DST-SRM
Scheda del progetto
Università degli Studi di Torino
PhD Fellow Marco Casale
The need to ensure access to raw materials (RM), including critical materials (CRM), has stimulated EU policies to find alternative and supplementary sources to exploit. RM, secondary raw materials (SRM) and sometimes CRM can be recovered from old landfills and flowing waste from different production cycles, applying landfill mining and circular economy approaches respectively.
The aim of this project is to develop a decision support tool (DST) to assess, quickly and with an interdisciplinary approach, whether selected mining and quarry dumps can be subjected to sustainable mining, thus taking into account not only technical and economic parameters, but also site-specific environmental and social ones.
To date, there is no DST on the market similar to the one that will be produced: the DST-SRM may be of interest to Public Administrations in the planning stages of mining activities, in order to know the RM/CRM/SRM that can be recovered from extractive landfills, but also to mining companies that can evaluate the different possible scenarios for the exploitation of landfilled resources and decide to apply the scenario that gives the greatest guarantees in terms of sustainability (contributing to the sustainability budgets produced by large companies - including mining companies).
The output of the DST is represented by several possible scenarios, useful for deciding whether and how to deal with the exploitation of extractive waste present in quarry and mine dumps: such exploitation may be necessary/useful both because RM/CRM present have an important market interest, but also in cases where it is necessary to secure extractive sites (i.e. sites under ISPRA attention). The DST produced will be tested and validated using the data and processing flowchart of identified case studies.