Rotho wins bauma Innovation Award 2025 in the category Climate Protection

Rotho is the winner of the International bauma Innovation Award 2025 in the category Climate Protection. The competition is a joint project of bauma together with notable associations in this industrial sector. The announcement and the presentations of this year’s Innovation Awards, in five categories, took place at a festive gala event on the evening of the Munich Trade Fair. The event was attended by around 450 guests.

A top-ranked jury of representatives from science and economics had in several rounds nominated three innovations in each category from 208 submissions and, together with specialized journalists, chosen the winners in the respective categories. The awards distinguish future-viable innovations with substantial benefit for practical applications that include contributions to energy and resources efficiency. In the category Climate Protection, Rotho impressed the jury with its ProCarbonCure system.

The at that time Federal Minister Klara Geywitz and the Bavarian Minister of State Hubert Aiwanger, congratulated the winners together with the laudators and presented the awards. The International bauma Innovation Award goes back to the German Construction Machinery Day, on the occasion of which state-of-the-art technologies from Germany were recognized until 2004. In this form, the prizes have been awarded every three years since 2007, with joint invitations for entries by VDMA, VDMA Services GmbH, Bauma and the leading associations of the German construction industry HDB, ZDB and bbs.

Innovative systems engineering for storing CO₂ in concrete products

With the ProCarbonCure system, large amounts of CO₂ can be durably and sustainably stored in products made of concrete and steel slag. For this reason, building products such as paving blocks, masonry blocks and facing bricks leave a significantly lower CO₂ footprint. In this way, the process makes an important contribution to enable greener concrete products in the future.

To realize the process, the development of a completely new concrete hardening process was required. This demanded the combination of specialized processes of hardening and drying in order to be able to store large amounts of carbon dioxide in in concrete. The result was a closed process that gives the CO₂ time to penetrate deeply into the concrete without out emitting a critical share back into the atmosphere. The process had already been successfully implemented on an industrial scale.