News

The ETN NEW-MINE project on Enhanced Landfill Mining is urgently looking for a pyrolysis expert to start a Licentiate Thesis at KTH Stockholm (Sweden). Applicants can apply here: https://new-mine.eu/esr7/.

Following the success of the Raw Materials Week 2017, the 3rd edition of the EU "Raw Materials Week", organised by the European Commission, will take place from Monday 12 to Friday 16 November 2018 in Brussels.

Gwendolyn Bailey, Early Stage Researcher (ESR) at KU Leuven in the EU MSCA-ETN DEMETER project, consistently endeavours to communicate science to a broad audience. She has now won the 2018 MSCA award for science dissemination.

On 17-9-2018 the Sounding Board of the SIM MaRes programme took place in Leuven to realign the programme with current needs in industry. René Wiersma (Shell) gave a lecture on the use of solvents in mining & metallurgy.

In their “Fifty Shades of Grey” project, Stelios Spathariotis and Prof. Andy Abbott (both University of Leicester) used Deep Eutectic Solvents to create a Union Jack art piece made by fifty different spots of metal colour…

PROMETHEE & BRGM are organising a milestone workshop dedicated to biohydrometallurgy on October 10, 2018. The event is highly relevant for researchers working in the EU projects CROCODILE, NEMO, METGROW+, ETN SULTAN & SOCRATES...

Prof. Koen Binnemans was given the LeCoq de Boisbaudran award for his “outstanding and long-lasting contribution” in the field of rare earth recycling. The prize was awarded at ICfE-10 (Sep’ 3–6, 2018) in Lausanne, Switzerland.

In a new ETN DEMETER Policy Brief, the authors Gwendolyn Bailey and Karel Van Acker (SIM² KU Leuven) motivate why the time has come for the electric-vehicle industry (EV industry) to start working together with the producers of rare earths (REEs). The goal of this Policy Brief is to communicate the specific needs identified by the sustainability assessment for permanent ...

On July 2nd, 2018, Dženita Avdibegović (SIM² KU Leuven) obtained her PhD degree in Chemistry. She successfully defended her PhD thesis entitled ‘Recovery of rare earths from bauxite residue leachates by functionalised sorbents‘.

Within the EU Horizon 2020 REMAGHIC project, SIM² KU Leuven developed a novel process to recover rare earths (REEs) from lamp phosphor waste by dissolution in concentrated methanesulphonic acid (MSA), which is a green solvent.