Integrated innovative pilot system for Critical Raw Materials recovery from mines wastes in a circular economy context.

About the project: RAWMINA will develop and demonstrate an innovative pilot system for the clean and sustainable production of non-energy, non-agricultural raw materials (RMs) in the EU from Mine Waste (MW) resources. RAWMINA will implement and standardize an innovative energy, water- and cost-effective continuous pilot process for producing RMs. It will integrate novel bio-leaching and nano-based materials for Sb, Co, Ge and W selective recovery from MW from “unexploited/underexploited metal containing materials”. RAWMINA will improve EU competitiveness and create added value in RMs processing, refining and equipment manufacturing by developing a new circular business model as an alternative to traditional linear mining economy. RAWMINA will integrate different technologies that will be demonstrated (TRL7) with MW of diverse geological compositions from EU and non-EU mines demonstrating flexibility in processing of the innovative pilot system. The project will perform a techno-economic and sustainability assessment throughout the entire life cycle considering health, safety, socio-economic and environmental impacts; maximizing water/energy efficiency and waste/wastewater reduction. IP, exploitation and business plans will be developed ensuring market penetration, technology export and first exploitation plan. RAWMINA will transform MW into a resource, enabling marketable products recovery to be used in batteries, flame retardants, optical fibers and industrial tools. The project will create a CRM Recovery Helix to maximize clustering and will interact with local communities to gain EU citizens trust. It will increase resource efficiency and sustainability of EU industry, contributing to decrease EU CRM import dependency. Apart from sheltering the EU from possible shortages in CRM supply, the project will contribute to reduce production costs and environmental impacts, contributing to the objectives of the European Innovation Partnership on RMs.

WINGS Role: The main tasks of WINGS within RAWMINA project are to define the Intelligent Management System (IMS) and to feed the design and construction of the pilot system, offering both monitoring and decision support capabilities. WINGS will participate to the definition of the bench-scale validation, to the integrated process modelling and simulation and the design of the overall pilot system, so as to build an interaction loop between the IMS and the simulation, as well as to contribute to the establishment of the operation parameters to be monitored and of the installation points and constraints, to design the control and decision support system, including a Human Machine Interface software and hardware, to allow for onsite and remote process monitoring and control. WINGS will contribute to the sustainability assessment with data and evidence collected by the IMS, as well as to the exploitation, dissemination activities.

Website: https://rawmina.eu/

Duration: 05.2021-10.2024

This project has received funding from the Horizon 2020 programme under grant agreement No 958252