GENERAL DESCRIPTION

Municipal solid waste and slags which have been landfilled in the past both have an inherent resource potential which value might increase under the pressure of raw materials demands in Germany and worldwide. Consequently, these deposits might be economically exploitable in the future.

Within the framework of the BMBF-supported joint project “TönsLM”, the RWTH Aachen University represented by the Department of Processing and Recycling (I.A.R.), researches the development of innovative processes to recover selected resources from municipal and slag deposits.

The Department of Processing and Recycling works to recover a coarse grained fraction which is suitable for further recycling steps. For this purpose, a pre-conditioning set-up has been developed which allows enriching the recyclable fraction in-situ and leads to reduced costs for logistics for subsequent processing steps. Furthermore, the question as to whether already existing processing steps are suitable to generate high-grade resource concentrations in recovered products originating from already deposited waste shall be researched with the project partners. Generated products are partially analysed in the I.A.R.s own technical lab.

The Fraunhofer Project Group IWKS works on the optimization of current sorting technologies for plastic and metal fractions from landfill material by means of modern sensor-based technologies like near-infrared spectroscopy (NIR). The data gained during the sorting process will be systematically gathered in a corresponding database and will serve as a basis for several material flow analyses of the mentioned fractions.

PROJECT GOALS

• Holistic view on topic “landfill mining”.

• Technical feasability study.

• Assessment of ecological and economical effects.

• Development of guidline (decision tool) for landfill mining.

FUNDING TYPE: National funding by Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

BUDGET: € 2.000.000