RAWFILL: supporting a new circular economy for RAW materials recovered from landFILLs

The focus of RAWFILL is on the solid waste sector in the North-West Europe region, with a concentration on landfills and relevant institutions responsible for waste and landfill management in the region. In order for landfill mining to be widely implemented in the North-West Europe region several barriers need to be overcome. Up to now, there has been no general or standard framework for developing enhanced landfill inventories that would allow public authorities and/or private sector partners to make economically informed decisions about launching a landfill mining project for a given landfill site. Furthermore, traditional landfill exploration methods – i.e. methods to assess the viability of a landfill mining project for a given site – are prohibitively expensive as they require costly analysis of multiple excavated waste samples. Cheaper methods, such as geophysical methods, to obtain a rough idea of the economic potential of a given landfill are therefore required (as promoted by RAWFILL). The current lack of reliable, coherent and affordable data about the economic resource recovery potential of a landfill (quantities, qualities and economic indicators related to the value of materials) is thus a major challenge. Furthermore at the aggregate level only very few regions in North-West Europe have some kind of a comprehensive overview of the potential of their landfills. The few existing inventories (e.g. Flanders, with its 2.260 landfills and Walloon region with its 3.500) do not include suitable datasets that would allow investors to robustly assess the opportunity to launch profitable landfill mining operations for a specific landfill site. The second major obstacle, which is the direct result of the former, is the lack of reliable decisions and prioritization tools that can be used in the North-West Europe region. Hence, there is no common approach to select the high potential landfill mining projects, thereby inhibiting the North-West Europe landfill mining market from development.