Il Sole 24 Ore, 13/09/2024
Italcer has inaugurated a 100% electric kiln, powered almost entirely by clean sources, that guarantees ceramics with technical and aesthetic standards similar to traditional gas kilns but with zero CO2 emissions. This is the kiln that the Italcer group inaugurated yesterday in the Castellón district of Spain, where three years ago it acquired Equipe Cermicas, a world reference for small format and large design tiles. Here, in the Onda factory (the smallest of the Spanish group’s three sites) a 30-metre-long electric kiln has already been working at full capacity since last June, capable of firing at 1,200 degrees around 1,000 square metres of tiles per day, saving not only polluting emissions but also energy consumption (30% less, which translates into a cut of over 5% in company costs), also because the kiln’s heat is recovered for the preliminary drying phase. ‘Every year 1,500 tonnes of CO2 are produced here, considering that the carbon price fluctuates between 65 and 85 euros, it means that we will save at least 100 thousand euros a year in ETS quotas’ explains Rogelio Vila Rodriguez, ceo of Equipe Ceramicas, which has grown in three years, under the Italcer umbrella, from 49 to 80 million euros in turnover, from 18 to 29 million in Ebitda and from 200 to 350 employees.
This is the first electric kiln, not a prototype, fully operational in the European ceramic industry, the result of two years of study and two million euro investment by Equipe-Italcer, in collaboration with Systemfoc (kiln manufacturer in the Valencian district) and JCT, the Ceramic Technology Institute of the Jaume I University of Castellón. ‘We started from this factory because it is where we make the most complex products, if the kiln works here it will work everywhere. The technology has already been designed on an industrial scale and in modular logic and now we will also start to replace the gas kilns in the other factories in the district in order to reach the goal of zero emissions of all our production in 2050,’ explains the CEO of Equipe, which has a total production capacity of 8 million square metres per year in the district. Few experiments for 100% electric firing have been undertaken so far in ceramics, bricks and refractories in Europe; Systemfoc itself had already attempted a handful of projects inCastellón in the past, without success.
Italcer now has the exclusive right to bring the green technology developed and tested in Spain to the Sassuolo district. ‘Until now it was thought that electrics could only be good for baking small volumes of dough, up to 5,000 kg per hour, and for top of the range products, these limits have been exceeded. The real difference today is the cost and the source of energy used: in Spain the electricity bill is a third of the Italian one and 70% of the electricity that runs in the grid is from renewable sources (against 45% in Italy, ed.) but in Equipe we have added a further 18% of photovoltaics thanks to the panels installed on the roof’ emphasises Graziano Verdi, CEO of the Italcer group on the sidelines of the ceremony at Onda.
Firing is the most energy-consuming phase of the ceramic process (more than half of total consumption) and the most polluting, so its decarbonisation is crucial to accompanying a hard-to-abate energy-intensive sector towards decarbonisation targets. While the combination of low energy costs, effective synergy between Equipe, Systemfoc and the university has rewarded the Castelln district, it is in Sassuolo that another of Italcer’s watershed projects in the name of sustainability will get underway: the first industrial plant for CO2 capture and conversion into reusable noble products. “We have just obtained the patent” says Verdi, “we have been working on it quietly for a couple of years (the design alone cost one million euro) and we will start building the first plant next to the atomiser in Sassuolo, with the aim of switching it on by the beginning of 2026,” explains Verdi, at the helm of a holding company founded in 2017 from the desire to aggregate brands of excellence in European ceramics, today controlled by the investment funds Mindful Capital Partners and Miura, which will approach €350 million in revenues and €82 million pro-forma Ebitda this year with 1. 100 employees and 15,000 customers worldwide.
