ETH Zurich Foundation, Oxara

Oxara

Gnanli Landrou

Cement-free technology to transform excavation materials into sustainable concrete

The construction industry is facing major challenges including scarcity of resources especially sand, CO2 emission due to large production of cement. Finally there is an increasing demand for affordable housing worldwide. Meanwhile, billions of tons of excavation materials are landfill per year. This waste material is currently un-used and occupy large volume of space.

Oxara’s solution consists of using the landfill waste (excavation materials) that is locally available to produce a poured earth concrete. Because we would like the process to be simple and competitive to concrete, we developed a cement-free concrete technology that allows us to cast the excavation materials in fresh state using concrete infrastructure and accelerate the hardening over time in order to remove the formwork after 24 hours.

Now Oxara poured earth concrete has all the advantages of concrete but it is 2.5 times cheaper and 20 times more ecofriendly. And when industrialized, it constitutes a sustainable solution for the affordable housings problem and will contribute to the reduction of global CO2 emissions, construction waste and sand consumption.

More on Oxara on their website and in the ETH news.