Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action ITN NEW-MINEH2020 MSCA ITN
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action ITN NEW-MINE
H2020 MSCA ITN
The EU Training Network for Resource Recovery through Enhanced Landfill Mining, NEW-MINE, unites 17 partners of the European Enhanced Landfill Mining Consortium (EURELCO), each of them being a leading actor in the field of Enhanced Landfill Mining (ELFM). The 10 universities, 6 companies and the public body involved are drawn from 7 different EU member states. The general coordination and management of NEW-MINE is supported by KU Leuven. The project started on the 1st of September 2016 and will run until August 2020.
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 valuable resources. 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. NEW-MINE trains 15 early-stage researchers (ESRs) in all aspects of landfill mining, in terms of both technological innovation and multi-criteria assessments. The technological innovation follows a value-chain approach, from advanced landfill exploration, mechanical processing, plasma/solar/hybrid thermochemical conversion and upcycling, while the multi-criteria assessment methods allow to compare combined resource-recovery/remediation ELFM methods with the “Do-Nothing”, “Classic remediation” and “Classic landfill mining with (co-)incineration” scenarios. By training the ESRs in scientific, technical and soft skills, they become highly sought-after scientists and engineers for the rapidly emerging landfill-mining and broader raw-materials industries of Europe.
Objectives
These are the objectives of NEW-MINE:
To develop innovative concepts, technologies and methods for integrated resource recovery and remediation of landfills containing municipal solid waste;
To train 15 ESRs in different aspects of ELFM, ranging from technological innovations along the whole ELFM value-chain (exploration, mechanical processing, plasma/solar/hybrid thermochemical conversion, upcycling) and integrated environmental and economic assessment to policy analysis;
To stimulate the EU-wide implementation of ELFM through coordinated exploitation and dissemination of the research results.
Role of Ghent University
In the NEW-MINE project UGent represents the first step in the ELFM value-chain: innovative exploration of landfills using geophysical survey techniques. UGent supervises the PhD focusing on this topic and provides each of the ESRs with a general introduction into geophysical methods through network-wide training.
