Background

Research infrastructures (RI) are facilities that provide resources and services for research communities to conduct research and foster innovation. The Future Circilar Collider [LH1] will be a research infrastructure that is hosted by CERN, conceived and constructed by an international collaboration, providing open access to a worldwide community of scientists.

As part of the feasibility study for the Future Circular Collider (FCC) research infrastructure, it is anticipated that approximately 16 million tons of excavation materials would be generated. The creation of a credible plan for the potential utilization of these excavation materials goes along the identification of different reuse pathways to sort and pre-treat materials, including transforming sterile rock – a soft and heterogeneous sedimentary rock called molasse – into functional soil for urban greening, agriculture, forestry and renaturation applications, in line with the principles of a circular economy. The goal is to avoid classifying this heterogeneous sedimentary rock as waste and thus prevent its disposal in landfills, in line with the avoid-reduce-compensate (ARC) approach.

Project in a Nutshell

The OpenSkyLab project aims to demonstrate an innovative process for transforming molasse into functional soil, thereby creating a substrate with added value for the regional agroecosystems and economies. The experiments are carried out on a plot of about 10 000 m² located in Cessy, France. The primary objective is to test the feasibility of converting representative quantities of molasse from previous CERN projects into functional soil for various types of applications and to assess the yield potential of the constructed plant-soil system.  The trial will also identify the plants best suited to this type of constructed soil under the typical climatic conditions of the region.

Mining the Future

In 2021-2022, the FCC Innovation Study, a Horizon 2020 project co-funded by the European Union and led by CERN, carried out an international challenge-based competition called “Mining the Future” to invite scientists and companies worldwide to propose technically feasible approaches for the use of molasse that are demonstrated today at laboratory scale and which could be brought to product level maturity by 2030.

The result was the identification of an integrated approach that combines local and innovative schemes to be able to manage significant amounts of molasse materials in the FCC construction project.

For the installation of the so-called
“OpenSkyLab”, a plot of about 10.000 m²
located near LHC point 5 (CMS, Cessy, France).