From empty rules to a legal framework

It was not unusual to face long environmental permitting processes for new projects in Chile at the beginning of the last decade. Waste management related projects were not the exception, and that unknown technology, so called “co-processing” at that time, was even totally unknown or stigmatised.

The Chilean cement industry started to talk about alternative fuels and raw materials (AFR) by the end of the 90’s, but at that time, the concept of “co-processing” was something only understood by the cement industry. Nobody in the public sector could even understand and imagine how cement kilns could...