Manchester-based resource recovery firm Axion Consulting has signed up to the European Enhanced Landfill Mining Consortium (EURELCO), which maps and shares information on Enhanced Landfill Mining (ELFM) projects and programmes.
Currently more than 40 organisations from 12 EU member states already belong to EURELCO in the hopes of sharing ‘the safe exploration, conditioning, excavation and integrated treatments of (historic, present and/or future) landfilled waste streams as both materials (Waste-to-Material) and energy (Waste-to-energy), using innovative transformation technologies and respecting the most stringent social and ecological criteria’.
According to Axion, the decision to join the consortium was driven in part by approaches from land developers investigating the possibility of ‘mining’ resources from former landfill sites. Axion said it hopes that joining EURELCO will give it the framework to respond ‘more effectively’ to these requests.
“We foresee a rise in this type of activity”
Simon Wilkinson, Axion’s Principal Engineer, said: “The consortium brings together diverse and complementary skill sets – from industry and academia to private companies and government organisations – with the common aim of examining how we can ‘mine’ the materials we buried in the past.
“We foresee a rise in this type of activity; as raw materials get more expensive, technology improves and land value continues to increase, it will become more economically attractive to ‘mine’ such resources and upgrade the land for re-development. ELFM is part of a wider view of a circular economy and is perfectly complementary to urban mining and recycling in general.”
Find out more about Axion Consulting.
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