The International Symposium on Sustainable Minerals (Sustainable Minerals 21), organized by Minerals Engineering International (MEI), will be held online from 21st-24th June.
CEEC is an industry advocate of MEI’s Sustainable Minerals conference, and CEEC Directors will be attending. We look forward to hearing your latest work – and invite you to attend with us and watch for CEEC’s global announcement. You can register for the event here.
In this conference, MEI highlights the need for an astute and conscious application and use of metals, the opportunities for materials and products reuse and recycling, and planning for end-of-life products needed for preservation of the Earth’s resources. To realize ambitions of sustainable use of metals, materials and resources – we need different disciplines across the material and consumer product system to connect and communicate.
Keynote speakers are Professor Anna Littleboy, Professor Luis Marcelo Tavares and Dr Anita Parbhakar-Fox; they will be discussing mine closure, sustainability-driven innovation and waste in the mining industry, respectively. There will also be a panel discussion on the topic 'What are the limits to achieving a circular economy?' chaired by Markus Reuter with Professor Anna Littleboy, Dr Anita Parbhaker-Fox, Professor Luis Marcelo Taveres and Dr Peter Radziszewski.
The conference program, which is available here, will discuss all aspects of material and metal usage and some of the themes it will consider include:
- Acid Mine Drainage
- Clean Technology (smelting, energy recovery, hydrometallurgical, etc.)
- Coal Wastes
- Effluent Treatment (biological and chemical methods for water purification)
- Energy Recovery
- Water use and recycling
- Environmental Impact Assessment Methodologies (LCA, metrics for sustainability, LCI, etc.)
- Industrial Applications (novel technology, new methods, breakthrough technology, etc.)
- Legislation (REACH, Basel, Stockholm, etc.)
- Process Control (to monitor and optimize environmental performance of plants, unit operations, furnaces)
- Processing of Industrial Wastes (slags, chemical, flue dusts, sludges, bottom ashes, etc.)
- Recycling of Post Consumer Materials (car recycling, waste electric and electronic equipment, plastics, paper)
- Tailings Disposal at mine sites
- Recycling Systems (monitoring, take-back systems, etc.)
- Recycling Technology (separation, automatic sorting, sensors, smelting, etc.)
- Sustainability (from an industrial as well as consumer point of view)
- System and other models for system optimization and Sustainability prediction
- Carbon emission controls; case studies of existing methods to reduce emissions and new technology being developed such as carbon capture and storage
- Efforts to reduce energy consumption in mining and mineral processing operations
- Developments in geopolymers as alternatives to conventional cements.