Striving for independence from the import of Critical Raw Materials, the EU has been making considerable investments towards reaching marine mineral resources. Recent EU projects such as Blue Mining, Blue Nodules, MIDAS, VAMOS, as well as numerous national and international programmes on exploration and exploitation of seabed minerals enabled making considerable progress towards the establishment of European deep-sea mining industry, which has a potential of creating a hundreds-billion market and thousands of new jobs. The current knowledge about deep-sea mining and particularly about the impact of mining activities on the marine environment is quite diversified and often contradictory. This is not conducive to the acceptance of seabed mining by society due to the absence of a clear and holistic picture of seabed mining and its possible environmental footprint. The DSM-School project is aiming to become a platform for the elaboration and dissemination of knowledge in deep-sea mining to increase awareness of wider society on marine mineral resources, state-of-the-art mining technologies, recent investigations on the environmental impact of seabed mining activities, as well as economic, political, social and legislative aspects. The project brings together leading universities, research organizations, and industry professionals to reach the wider society by using different communication tools such as a two-week summer school organized in Germany, the Netherlands and Norway, the Internet, and public events. The DSM-School project assumes to be turned into a long-term, self-sustainable and Europe-wide initiative for the dissemination of knowledge and boosting research and innovations. Project website https://tu-freiberg.de/forschung/forschungsprojekte/projekte/dsm-school Registration https://tu-freiberg.de/forschung/forschungsprojekte/projekte/dsm-school/registration2021
Montanuniversität Leoben as part of the TU Austria-Universities was responsable for on of the breakoutsession for European Forum Alpach. The topaic was “Plastics? Sustainable!”
Plastics are essential in our daily life, yet their image is very negative. In fact, the majority of plastics are used in valuable products e.g. in medicine, mobility, infrastructure or energy transmission and thus contribute to many SDGs. This BOS deals with various aspects of plastic, including their environmental relevance and usage behaviour. How plastics fit into the Circular Economy Approach will be discussed and ideas on the sustainability increase of plastic products will be presented.
ENG | BS 7: Plastics? Sustainable! from AITtomorrow2day on Vimeo.
Find out more about the ALPBACH TECHNOLOGY SYMPOSIUM 2021 at https://www.ait.ac.at/en/news-events/alpbach-technology-symposium-2021
At this year’s online Green Tech Jam, the solution of the challenge “Circular Economy meets Distributed Ledger – a transparent PET bottle product cycle” set by the Montanuniversität Leoben (involved institutes: Resources Innovation Center & Industrial Logistics), which was developed by an interdisciplinary team of students, won the first place. The team “sixpack” was supervised by the Chair of Industrial Logistics during the 24-hour challenge and consisted of three Slovenian students from Graz University of Technology as well as three Montan students. They were able to prevail against 7 other teams, each of which worked on one of 6 different challenges provided by the companies t-matix, BDI, Komptech and AI.engineer as well as the Climate and Energy Fund, and us.
In the Android app developed by the team “sixpack”, QR codes attached to bottles can be scanned and information about the bottles retrieved from the distributed data storage. The path of the bottle – from PET production to the supermarket – is displayed graphically on a map and unconventional energy comparisons with more or less everyday activities (e.g. the duration of headbanging during a concert) are carried out and visualised.
At the interdisciplinary Hackathon under the slogan “Code & Concept for a greener future” organised by the Green Tech Cluster Austria together with the Climate Change Center Austria (CCCA) and Graz University of Technology,8 teams of students from different disciplines and different european universities had around 24 hours to work on a problem relating to the topics of climate and the environment and to present a digital solution for it. In total 36 international students participated at this event. The MUL challenge also competed as part of one of two Climathon challenges at the Green Tech Jam. Climathon is a global climate hackathon under the umbrella of EIT Climate-KIC.
More information about the whole event can be found at https://www.greentech.at/nachlese-green-tech-jam/
Patrick joined the team of the RIC Leoben in July 2019 as sustainable development coordinator. He is responsible for the activities in the UniNEtZ project, a joint project of all higher education institutions of Austria for an integrated anthology of options for the Austrian government for the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals. In particular Patrick is responsible for the coordination of Montanuniversitaet’s Sustainable Development Goal 12 – “Responsible Consumption and Production” partnership, in collaboration with Johannes Kepler Universitaet. He is an active part in the development of the sustainability agenda of RIC.Patrick studied mechanical engineering at Montanuniversitaet Leoben. During his studies he worked at Materials Center Leoben as a student researcher for over 4 years, where he calculated material and friction behaviour of rails by using finite elements methods combined with contact mechanics knowledge. His passion for societal needs and development have led him into his current position.
Multifactor model for investments in the raw material sector
After a decade of declining commodity prices, negative investment trends, debated mining legislation and increased overall risks, mining companies are struggling to survive searching for new sustainable investment options. The InvestRM project will create a decision-making tool for raw materials companies and investors, mining institutes, technical universities, geological surveys, non-governmental association, B&H government and state institutions in order to facilitate investment in the raw material sector. Project is focused on Bosnia and Herzegovina due to its critical raw materials potential, but will be fully transferable to other East and Southeast European (ESEE) countries. The project will deliver structured country data (entity based) together with relevant and validated geo-information on 120 critical raw materials deposits and occurrences within B&H: antimony, bauxite (as potential source of rare earth elements – REE), fluorite and magnesite. One of the special tasks is establishment of constructive dialogue with minimum 40 B&H SMEs and large companies throughout Banja Luka, Prijedor, Tuzla and Zenica, info-days in order to tailor the InvestRM decision making tool.
Investment opportunities in raw materials in Bosnia and Herzegovina BROCHURE Download
01/2018 – 03/2021
EIT RawMaterials – Regional Innovation Scheme
Montanuniversität Leoben (Partner), Mining Institute Banja Luka, University of Zagreb, Geological Survey of Slovenia
Chair of Mining Engineering and Mineral Economics – Nikolaus Sifferlinger
Total: € 300.948
Montanuniversität Leoben: € 29.770
