Nowadays, concrete is still the most used building material. The most important part of concrete is a binder, which is mostly Portland cement. The cement production is very demanding for energy (4900 MJ/tonne) and natural sources. The emission production is another big problem of cement manufacturing (for 1 tonne of produced cement 1 tonne of CO2 is released). Except for those negatives, production of waste, which cannot be re-use in cement manufacturing, is related to cement production. This waste is called cement by-pass dust (CBPD), which contain a big amount of soluble salts, especially chlorides. For the above reasons, it is appropriate to focus on reducing the amount of cement in building materials. The building materials using a different type of materials than Portland cement, as a binder, are called alkali-activated materials (AAM).

The project GeoDust deals with problematics of AAM with using CBPD for their production. So it tries to reclassify CBPD from the category of waste to the secondary raw material. GeoDust is the four-year project which has started at 2017 and is supported by European Union, in the framework of the projects H2020 MSCA RISE. Scientific quality of GeoDust consortium is assured by Materials Research Centre at Brno University of Technology (the Czech Republic, consortium leader), Eduardo Torroja Institute (Spain) and Technical University of Ostrava (Czech Republic), while necessary and inspiring insights from industry comes from CEMMAC, Ltd. (cement plant Horné Srnie, Slovakia) and concrete producer ŽPSV (Czech Republic).

Based on the research of structure and composition of CBPD, alkali-activated slag-based binders and hybrid cement are being developed to produce cheap concretes. After optimizing the composition of the eco-innovative mixtures, they could be potentially used as the material for railway junctions and other building constructions.a