Background

Research infrastructures (RI) are facilities that provide resources and services for research communities to conduct research and foster innovation. The Future Circular Collider would be a research infrastructure hosted by CERN, conceived and constructed by an international collaboration, and 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 is an initiative focused on transforming molasse-based excavation materials into functional, value-added plant-soil systems. The development of innovative processes takes place on a plot of about 10 000 m² located in Cessy, France, by using molasse from previous CERN projects alongside local raw materials and by-products. The goal is to promote the formation of soil structure to enhance the formation of functional soils suitable for urban, agricultural or ecological applications.  The OpenSkyLab platform will also identify the plants best suited to this type of constructed soil under the typical climatic conditions of the region and provide an estimate of their yield potential.

How the project started

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.