Horizon 2020 - Stakeholder Meeting March 2017

28 Mar 2017

As part of the Horizon 2020 – IMP@CT project, Mineco participated in its first Stakeholder meeting, hosted by Imperial College London. As the project is still in its start-up phase, the stakeholder meeting provided an excellent platform to meet high profile experts from very specific fields relevant to the IMP@CT project.

The focus on the first day was ‘Ethics in Small-Scale Mining’ and speakers including Gavin Hilson (University of Surrey), Bridget Storrie (University College London) and Marcello Veiga (University of British Columbia) held their presentations, fuelling long lasting discussions within the consortium. Topics like the differences of artisanal and established small scale miners (Marcello Veiga), different ways to build peace in conflict-affected mining communities (Bridget Storrie) and the co-existence of large-scale and artisanal miners in Sub-Saharan Africa (Gavin Hilson) among others were discussed and concluded in a round table discussion.

The second day was chaired by industry expert Tim Sambrook and focused on the technological aspects involved with small scale mining. The consortium learned about ground-breaking new technology from the VeRo-liberator team, Prof. Gregor Borg and Felix Scharfe, demonstrating their high frequency and high speed impact comminution equipment. Other presentations included the research of Prof. Gavin Jenkins (University of Leicester) on the usage of ionic liquids as a potential alternative to the use of cyanide in hydrometallurgy and Andrew Batchelor from the University of Nottingham on the usage of microwaves for pre-concentration and liberation applications. The day concluded with another round table discussion about the potential application of new technology in small scale mining.

Overall, it was a very successful meeting and we are very thankful to the speakers and the organisers from ICL.