Europe has somewhere between 150,000 and 500,000 landfill sites, with an estimated 90% of them being “non-sanitary” landfills, predating the EU Landfill Directive of 1999. These older landfills tend to be filled with municipal solid waste and often lack any environmental protection technology. In order to avoid future environmental and health problems, many of these landfills will soon require expensive remediation measures. This situation might appear bleak, but it does present us with an exciting opportunity for a combined resource-recovery and remediation strategy, which will drastically reduce future remediation costs, reclaim valuable land, while at the same time unlocking valuable resources. However, the widespread adoption of Enhanced Landfill Mining (ELFM) in the EU, as envisaged by NEW-MINE, urgently requires skilled scientists, engineers, economists and policy makers who can develop cost-effective, environmentally friendly ELFM practices and regulatory frameworks. All this demands a European commitment to concerted, inter- and transdisciplinary research and innovation. NEW-MINE trains 15 early-stage researchers (ESRs) in all aspects of landfill mining, in terms of both technological innovation and multi-criteria assessments. The technological innovation follows a value-chain approach, from advanced landfill exploration, mechanical processing, hybrid plasma/solar thermochemical conversion and upcycling, while the multi-criteria assessment methods allow to compare combined resource-recovery/remediation ELFM methods with the “Do-Nothing”, “Classic remediation” and “Classic landfill mining with (co-)incineration” scenarios (See Figure 1). By training the ESRs in scientific, technical and soft skills, they become highly sought-after scientists and engineers for the rapidly emerging landfill-mining and broader raw-materials industries of Europe.
The overall project flow is shown in Figure 2. The 15 ESR topics are linked through an ELFM flowsheet, in which ESR1 is performing geophysical exploration of landfills, which are subsequently excavated and treated by different mechanical separation processes (ESR2-3-4) to produce different fractions, which are subsequently processed to recover materials (e.g. metals, building sand) and further processed to produce a refuse derived fuel (RDF) for work package 2. Work package 2 studies the conversion of the RDF to syngas, metals and slags and ashes (ESR5-9), while WP3 studies the metal/slag-ash separation and the further treatment of slags/ashes to produce inorganic polymers and/or glass ceramics (ESR10-12). Work package 4 performs an integrated assessment of the process and of ELFM as a whole (ESR13-15).
