Project description
Innovative methods for rare earth elements extraction in Europe
Sustainable mineral extraction is vital for our planet. It involves addressing environmental, social, and economic impacts and developing low-impact technologies that require environmentally friendly, safe, intelligent, and resource-efficient extraction methods. The EU-funded REESOURCE project aims to establish a sustainable and decarbonised value chain for extracting Rare Earth Elements (REEs) in Europe. The project involves scientific, technical, social, and financial actions, including enhancing key technologies, developing new formulations based on environmentally friendly chemicals, and valorising tailings through a Circular Economy approach. The project also assesses the social dimension to promote early social awareness, engagement, and acceptance, aiming to support the mass adoption of UNFC and UNRMS in the raw materials sector.
Objective
Responsible, sustainable and low CO2 footprint mineral extraction is vital for the preservation of our planet. Ensuring responsible supply of minerals, involves addressing the environmental, social, and economic impacts of mineral extraction and developing technologies and know-how to minimize them. Mining within these low-impact boundaries in a world that is putting an increasing pressure on the mineral supply requires developing environmentally friendly, safe, intelligent and resource efficient extraction technologies and methods. REESOURCE will set a sustainable and decarbonized value chain basis for the extraction of Rare Earth Elements (REEs) in Europe, supporting the ambition of the continent to become self-sufficient on REEs. This target will be achieved through a set of actions (scientific, technical, social and financial) that will serve to pave the road for the development of the European mining of the future. These include i) enhancing key technologies of raise mining to foster “invisible mining”, with minimal socioenvironmental impact and lower CO2 emissions’ footprint compared to existing approaches; ii) developing novel formulations based on environmentally friendly chemicals for both, the mineral beneficiation process of REEs and the process water treatment, supporting the recirculation of this resource; iii) developing a novel stabilization technique for tailings, making them suitable for backfilling, stabilizing the mine and avoiding the need of tailing ponds; iv) valorize the tailings through a Circular Economy approach, to make them suitable for expanded value chains as geopolymers for construction applications and composite materials for catalytic and CO2 capture applications; v) assess the social dimension to maximize early social awareness, engagement and acceptance and vi) multiply the project impact through cross-fertilization with other projects and clusters, supporting the mass adoption of UNFC and UNRMS in the raw materials sector.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
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Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-RIA - HORIZON Research and Innovation ActionsCoordinator
2007 Lillestrm
Norway