CEEC presents 2021 Medals at IMPC Asia-Pacific in Melbourne

CEEC Executive President Janine Herzig with Medal recipients Professor Malcolm Powell, Ben Wraith and Justin Resta at IMPC 2022
CEEC Executive President Janine Herzig with Medal recipients Professor Malcolm Powell, Ben Wraith and Justin Resta at IMPC 2022

The Coalition for Eco Efficient Comminution (CEEC) officially presented some of the 2021 CEEC Medals in person at the IMPC Asia-Pacific conference in Melbourne, Australia on 23rd August 2022.

The 2021 CEEC Medal for Technical Research was awarded to the authors of the paper ‘The Double Wheel Breakage Test’, which was published in Minerals Engineering, Volume 168 in July 2021. One of the authors, Professor Malcolm Powell from the Julius Kruttschnitt Mineral Research Centre (JKMRC) at the University of Queensland’s Sustainable Minerals Institute (SMI), accepted his Medal from CEEC Executive President Janine Herzig at the special ceremony at IMPC 2022. Dr Marcos Bueno and Janne Torvela were online to view the ceremony live.

Professor Powell told those gathered the history of their winning paper which began with a great idea from two of the paper’s authors, Dr Marcos Bueno and Dr Rajiv Chandramohan, who were PhD students at the JKMRC at the time and approached him to be the senior advisor. “I told them it’s a great idea, but you’ve got to do a lot of really careful engineering to turn it into something that works,” he said.

“I’m very impressed with the quality of what was done. I must acknowledge that Marcos has been the big driver; he brought a good engineering team together [with the other co-authors] and some funding from government to actually get this off the ground, and now it’s going to be a working device. I’m just very pleased that a brainwave by a couple of PhD students can turn into something that can contribute to the industry. A great congratulations to my co-authors.”

The co-authors, including Marcos, Rajiv, Janne, Tábatha Chávez Matus and Toni Liedes have received their Medals in the post.

The 2021 CEEC Medal for Operations was awarded to the authors of the paper ‘Recent improvements in ore sorting at the Renison Tin Concentrator - target 1 Mt/a’, which was presented at the AusIMM Mill Operators' Conference (MillOps) in Brisbane, Australia in June 2021. Two of the authors, Justin Resta from Bluestone Mines Tasmania Joint Venture and Ben Wraith, formerly of Bluestone and now at Gekko Systems, attended the ceremony and accepted their Medals from Ms Herzig.

Ben Wraith said: “We didn’t set out to win any medals; all we tried to do is fill a few operational gaps in knowledge. We collected quite a few memos and technical papers internally and thought it would be best to combine them all together into a paper for publications.”

Justin Resta added “I hope metallurgists and other practitioners have gotten some useful insights from the paper.”

The third author, Johan Welman, will receive his Medal by post.

Ms Herzig congratulated all of the authors of the winning papers. “It’s always a very difficult decision for the CEEC Medal Committee, as we have very high quality submissions, so you can be assured that the selected papers are incredibly worthy,” she said.

Nominations for the 2022 CEEC Medal are open until 31st October 2022, and CEEC encourages people to submit outstanding published papers, articles or case studies from the last 18 months that show ground-breaking examples of innovation in comminution and other mineral processing applications (including water, tailings and carbon management) that help accelerate more eco-efficient extraction. More information about the evaluation criteria and the submission process is available on the CEEC website.

Ms Herzig acknowledged Dr Zeljka Pokrajcic’s outstanding contribution to CEEC as Founding Director and as Chair of the CEEC Medal Evaluation Panel for the last 10 years; Dr Pokrajcic has now retired from CEEC and the new head of the Medal Committee will soon be announced.

“Finally, I would like to thank the Sponsors and supporter of CEEC,” said Ms Herzig. “With the recent appointments and renewal in CEEC, and with travel restrictions being now eased, CEEC will be providing significantly more opportunities for our Sponsors. This will take the form of face-to-face workshops as well as webinars and openings to participate on Steering Committees for new Projects in Water and GHG emissions where stakeholders can truly collaborate and innovate.

“The value for Sponsors in supporting CEEC’s mission is that we provide a unique and agnostic platform and linkage for Sponsors to collaborate, solve problems, exploit opportunities and network with each other – all to raise standards and operating practices in the resources sector. We are all striving to provide open access to tools and findings that will help the sector achieve Net Zero and reduce the impact of the extraction and concentration of the materials that are essential to the sustainability of the human race and planet.

To any Sponsors in the room this evening, or watching the recording, I would like to thank you very much for your generous support.”

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