Artem Golev

Barriers to Industrial Symbiosis: Insights from the Use of a Maturity Grid

The concept of industrial symbiosis (IS) over the last 20 years has become a well‐recognized approach for environmental improvements at the regional level. Many technical solutions for waste and by‐product material, water, and energy reuse between neighboring industries (so‐called synergies) have been discovered and applied in the IS examples from all over the world. However, the potential for uptake of new synergies in the regions is often limited by a range of nontechnical barriers. These barriers include environmental regulation, lack of cooperation and trust between industries in the area, economic barriers, and lack of information sharing. Although several approaches to help identify and overcome some of the nontechnical barriers were examined, no methodology was found that systematically assessed and tracked the barriers to guide the progress of IS development. This article presents a new tool - IS maturity grid - to tackle this issue in the regional IS studies. The tool helps monitor and assess the level of regional industrial collaboration and also indicates a potential path for further improvements and development in an industrial region, depending on where that region currently lies in the grid. The application of the developed tool to the Gladstone industrial region of Queensland, Australia, is presented in the article. It showed that Gladstone is at the third (active) stage of five stages of maturity, with cooperation and trust among industries the strongest characteristic and information barriers the characteristic for greatest improvement.

Where next on e-waste in Australia?

For almost two decades waste electrical and electronic equipment, WEEE or e-waste, has been considered a growing problem that has global consequences. The value of recovered materials, primarily in precious and base metals, has prompted some parts of the world to informally and inappropriately process e-waste causing serious environmental and human health issues. Efforts in tackling this issue have been limited and in many ways unsuccessful. The global rates for formal e-waste treatment are estimated to be below the 20% mark, with the majority of end-of-life (EoL) electronic devices still ending up in the landfills or processed through rudimentary means. Industrial confidentiality regarding device composition combined with insufficient reporting requirements has made the task of simply characterizing the problem difficult at a global scale. To address some of these key issues, this paper presents a critical overview of existing statistics and estimations for e-waste in an Australia context, including potential value and environmental risks associated with metals recovery. From our findings, in 2014, on average per person, Australians purchased 35kg of electrical and electronic equipment (EEE) while disposed of 25kg of WEEE, and possessed approximately 320kg of EEE. The total amount of WEEE was estimated at 587kt worth about US

The Role of the Mining Industry in a Circular Economy: A Framework for Resource Management at the Mine Site Level

370million if all major metals are fully recovered. These results are presented over the period 2010-2014, detailed for major EEE product categories and metals, and followed by 2015-2024 forecast. Our future projection, with the base scenario fixing EEE sales at 35kg per capita, predicts stabilization of e-waste generation in Australia at 28-29kg per capita, with the total amount continuing to grow along with the population growth.

Rare earths supply chains: Current status, constraints and opportunities

The circular economy (CE) concept advocates drastically reduced primary resource extraction in favor of secondary material flowing through internal loops. However, it is unreasonable to think that society will not need any resources, for example, metals, from mining activities in the short, medium, or longer term. This article explores the role of the mining industry in transitioning to the CE and shows that mines can make significant progress if they apply the CE principles at the mine site level. Circular flows within the economy aim at keeping resources in use for as long as possible and limit final waste disposal. Likewise, operating mines for as long as minerals can be extracted at acceptable environmental costs, thus minimizing the loss of a nonrenewable resource, can be viewed as a contribution of the mining industry to CE objectives. To test this idea, we propose a framework where the conservation of nonrenewable resources is a core concern. The first part establishes a set of material flow indicators relevant to a mine project. The second part considers the entire mines life cycle, in particular, the consequences of interruptions in activities on material losses. The framework is then illustrated by a case study of the Mount Morgan mine in Australia, where three distinct extractive strategies were applied throughout its history. The results from applying the framework show that proactive and preventive management of mining waste provides significant environmental benefits and generates value from mine waste. These outcomes illustrate that the concept of the CE can be applied in a practical manner to a mining operation.