Shifting Gears: A Look Back at CILANTRO’s Event Highlights from Our First Season

It has been a busy and incredibly productive first season for the CILANTRO project. Our mission is bold: to develop the world’s first carbon-negative cement manufacturing route using cold mechanochemistry instead of polluting fossil-fuel ovens. But turning complex science into an industrial reality takes a lot of collaboration, feedback, and community building.

Starting from our very first Kick-Off Meeting last October, followed closely by our first collaborative EIC Portfolio meeting in January, CILANTRO has active participated in various events, industrial field trips, and policy summits across Europe to promote our work.

Here is a summary of where we have been this year.

Academic & Scientific Congresses

Sharing our lab data with fellow scientists helps us refine our room-temperature engineering pathways. This season, our researchers presented at:

• CNMAT 2026 (Portugalete, Spain): We presented our latest findings on how high-energy mechanical milling structurally alters minerals at a nanoscale to reduce processing temperatures.

• HyDEM 2026 (Braunschweig, Germany): The team presented technical poster and oral insights regarding the stability of calcite under controlled gaseous environments.

• 2nd Applied Circular Economy and Sustainability Congress: We joined crucial cross-disciplinary panels to highlight how reshaping the cement supply chain fits perfectly into Europe’s circular economy goals.

Policy & Industry Engagement

Making clean cement viable means working closely with European innovators and manufacturing giants. To ensure CILANTRO aligns with policy and market needs, we took part in:

• The EIC Innovation Summit: A fantastic event for networking with the broader European deep-tech community and discussing market pathways for breakthrough technologies.

• Heidelberg Materials Exchange: Engaging with major industrial players gives us real-world perspective on the logistical and structural needs of tomorrow’s cement factories.

Technical Visits & Institutional Collaborations

Good science relies on deep geological and material expertise. This season also included focused practical exchanges, most notably a working visit to the Spanish Geological Institute, which allowed our teams to study mineral baselines critical to our grinding processes.

What’s Next?

Building an international consortium of eight partners across multiple borders takes serious groundwork, and we are incredibly proud of the collaborative foundation built over the last several months. As we move out of the summer season, our research groups are heading straight back into the lab and the modeling desk to turn Year 1’s momentum into Year 2’s breakthroughs!

Thank you to our amazing consortium partners and the European Innovation Council for making this first season such an active one!

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.