Refractories Symposium resumes in St. Louis with sustainability theme

On March 28–30, 2023, the refractory ceramics community celebrated the in-person return of the ACerS St. Louis Section and Refractory Ceramics Division Annual Symposium on Refractories in St. Louis, Mo.

“It was a pleasure to have approximately 220 members of the refractory ceramics community back in St. Louis after four long years of being apart,” says Kelley Wilkerson, chair of the Refractory Ceramics Division.

Attendees came from 11 countries spanning the globe: Europe, Canada, South America, Australia, China, India, and Korea. Close to half were first-time attendees!

The theme of this year’s symposium was sustainability. Symposium organizers Alex Stansbery (Resco Products), John Waters, and Behzad Majidi (Pyrotek Inc.) recruited talks that covered the range from sustainable approaches to raw materials, to improving thermal processes with refractories, to optimizing refractory formulations, to converting foundry waste to saleable products. There was much discussion of life cycle assessments (LCA) and how corporations are using LCAs and various certification tools to develop robust sustainability programs to hold themselves accountable.

The symposium opened with a keynote address by FACerS Nancy Bunt. Bunt was an inspired choice for delivering the keynote, as she has nearly 40 years of experience in the industry and is now global sustainability director of the Imerys Refractory, Abrasives, and Construction Business Area.

The United Nations’ 17 Sustainability Goals are well known, but perhaps less well known is the United Nations Global Compact–

Accenture CEO Study. The most recent study defines resilience as “a company’s ability to withstand, adapt, and prosper through uncertainty and volatility—to emerge stronger and strengthen competitive advantage.”

Bunt tied resilience to sustainability, noting that sustainability is at the core of resilience, and she described how the Imerys SustainAgility program supports both sustainability and resilience at the point where most manufacturing begins—raw materials.

The symposium closed with a talk by Paul Ormond of Evergreen Alumina, a start-up company tackling the challenge of aluminum foundry waste. Ormond introduced an “industrial waste-to-value” technology based on a closed-system proprietary process that generates neither waste nor effluent. The patent-pending process was developed by refractory industry veteran Riley Robbins.

Two awards were presented at the meeting. The St. Louis Section awarded its Theodore J. Planje Award to David Tucker of Imerys-Mulcoa, and the RCD Allen Award went to professor Stefan Schaffoener of the University of Bayreuth, Germany. Schaffoener reported on his latest research on functional porosity in composite ceramic refractories.

An evening reception and expo gave attendees time to reconnect, talk about business, and meet all the new attendees.

Dinner, lunch, a Top Golf kick-off event, and plenty of coffee breaks set the stage for networking and great conversations about refractories.

View photos from the Refractories Symposium on ACerS Flickr page. Next year’s symposium theme will relate to failure analysis. The details are yet to be worked out, but the symposium will take place in St. Louis in March 2024.