Blog

Last 8th of June 2020, the day before New-Mine’s final network event, ESR Guilherme Ascensão successfully defended his PhD thesis in Civil, Environmental and Materials Engineering. Guilherme obtained a joint PhD combining the ‘traditional’ academic setting with research activities in an industrial company. He was jointly supervised by Dr. Monica Segata and Dr. Alessandro Morbi from the Heidelberg Cement group, ...

Last summer, I had a chance to attend the Sardinia Symposium 2019 together with other ESRs from NEW-MINE. The Sardinia Symposium is one of the largest conferences in the field of waste management and is held once in every two years. More than 650 participants from 55 countries attended this conference. In this conference, I presented my work on the ...

Last 19th of May 2020, ESR John Laurence Esguerra (JL as he likes to be called) successfully defended his Licentiate Thesis. In Sweden, Licentiate is an intermediate degree awarded on the way to a PhD. JL is jointly supervised by Joakim Krook and Niclas Svensson of Linköping University and Steven Van Passel of the University of Antwerp. As part of ...

Quite often, people ask me – why pyrolysis? Can’t we just incinerate those excavated waste? Indeed, incineration is frequently mentioned as the most effective way of excavated waste valorisation. Almost 30 years ago, the Lancaster County Solid Waste Management Authority (Lancaster, PA, USA) launched the project of landfill reclamation combined with the incineration of excavated material which outcomes were summarised ...

As a Marie-Curie Early-Stage Researcher (ESR) everyone has the opportunity (and obligation) to do one or two secondments. These short stays in the project partner organisations are a fundamental part of the ‘European Training Network’. However, it is sometimes challenging to schedule these secondments at the best possible time. The initial planning of the secondments can be in conflict with ...

This photograph was taken in July 2019 in a town called Muncar in Banyuwangi, Indonesia. It is primarily a fishing town where most of the residents have never seen this beach clean in the past few decades. The fishermen realize that plastic pollution in the ocean is impacting their livelihood and that they need to move away from status quo. ...

In our project 15 early state researchers (ESRs) work together to produce energy from landfill material using a wide variety of technologies. Beginning with excavations and mechanical processing we generate an intermediate product for this purpose, called potential refuse derived fuel – pRDF (compare Figure 1). This pRDF mainly consists of films and plastic bags (2D-fraction) and is supposed to ...

(Read the English version of this blogpost here: https://new-mine.eu/environmental-activists-wanted/) “Il giorno in cui i ragazzi guarderanno ai grandi scienziati con la stessa ammirazione che riservano per i grandi musicisti ed attori, la civiltà farà un salto in avanti”. Sono le parole dell’illustre fisico teorico Brian Greene. Ma è davvero necessario che la nostra civiltà faccia questo “salto in avanti”? A quanto pare, ...

“When kids look up to great scientists the way they do to great musicians and actors, civilization will jump to the next level.” said the eminent theoretical physicist Brian Greene. But do we really need to reach that “next level” of civilization? It seems that if we want to preserve life, the answer is yes. If we look at the ...

“Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean” – Ryunosuke Satoro. When we talk about waste we are situating ourselves in a context where human beings intervene, since nature itself does not generate waste. In the ecosystem, every element discarded by a living being is susceptible to being used, and in fact it is used, incorporating it into ...