October 15-16, 2015. Hosted by VITO, Brussels.

YEAR organizes a seminar on Raw Materials in Brussels, Belgium on 15-16 October.

The EU is highly dependent on raw materials that are crucial for a strong industrial base, an essential building block of growth and competitiveness. Securing the sustainable access to raw materials, including metals, industrial minerals and construction raw materials, and particularly Critical Raw Materials (CRM), for the EU economy is of high importance. However, the EU is confronted with a number of technological challenges along the entire raw materials production value chain of primary and secondary raw materials.

During recovery of raw materials, often by-products are created. By-products are mostly elements accompanying the major raw materials at low concentrations. These accompanying elements can be valuable or critical elements. One of the challenges for raw materials processing is the development of efficient processing technologies for the recovery of valuable, strategic or critical raw materials and elements that accompany the major raw materials at low concentrations in primary and/or secondary materials.

These new technologies can lead to an increase in the economic performance and flexibility in minerals processing, metallurgical or recycling processes and strongly improve the indepence of the EU regarding resource supplies.

The goal of the seminar was to create interactions between young experts from different institutes, debate on potential project ideas and express our positions to the EU Commission.

In this context, YEAR is looking for young researchers of member institutes active in the field of raw materials sustainability to join the seminar with the EU representative.

More info and preliminary program can be found here