative read.

Yours

Victor Kapr