On 5 and 6 February, 2018, the 4th Enhanced Landfill Mining Symposium is taking place in Mechelen, Belgium. On January 15, 2018, the Final Symposium Programme was released: pdf available here. ELFM IV offers a total of 50 papers.

Enhanced Landfill Mining (ELFM) was featured in the Financial Times as one of the “50 Ideas to Change the World”. In a Special Report Joshua Jacobs interviews key players and discusses the barriers and opportunities for ELFM.

The EU FP7 EURARE project team has published a concluding project brochure, explaining how Europe can create a sustainable European rare-earth supply chain. A must read!

Gwendolyn Bailey, a KU Leuven researcher in the EU H2020 DEMETER project, presented her work at the high-level 7th Trilateral EU-US-Japan Conference on Critical Materials (October 12, 2017) in Pittsburgh, USA.

As part of “Artefact 2018: This Rare Earth - Stories from Below”, a unique symposium on the Social License to Operate with respect to the mining and recycling of critical metals is taking place on February 21, 2018 (Leuven).

During the annual JRC EU4Facts conference in Brussels, the EU MSCA-ETN DEMETER video was awarded as a showcase example on how science can contribute to evidence based policy making.

November 6 – November 10 Following the success of the 1st edition of the ‘Raw Materials Week‘, the 2nd edition will take place in Brussels from Monday 6 to Friday 10 November 2017.  See details.

On 5 and 6 February, 2018, the 4th Enhanced Landfill Mining Symposium (ELFM IV) is taking place in Mechelen, Belgium. This week the full Symposium programme was released. Early bird registration is now possible.

On September 13, 2017, the EC finally published its updated list of Critical Raw Materials. SIM² KU Leuven will continue to provide recovery/recycling technology for the following CRMs: Sb, Co, Ga, Ge, In, PGMs, REEs and Sc.

SIM² KU Leuven has just launched “SOLVOMET”, an Industrial Service Centre whose mission is to support its industrial partners in the development of more sustainable solvometallurgical separation processes and new mining chemicals.