News

On the 18th of June 2019,  dr. Annelies Malfliet presented SOCRATES project and the key message of the SOCRATES policy brief “Lead Metallurgy is Fundamental to the Circular Economy” as guest speaker at the Lead REACH Consortium General Assembly. The Lead REACH Consortium is an initiative of the International Lead Association (ILA). The ILA supports its 90 members involved in ...

High level expert panel workshop on Social License to Operate, followed by a SLO clustering event organised by the NEMO, CROCODILE and TARANTULA projects teams.

Germanium is a precious metal which is mainly used as a semiconductor in electronics and infrared optic industries, and as a polymerisation catalyst for the production of polyethylene terephthalate. Due to its high supply risk and its high economic importance, germanium is considered as one of Europe’s critical metals

Germanium is a precious metal which is mainly used as a semiconductor in electronics and infrared optic industries, and as a polymerisation catalyst for the production of polyethylene terephthalate. Due to its high supply risk and its high economic importance, germanium is considered as one of Europe’s critical metals

On April 1-5, 2019, the 6th Slag Valorisation Symposium took place. More than 200 persons experienced at first hand that slag valorisation has been transformed from an academic concept into an industrial success story.

On the occasion of highlighting the innovative research of the SOCRATES project, one of our ESRs, Marianna, was put in the spotlight at the University of Leicester. Her research was highlighted in the postgraduate research magazine ‘Frontier’. In a short article, she comments about the essential development of novel extraction methods for critical metals. “Europe faces a serious challenge in ...

The EU ETN SOCRATES project team has launched a press release about its recent Policy Brief entitled “Lead Metallurgy is Fundamental to the Circular Economy”. The key message by the authors of the Policy Brief is that the EU’s circular economy plans risk stalling if regulators pursue ill-judged restrictions. (PTJ, Leuven, 28/3/2019) EU ETN SOCRATES Press Release [PDF-version available here] ...

In the framework of the EU MSCA-ETN REDMUD project, the occurrence mode of selected rare earths in neutralised-leached bauxite residue was studied by KU Leuven and NTUA. The work is published in Journal of Sustainable Metallurgy.

The zinc smelter Boliden Kokkola in Finland has found new methods to extract zinc, silver and lead as well as produce sulphuric acid from the residue. It has approximately 820,000 tonnes of landfilled sulphur residue (330,000 dry tonnes), a material containing valuable metals that they previously were unable to recover. Now, through its research, Boliden can take another steps towards a ...