“Humanity will not perish in an atomic nightmare – it will suffocate in its own waste” said the Nobel Prize winner Niels Bohr. Despite his thoughts that “it is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future”, he could not have been any more right. So are many countries realizing this now. While this has been a global issue for ...

In my previous blog post here, I talk about how circular economy works and how my Ph.D. works will contribute to achieving this emerging framework. In specific, producing hydrogen from gasification of landfill waste, and later on, using it as a fuel or chemical feedstock could be the best scenario for closing the economic cycle. Hydrogen has been named as ...

“Think before you bin it: there should be a use in it!” That was the title of the workshop Giovanna and I gave on Saturday, 5th of May at the Children’s University of KU Leuven. It was a great opportunity to motivate and inspire children between 8 and 13 years old on recycling and reuse of waste. As two “New-Mine” ...

The circular economy has been gaining more and more interest in the worldwide societies these days. A circular economy is proposed as an alternative to a traditional linear economy that consists of making, using, and disposing of the commercial product. In a circular economy, resources are kept in use for as long as possible while its maximum value is being ...

In the NEWMINE project, we aim to clean up the old landfills from the past. In order to do so, we want to dig up this waste, analyse what is in it and see how we can recycle it or make new products out of them. In this blog, I will focus on what is in our waste. We classify ...

“It must be very challenging to try to understand all these chains of processes”, said Daniel, an industrial partner from ScanArc Plasma Technologies AB, as he kindly drove us to the train station after our company visit. In this blog entry, I would like to bring you the perspective of a system analyst battling through one of the most tedious ...

When you try your best but you don’t succeed When you get what you want but not what you need When you feel so tired but you can’t sleep … And I will try to fix you Arriving to a top-notch University in a ‘first world country’ in Europe to perform cutting-edge research in a topic you love, sounds like ...

There are plenty of landfills in Europe and in the rest of the world, which can pose a threat to the environment (and to us). Often, these landfills risk to produce landfill gasses (greenhouse gasses) or a highly polluted leachate. Old municipal solid waste landfills generally contain big amounts of fines (soil-type), stones, water and a big volume of plastics. Also, ...

Okay, the text immediately starts with a problem. It’s a mathematical problem, but it is also in a sense mathematically problematic: it is the so-called inverse problem. We, at Ghent University, work with such inversions almost every day, since their solution allows us to derive valuable results from our geophysical measurements. Let’s start with figuring out what the term ‘inversion‘ ...

On November 7 to 9, 2018, the 14th Recy & DepoTech conference will be organised; ETN NEW-MINE will be present! The Recy & DepoTech conference has become the biggest waste management conference in Austria. The goal of the conference is to document the dynamic development of waste management through to recycling. The up-to-date issues, the quality of the lectures and the ...