hydroMEtallurgical Tech for Interregional Urban Mining

ongoing

METIUM builds the first EU Interregional Urban Mining innovation ecosystem. To do so, our consortium will build 4 cross-border Strategic Raw Materials (SRM) Value Chains by scaling a portfolio of 15 Demonstrators across collection and dismantling, pre-processing and hydrometallurgy toward TRL9. Cornerstone of METIUM, our “Hydromet Triangle” anchored in Less Developed Regions (LDR) will support the upscale of 5 large-scale and cutting-edge Hydrometallurgical technological processes. We thus bring a reliable alternative to pyrometallurgy technologies which dominate the market and are both economically and environmentally inefficient. We will unlock 4 Urban Mines from 4 LDR from Poland, Greece, Portugal, Slovenia, and positioned Leading Innovators from 6 LDR to coordinate a value chain or Urban Mine. We will tackle compliance and regulatory challenges, building the right conditions to develop new partnerships and grow this Interregional Urban Mine by including new Regions, especially LDR that are an untapped source of SRM and innovations. Our 19 partners (11 of them from 8 Less Developed Regions) will focus on a selection of SRM with 86% to 100% of EU dependency on foreign powers (e.g., China), such as Li-Ion Battery materials, Platinum Group Metal (PGM), Rare Earth Elements, Aluminium and Copper. These are critical to EU applications for Ecological and Digital Transitions but also Defence. We will demonstrate an efficient interregional processing of 3 200 Kg of EoL/Waste product across the 4 chains to recover 80 to 99.99% of a range of 11 SRM (Co, Mn, Li, Ni, Ir, Pt, Rh, Pd, REE, Cu, Al). Building an alternative route to mining requires a critical mass of waste inflow that METIUM will build by consolidating scattered End-of-Life Product and waste flows. Within METIUM, we will test the first EU-wide Urban Mining Marketplace piloted for PGM and PV Panel SRM. This ambitious project will also rely upon strong cross-chain and inter-laboratory coordination mechanisms.