RAWFILL: Supporting a new circular economy for RAW materials recovered from landFILLs
Supervisor: Prof. Frédéric Nguyen
Partners:
Funding: INTERREG RAWFILL PROJECT
Total budget received from Interreg North-West Europe (2014-2020): € 2,29 million
Total project budget: € 3.87 million
Start / End of project: 03/2017 - 09/2021
Project web site: http://www.nweurope.eu/projects/project-search/supporting-a-new-circular-economy-for-raw-materials-recovered-from-landfills/
Keywords: landfill mining, raw materials, recycling, geophysics, remediation, circular economy
Project description
The North-West Europe region has 100.000 landfills. Most of these landfills lack state-of-the-art environmental protection systems, leading to local pollution, land-use restrictions and global impacts. This problem can be transformed into an opportunity as large volumes of resources such as materials and energy can be recovered through Landfill Mining. This way Landfill Mining can be widely implemented in the North-West Europe region.
The main challenge for this is the profitability risk due to the lack of reliable data on the recovery potential of landfills: quantity, quality and value of materials. RAWFILL, under the program Interreg NWE, will tackle this challenge by providing an enhanced framework for private/regional/national/transregional landfill inventories, an innovative approach to complete any set of missing mandatory economic data and a decision support tool.
Within this project, the Applied Geophysics Research Unit will tackle to challenge of characterizing those resources by developing innovative geophysical methods for non-destructive characterization.
Project goals
RAWFILL provides knowledge and tools to screen LFs and demonstrates under real conditions the evidence-based, standardised methodology to select profitable LFM projects, recovering huge amounts of dormant raw materials, energy carriers & land resources.