Upon the invitation of SPI, project partners headed to beautiful Porto for FutuRaM’s fifth consortium meeting. 

Outlining crucial next steps and the project’s collaboration with DG GROW on the implementation of the Critical Raw Materials Act, Kees Baldé from UNITAR and James Horne from the WEEE Forum set the the tone of the meeting. However, spanning across three days, the main point of focus were on our technical sessions propelling project progress and facilitating communication between the six different waste streams.

Touching on the certainty and ranges across the vast amount of data the project will produce, Kirsten Remmen and Matthias Rösslein from Empa guided the meeting’s first session. Moving forward Marc Urvois and Daniel Monfort from BRGM gave an update of progress on the secondary raw materials knowledge base and opened a discussion on replacing the urbanmineplatform.eu.

Focussing on stocks and flows progress and planning, our partners spent a large part of the meeting reviewing and advancing the work in this area, with our experts taking a deeper focus on each of the FutuRaM waste streams. All under the guidance of Kees Balde, Giulia Iattoni & Tales Yamamoto from UNITAR, alongside Sonia Cunha and Adrien Perello-y-Bestard from Leiden University.

What is more, Soraya Heuss from LMU introduced a discussion on product-centric and process-centric approaches to UNFC leading to insightful conversations while Lucia Herreras Martinez gave an informative update on the adaptation of the WEEE Forum’s RepTool for FutuRaM. 

Closing the event, partners have turned their focus on exploitation, discussing how to best deliver our results in a financially sustainable way and ensure accessibility to the secondary raw materials knowledge base to a diverse range of users such as policy makers, industry, academia, or consultants. The workshop was kindly assisted by Denisa Mateus (SPI), Madijd Bouzit and Daniel Monfort (BRGM), Sarah Downes (REPIC), Soraya Heuss-Aßbichler (LMU), and Pascal Leroy (WEEE Forum).