News

Researchers are invited to (pre)register for the ETN/EIT Summer School “To mine or not to mine: A multi-criteria assessment of the landfill mining of municipal and industrial solid waste deposits” (September 10-12, 2018, Leuven).

Could “red mud” (bauxite residue) be the answer to some of Europe’s critical-metal supply concerns? That’s the central question addressed in the April 2016 EU MSCA-ETN REDMUD Policy Brief, authored by Dr. T. Baleomenos (Greece).

In this 15-minute TED-talk for the science dissemination platform “University of Flanders” Peter Tom Jones explains the Enhanced Landfill Mining concept, discussing the challenge to mine landfills in view of resource recovery.

On March 29, 2018, the kick-off event for GloREIA took place in Brussels. GloREIA is to become a new, global association for the rare earth industry. To kickstart this association EIT RawMaterials provides financial support.

In the framework of the ERC SOLCRIMET project KU Leuven researchers have found that replacement of water by ethylene glycol provides enhanced selectivity in the solvent extraction of transitions metals from rare earth elements.

This new RSC Advances paper demonstrates the effectiveness of a novel supported ionic liquid phase (SILP) for the uptake of REEs (Sc, Y, Nd, Dy) in the presence of base elements (Ca, Al, Fe) from bauxite residue (BR) leachates.

On Sep’ 10-12, 2018, the Summer School “To mine or not to mine – A multi-criteria assessment of the landfill mining of municipal & industrial solid waste deposits” is organised in Leuven by ETN SOCRATES/NEW-MINE & EIT KIC IMAGINE

This new Hydrometallurgy paper by Kumar Batchu and Binnemans studies the effect of the diluent) on the solvent extraction of Nd using D2EHPA as extractant. Studied diluents varied from aliphatic, aliphatic-aromatic to aromatic.

The ETN NEW-MINE project has just published a new Policy Brief on the future of Enhanced Landfill Mining in Europe and beyond. The Policy Brief draws Six Lessons Learned from the recent ELFM IV Symposium (February 5-6, 2018).

Lukas Gijsemans (Bachelor Degree Chemistry) works as a research associate at the Lab for Inorganic Chemistry. He investigates solvometallurgical methods for industrial case-studies in the KU Leuven C3-SOLMET project.