On 9^th June 2016 Lucy Cooper (WRAP) and Susanne Coles (KTN) joined other related EU projects in Brussels to attend an EASME WEEE cluster meeting on harmonising the production and storage of data for WEEE in the urban mine organized by H2020 project ProSUM.

Marco Recchioni (EASME), who introduced the day, was followed by Daniel Cassard (BGRM) leading through the development of the EU-UMKDP and Jaco Huisman (UNU) talking about classifying and characterising the urban mine, work tackled by ProSUM highlighting key issues in developing an INSPIRE compliant knowledge data platform.

Next the LIFE project Critical Raw Material Recovery (Lucy Cooper, WRAP), H2020 project EWIT (Georg Kanitschar, TUW), COST Action ReCreew (Clayton Burger, University of Oldenburg) and H2020 project SMART GROUND (Marco de la Feld, ENCO) shared their approaches and methodologies to characterise EEE, WEEE and waste containing WEEE.

The presentations sparked plenty of discussions between the projects and representatives from DG GROW, DG Env, DG Connect and DG RTD covering aspects such as uniform adaption and long term provision of a single database system and its value to end-users. Several actions were agreed to pave the way for increased collaboration between related projects and with the EC.

If you are interested to find out more please contact susanne.coles@ktn-uk.org.

You may be seeing a bit more of project partner Scott Butler (regional director for the UK & Ireland at ERP) in the coming weeks and months, with Scott now a regular blogger on Edie.net.

The first blog from 5 November 2015 focuses on raw materials and our Critical Raw Material Recovery project – Thanks Scott!

Read on Raw materials: Not the next gold rush, but…

Georgina Taylor (WRAP) presented the Critical Raw Material Recovery project at the recent launch of work funded by the EU LIFE programme. This accompanies a recent announcement by the European Commission that 96 projects out of over 1000 applications have been approved for co-funding through the LIFE programme with a total investment of €160.6 million.  The Critical Raw Material Recovery project joins 5o other projects, that will be realised thanks to the LIFE Environment & Resource Efficiency component of the overall programme. Read more…

The list and descriptions of the 96 approved projects is available at http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-15-6082_en.htm

Wuppertal Institute used the opportunity to present the objectives and approach of the Critical Raw Material Recovery project at a workshop on recovery of precious and special metals that took place in Berlin on 02 November 2015. The workshop was organised by the German Environment Protection Agency (UBA) and offered various opportunities to interlink the project with other ongoing activities and institutions in this field.

See also: “Recycling precious and special metals: a call for coordinated action”

On 15 October 2015 WRAP’s own Lucy Cooper took the stage at LARAC 2015 to talk about her work on collection and reuse of WEEE. Lucy took the opportunity to introduce the Critical Raw Material Recovery project to the audience outlining how the project will analyse the link between collection of electricals and the potential for product reuse and recycling.

Read on to find out more about LARAC and the 2015 Conference.

Critical Raw Material Recovery in the press – a recent press release by Project Coordinator WRAP announces receipt of €2.1 million funding by the European Commission through the EU LIFE programme, which will see the Critical Raw Material Recovery project come to life. Over the next 3.5 years project partners WRAP, EARN, ERP UK Ltd, KTN and Wuppertal Institute will work together on exploring commercial opportunities for harvesting critical raw materials from unwanted electronic consumer products. By linking waste collection methods with advanced CRM recovery technology the project aims to boost the recovery of a range of CRMs by 5% by 2020.