Reclinker raises £10M to turn demolition waste into cement

Blast furnaces are closing. Across Europe and the UK, steelmakers are moving to electric arc furnaces and retiring the older route. Every closure takes something the cement industry quietly leans on: blast-furnace slag, the ground by-product blended into concrete for decades because it removes a measurable share of CO₂.

That substitution was the cheapest emissions lever the sector ever had. Slag was somebody else's waste. Blended cements used it at volume, the numbers improved, and no new kiln was required.

The supply is thinning. Cement makers are left with the harder half of the problem — limestone that has to be calcined, fuel burned at kiln temperature — with less room to hide it.

On 5 October a Cardiff company raised £10 million to sell the replacement. Reclinker recovers cement paste from construction and demolition waste and re-clinkers it inside an electric arc furnace running alongside steel. The round was oversubscribed. First commercial sales are signed. The trial phase ends here. The plant has to follow.

A feedstock nobody forecast

Clinker is the expensive ingredient in cement. Limestone is heated until the CO₂ comes out of the rock, then the result is ground with gypsum. Most of the industry's process emissions come from that reaction. Fuel can be swapped. Chemistry cannot.

For years the practical answer was to dilute it. Slag replaced a slice of clinker in ordinary blends, the emissions improved, and no equipment changed. It worked while steelmaking still ran on blast furnaces.

That condition is ending. Blast-furnace capacity in the UK and Europe is being retired in stages, and the waste stream that came with it is getting harder to specify at consistent volume. The industry needs clinker from somewhere that is neither a kiln nor a blast furnace. That is the opening Reclinker is raising into.

CHRONICLE: Reclinker, from a Cambridge lab to a Cardiff furnace
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  2022         2025          5 Oct 2026       ◉ NOW         ▸ NEXT
  🎓           🏭            💰               ⚙️            🏗
  Spun out     First 24h     £10M Series A    Sales signed, Commercial
  of the       run at 7      oversubscribed   trials       plants in
  University   Steel UK,     — co-led by      complete     Europe and
  of Cambridge hundreds of   Clean Growth                  the US
               tonnes of     Fund + AP
               clinker       Ventures

Reclinker was spun out of the University of Cambridge in 2022 and still lists its engineering base there. Its commercial centre is Cardiff, where a site at 7 Steel UK has been running the process on industrial equipment instead of lab reactors. A first 24-hour run produced hundreds of tonnes of low-carbon clinker.

The process, without the brochure language

Cement paste is recovered from construction and demolition waste — the crushed concrete that otherwise becomes road base. Reclinker feeds it into an electric arc furnace together with steel scrap. The furnace already runs at the temperatures clinker requires. Steel comes out one side, clinker out of the other.

No rotary kiln. No quarried limestone. No fossil-fuel heat dedicated to cement.

Those are company numbers, not an independent assessment. The result that can be checked is tonnage: hundreds of tonnes of clinker produced in a single continuous run, on equipment a steelworks already owns.

This investment demonstrates the power of co-investment in bringing innovative, high-growth businesses to Wales. By investing alongside specialist climate technology investors, we're helping Reclinker establish and grow its presence here, building on the successful industrial trials already undertaken in Cardiff.— Gareth Mayhead, Investment Executive, Development Bank of Wales

Who is writing the cheque

The Series A was co-led by Clean Growth Fund and AP Ventures, with the Development Bank of Wales, Kibo Invest, Zero Carbon Capital and Cambridge Enterprise alongside. Reported at €11 million or about $13 million, the round closed oversubscribed at £10 million.

The money goes three ways: expanding the Cardiff operation, hiring, and replicating the setup at electric arc furnaces in Europe and the United States. Commercial sales are already booked. In a market where low-carbon cement still competes against a commodity, that detail carries more weight than the headline number.

Company statements and trade press, October 2026

What £10 million has to prove

Consistency comes first. Clinker chemistry is unforgiving, and demolition waste changes with every load that arrives. Then radius: hauling heavy wet material only pays within a short distance of the furnace. Standards come last and move slowest — cement is specified by bodies that take years to accept a new clinker source, and a plant cannot sell what nobody has approved.

Reclinker says the first commercial sales are secured. That is the number to watch. Material Evolution, a UK rival, is chasing the same waste-to-cement thesis through a different process. An oversubscribed £10 million says investors are willing to fund the attempt; who converts it into repeatable tonnage is still open.

What it means outside Cardiff

Steel and cement are usually filed as separate decarbonisation problems with separate budgets. Reclinker's argument is that they share equipment, share heat and share a feedstock chain. If the furnace already exists, the marginal cost of making clinker in it falls sharply.

That turns a waste problem into a feedstock problem. Demolition is a guaranteed output of every built environment, and unlike slag it is not tied to a process being dismantled.

None of this settles whether the model scales beyond one Cardiff site. It does settle who tests it at commercial volume first, and it leaves the cement industry with an awkward question: the slag shortage may have been a clinker shortage in disguise.