Glen Corder

Sustainability of Rare Earths—An Overview of the State of Knowledge

Rare Earths (RE) have been the focus of much attention in recent years as a consequence of a number of converging factors, prominent among which are: centralization of supply (in China), unique applications in high-end technologies particularly in the low-carbon energy industry, and global demand outstripping availability. Despite this focus, RE supply chain sustainability has not been examined in depth or in any systematic manner. This paper provides an initial review of RE sustainability considerations at present, including current initiatives to understand the research and development needs. The analysis highlights a broad range of areas needing consolidation with future research and calls for collaboration between industry and academia to understand the sustainability considerations of these critical elements in more depth.

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

Feedforward control of a wastewater plant

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.

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

A feedforward control strategy to compensate for disturbances in the applied biological load to the activated sludge plant was designed. This strategy was generated from Laplace-domain transfer function models predicting the dissolved oxygen concentration at the end of the aeration tank from the applied biological load and the air flowrate. In producing these models, the Luggage Point Wastewater Treatment Plant was used to obtain plant data. After conducting a series of computer simulation tests, the improvement in performance using the new control scheme compared to the existing dissolved oxygen feedback controller resulted in a 20% reduction in air flowrate. It is estimated the new strategy would give a payback period of less than 15 months.

Mining and Sustainable Development

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.

Designing-in Sustainability in Industrial Projects and Processes

This aim of this chapter is to introduce the reader to the key elements of sustainable development. To achieve this aim, the chapter is subdivided into the following sections. Section one offers a short history of sustainable development in the mining industry. In the following section, an overview of sustainable development principles and frameworks are examined. The following three sections examine the relationship between a social licence to operate and sustainable development, and issues surrounding implementation and measurement. In the penultimate section, a case study of the Philippines is covered. The paper concludes that sustainable development is becoming increasingly central to the future of the mining industry in the region.

Costs and carbon emissions for geopolymer pastes in comparison to ordinary portland cement

Industrial projects represent significant potential for economic development in their host countries. Likewise, they also present the potential to cause significant social and environmental impacts. While much consideration has been put into the design for sustainability of products, there is still a significant gap in the integration of sustainability considerations into industrial projects and processes. Moreover, there is an additional need to bridge the theory of sustainable design and the “on-the-ground” needs of the designers of such projects. This paper discusses one framework which has been developed to help bridge this gap, as well as the results and learnings from its application to high impact “real world” projects. The paper discusses the problem from a range of perspectives including: what the gap between current and ideal practice is, what needs to be incorporated in a sustainable industrial project, what methods have been applied, and the relative theoretical and practical success of the current framework.