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Demolishing is no doubt a messy business and is always accompanied by loud noise, lots of dust, wasted water, wasted energy, giant piles of rubble that often head straight for the landfill and heavy labor needed for recycling the waste concrete and metal material.

However, a genius invention called ERO- Concrete Recycling Robot by Omer Haciomeroglu, a student at Sweden’s Umeå Institute of Design, has changed all of that. He made a robot that can efficiently disassemble concrete structures, minimizing the amount of waste and dust, while at the same time separating waste concrete from rebar and other debris on the spot.

How it works:

The robot begins by scanning the building to figure out the most efficient way to perform the heavy job, as the robot has the option of switching between pulverizing and smart deconstruction modes. Then, by making use of a high-pressure water jet, it slowly breaks down the concrete. After that, the robot immediately sucks up the residue and separates it into aggregate, cement and water.

Clean aggregate is packed into big bags, which are labeled and sent for reuse at other construction sites. Water is recycled back into the system to break down more walls. In short, the design ensures that nothing is placed in landfills or sent away for additional processing.

ERO is efficient as compared to traditional methods which rely on fossil fuels to power all kinds of machinery and recycle virtually nothing. All the materials which were previously waste, now turn into labeled, packaged assets to be transferred right away into concrete pre-casting stations to be re-molded into new building blocks without releasing any dust or waste.