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.

The 27th EuCheMS Conference on Molten Salts and Ionic Liquids – EuCheMSIL 2018 will be held from 7-12th October 2018 in Lisbon, Portugal. For further information visit  http://www.euchemsil2018.org/ for details that will be continuing updating, but that has already the basic information. Any special queries can be sent to euchemsil2018@ciencias.ulisboa.pt.  

In the aftermath of the publication of the animated promotional videos of ETNs NEW-MINE and SOCRATES, we were contacted by China Global Television Network (CGTN) who made a brief report on the projects’ ground-breaking research.

On the 13th of July Darmstadt, Germany, will be the venue for a milestone Symposium on the importance of critical metals for green energy technologies. The Symposium features a multitude of lectures by renowned experts.

In June 2017 the EIT RawMaterials network has approved the GloREIA KIC Added Value project, which stands for “Towards a Global Rare Earth Industry Association”. The funding for this EIT RawMaterials project is 300,000 EUR.

In the framework of the EU EREAN and DEMETER projects on Rare Earth recycling, a new Policy Brief “ERES 2017: Six Lessons Learned” was launched in order to stimulate (policy) debate about the Europe's Rare Earth supply.

The EU Horizon 2020 SOCRATES project has now just released a new animation video about “Recovering valuable metals from industrial waste”. The film is presented by two SOCRATES PhD students.