NEW-MINE

  This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 721185.  

Title

EU Training Network for Resource Recovery through Enhanced Landfill Mining

Concept

Europe has somewhere between 150,000 and 500,000 landfill sites, with an estimated 90% of them being “non-sanitary” landfills, predating the EU Landfill Directive of 1999. These older landfills tend to be filled with municipal solid waste and often lack any environmental protection technology. In order to avoid future environmental and health problems, many of these landfills will soon require expensive remediation measures. This situation might appear bleak, but it does present us with an exciting opportunity for a combined resource-recovery and remediation strategy, which will drastically reduce future remediation costs, reclaim valuable land, while at the same time unlocking billions of tonnes of valuable resources contained within these landfills. However, the widespread adoption of Enhanced Landfill Mining (ELFM) in the EU, as envisaged by NEW-MINE, urgently requires skilled scientists, engineers, economists and policy makers who can develop cost-effective, environmentally friendly ELFM practices and regulatory frameworks. All this demands a European commitment to concerted, inter- and transdisciplinary research and innovation. The NEW-MINE project trains 15 early-stage researchers (ESRs) in all the aspects of landfill mining, in terms of both technological innovation and multi-criteria assessments for ELFM.

Participants

• Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium (Coordinator)
• Universiteit Gent, Belgium
• Montanuniversität Leoben, Austria
• Università degli Studi di Padova, Italy
• Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich, Switzerland
• Linköpings universitet, Sweden
• Kungliga Tekniska Hoegskolan, Sweden
• Shanks Valorisation & Quarry, Belgium
• Italcementi Fabbriche Riunite Cemento S.p.A., Italy